Words

It has been a while since I have written a blog. There are lots of reasons – a busy schedule, days that rushed by, distractions and preoccupations, stress, two sermons and a Bible study every week, fatigue. But the most honest reason – I lacked the words.

I am in Arizona visiting my daughter and son-in-law, taking a vacation, goofing off.

And thinking about words.

A lot of a pastor's life revolves around words. Every Sunday I stand in the pulpit of the church I pastor and speak words. But they are not just any words – they are careful words, thoughtful words saturated with prayer, Bible words, hopefully Spirit-led and Spirit-filled words.

Scholar Thomas Long says sometimes words are just words. I can get up and say all sorts of things, about my love for my children and how I adore my wife and how grateful I am for my church family – but all those things could be just words, Long says. No meaning. No truth. No depth.

Words.

I am reading Eugene Peterson's book Tell It Slant and he observes that though Jesus spoke words, He never wrote words, at least any that have been preserved. The words He wrote using His finger as a pencil in the Jerusalem dirt the day religious leaders tried to trap Him (John 8) were gone when the dust settled. Jesus didn't write any words – He left it to His followers to write the blogs, the Gospels, the accounts of what Jesus did and how He changed their lives and eternities. Words, yes – but words with power and meaning from the One who was the Word become flesh and who was and is God's ultimate Word to us.

When words are spoken honestly and with heart, they expose our hearts, tell the truth, impact others. That is why words must be chosen carefully. That is why our words must reflect who we are and Whose we are. I just happen to say a lot of words that people hear, twenty or thirty minutes of them on a Sunday morning, a lot more on an evening Bible study, and who knows how many in the conversations I have.

I hope I say them well – I pray my words will ultimately be words from God Himself.

I realize that words are not just Sunday things for me or you, they are everyday things, and for the person who follows Jesus, our words must never cease to reflect the One who has changed our lives and eternities. Whether our words be many or few, our conversations long or short, something of the grace of God, the love of Jesus, the presence of the Holy Spirit needs to slip through.

When that happens, don't our words become more than just words?

Eugene Peterson observes that though Jesus both preached and taught, He also engaged in lots of conversations about subject matter which at first might not seem spiritually important. He told stories about farmers and judges and victims, about coins and sheep, prodigal sons and heart-broken fathers, wedding banquets and going to war, midnight awakenings and begging for bread, about cooks and beggars and manure. The stuff of life, in other words. The many things that occupy our time and fuel our words. Conversations that are pregnant with opportunities to say more than just words.

It occurs to me that with all the talking we do, we need to be aware that God wants to say some pretty important things through us. Some of those things happen when a pastor gets up to speak on a Sunday, but they also happen every day of the week in all our conversations. As Christ-followers, we reflect our Lord, and when we converse about all the mundane things of life, we need to remember that our words say something not just about us, but about Him as well.

No wonder James advises us to be quick to listen and slow to speak. Maybe then our words will be more than just words.

The Journey With Jesus

I decided back in January to spend a year with Jesus. Reading a chapter a day in the Gospels, I could read all four Gospels four times in one year – actually, 356 days if I don’t miss any. I am on my second pass through and it has been an interesting journey.

First and foremost, I have found it difficult to read just one chapter a day. Some days I get so caught up in other things I miss reading a chapter – other times I start reading, and I can’t stop, I want to see what happens next. But all in all, as I said, I am on track – I finished my first pass through before the end of March.

Second, because I spent 2009 preaching through Mark’s Gospel, my journey has actually been a bit jarring. I got to know Mark really well in 2009, preaching close to fifty messages from the book. I knew something of the rhythm of the book, the journey with the Lord, and so when I began to read the other Gospels as an attempt to continue the journey, I noticed something striking. Each Gospel gets at Jesus in a different way. It is like four different pictures of the same person, taken from different angles. You begin to notice things. Matthew is so orderly, and he waits until chapter 8 to give the miracles Mark gives in chapter 1. Luke has the rich parables that speak of the Father’s love for us. John knows we have read the story before, so he lets us see things from a different perspective, catching us off guard, including things not told elsewhere, like the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Four different angles to understand and appreciate Jesus more.

Third, I have been amazed at how respectful Jesus is of the decisions others make. He is content to share the good news of the Kingdom and then let us decide. He believes fully that it is the Holy Spirit who convicts and converts, something I need to remember. He looks with love as a rich young ruler chooses to walk away, but he doesn’t go running after him and say, “Wait a minute, maybe I can make it easier for you, how about you sell just half of what you have?” He lets us make our own decisions, even if those decisions have dire consequences. I have been encouraged to trust God’s work more, and to love others more deeply with no strings attached.

At times my reading is more disciplined – I read through four chapters in Joshua for my Wednesday Bible study, I pour over a half dozen passage in preparation for Sunday night, I print out and pray over the text for Sunday morning... oh yeah, I have to get that Gospel chapter in! Those are the days I wonder if it does any good – except the Lord has an amazing ability to bring to my attention some passage, some verse, some word. Sometimes I think it is like the meals we eat – we may devour some meal mindlessly, preoccupied with something else – but at least our bodies have been nourished. I have learned that God can take what we expose ourselves to and do amazing things.

Isn’t that just like God?

The first pass through I read from the New International Version. This quarter I am in The Message. It is one of my favorites for devotional reading of Scripture – in many ways, it is like a Bible and a commentary rolled into one. I recommend it highly.

This morning I read these verses from Matthew 6: “And when you come before God, don’t turn that into a theatrical production either. All these people making a regular show out of their prayers, hoping for stardom! Do you think God sits in a box seat? Here’s what I want you to do: Find a quiet, secluded place so you won’t be tempted to role-play before God. Just be there as simply and honestly as you can manage. The focus will shift from you to God, and you will begin to sense his grace.”

And so I did.

Christ the Victor

John 13:1 declares, “... Having loved His own who were in the world, He now showed them the full extent of His love.”

The full extent – the breadth, the length, the height, the depth.

Literally John says, as the New American Standard words it, “He loved them to the end.” To the point of completion. To the very end of His strength, His heart, His soul.

To the wondrous cross.

How can we get at such extravagant love? It always exceeds our ability to comprehend or fully understand, and so all we can do is give an example, an approximation, an image.

There is a classic image of the cross that has always intrigued me. As Good Friday approaches, maybe it will enrich your meditations on the tremendous sacrifice of our Lord.

Through the years the image of what Jesus accomplished on the cross has been called Christ the Victor. There on the cross Jesus struck the deathblow to evil and sin.

Like a warrior He went to battle – only this was a battle unlike any the world has seen.

Typically a warrior sought to defeat his opponent by inflicting a wound so severe that it renders a response impossible. That is not what we see on the cross – it looks just the opposite.

But there is another way to defeat an opponent. Instead of hammering an opponent into submission, a warrior could choose to stand still and take his enemy’s best blow – to absorb all the blows, one after another, until the enemy literally exhausts his power and collapses.

That is what Jesus did on the cross. He suffered the worst that evil could hurl at Him.

Rejection by His own people in the streets of their capital city.

Hatred from all the experts in His own religion.

Injustice at the hands of the Roman court.

Disloyalty and betrayal by two of His closest associates, Peter and Judas.

Abandonment by His followers.

Public shame at being stripped naked and ridiculed as an impostor, “King of the Jews.”

The agony of the torture of crucifixion.

And in it all, the constant pressure of temptation to give it all up, to smash these ungrateful creatures with thunderbolts from heaven.

Jesus just stood there and took it -- taking on Himself the sins of the world, holding Himself in place – it wasn’t nails that held Him there, He chose to stay there. He took all that was thrown at Him, suffering to the end, taking every sin that could be thrown at Him -- and finally dying.

Had sin won? Was it left standing? Who would get up?

We know.

“Jesus, my redeemer, name above all names;
Precious Lamb of God, Messiah, Hope for sinner’s slain.
Thank You, O my Father, for giving us Your Son,
and leaving Your Spirit till the work on earth is done.”

Grotesque Display

I have been preaching a series of reflections on the cross in the church I pastor, a series entitled How Deep The Father’s Love For Us. The title comes from a beautifully written and reflective musical piece by Stuart Townend. The words of this modern-day hymn have often been in my mind these past few weeks. The first couple of stanzas go like this:

How deep the Father’s love for us,
how vast beyond all measure
that He should give His only Son
to make a wretch His treasure.
How great the pain of searing loss
The Father turns His face away
As wounds which mar the chosen One
Bring many sons to glory

Behold the Man upon the cross,
my sin upon His shoulders;
Ashamed, I hear my mocking voice
call out among the scoffers.
It was my sin that held Him there
until it was accomplished.
His dying breath has brought me life;
I know that it is finished.

I look for every way possible to grasp more completely what our Lord accomplished on the cross. I have come to the conclusion that we could never grasp the enormity of the pain we cause God if not for the cross.

Writer Henri Nouwen tells the story of a family he knew in Paraguay. The father was a doctor and he spoke out against the military regime of the country and their human rights abuses. In retaliation, the local police took revenge by arresting the doctor’s teenage son and torturing him to death.

The people in the town were outraged and wanted to turn the boy’s funeral into a protest march, but the doctor chose another way of expression.

At the funeral, the father displayed his son’s body as he had found it in the jail -- naked, scarred from the electric shocks and cigarette burns and beatings. All the villagers filed past the corpse, which lay not in a coffin but on the blood-soaked mattress from the prison.

It was the strongest protest imaginable, for it put the great injustice and the horrifying wrong on grotesque display.

That is what God did at Calvary – He put His Son on grotesque display. We see Him there, with the blood and the bruises and the torture – and as we pass by, we are confronted with the fact that we are the ones who put those nails in His hands. We are the ones who, through our sins, beat him and bruised him and tortured him.

The prophet Isaiah exclaimed in Isaiah 53:4-5, “Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows... he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities.”

How would we ever grasp the pain we have caused God except for the cross? How deep the Father’s love indeed!

Snickers Bars and Lent

I grew up in a tradition of Christianity that practiced Lent, the forty days leading up to Easter. I have to admit that as a child, I didn’t really understand or appreciate Lent – it was that time of year when I was supposed to give up something that had some value to me and I was supposed to learn something. I normally chose Snickers bars. I really love Snickers bars, especially if they are frozen. It was tough to set aside my habit for forty days. Of course, I would never give up Butterfinger bars – that was my true favorite in those days. I would crunch them up and put them on ice cream. Every day after school. For forty days. But I did give up Snickers bars.

When I became a Baptist I gave up many of my childish ways, which included the practice of Lent. No church I have been a part of these last forty years has practiced any form of Lent, and it only enters my mind when I see it is time for Lent on the Christian calendar and many of us Baptists (not all) wonder what it is all about and skip it.

I must admit that I have thought about Lent more this year.

Part of the reason is that I have had some conversations about Lent with some of my church congregation. They have wondered what it is about, if it is a good idea or not.

The other reason is my Wednesday evening Bible study where we have spent time surveying the Old Testament, and we have come across these predictions in Deuteronomy that once the children of Israel got fat and prosperous in Canaan, they would forget all about God. As long as things were tough in the wilderness and they had to rely daily on God’s provision of manna and water, they maintained at least some level of dependency on Him. But once they got into the land of promise, the milk and honey was too much for them. As Moses predicted, they forgot about God.

The observance of Lent is never mentioned in the Bible nor found in a Bible dictionary, which is one reason many Christians do not observe Lent. As I understand the history of Lent, it came into existence when Christians became fat and prosperous, when it was no longer dangerous to be a Christian and we began to enjoy a life of ease like other people in the world. As one writer put it, we began to enjoy our soft couches and our leg of lamb. The pattern of the Old Testament was repeated with people forgetting about God, at least in practice. Lent was a period of time to reflect, to do without so that we might become attuned once again to how dependent we have become on things. It is not about Snickers bars or Butterfingers, but about what our treasure is and where our hearts are. My childhood practice really never cost me much, which is why Lent did me little good. It never struck at the heart of my addictions, of what was truly important to me, what I craved or yearned for or felt life would be over if I lost. If my belly cried out, “I can’t live without a Snickers bar,” my mind would say, “Buy a Butterfingers – this will all be over in forty days.”

I read recently that Lent is like practicing dying – by spending time in reflection on what God has done, marking forty days with true self-denial in some form, we learn the depth (or superficiality) of our Christian faith while at the same time gaining some freedom. We die in order to live – we loosen the grip of whatever it is that tends to control us, and in the process we discover new life.

That sounds a lot like Jesus – “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but forfeits his soul?” “If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me?” “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be.”

I have some Christian friends who practice Lent, some in their congregations and others personally. Forty days of self-denial in the wilderness enabled our Lord to have a sharp focus – we don’t live by bread alone, nor to simply please others, or to sell our souls for whatever kingdom we might desire. Maybe forty days of giving up something that is truly important to us, of limiting the influence of that which we feel we have to have, might bring a sharper focus in our lives. What’s more, if we can change our practice of faith for forty days, maybe it will be effective for a lifetime.

We don’t have to wait until next year for Lent to come around. You don’t have to say, “Too bad, Lent is almost over, I will do it next year.” No, that is the marvelous thing about being a Christ-follower – any day is a good day to start some self-denial. To give up something. To substitute something better, like giving yourself for the sake of others instead of gratifying yourself.

I let my wife read this blog before I printed it, just to make sure it wasn’t a bunch of nonsense. She said she liked it. Then I mentioned to her that maybe she could give up chocolate chip cookies for 40 days.

She looked at me in horror and decided this wasn’t a very good blog after all. A bunch of nonsense.

Maybe I hit a sore spot – but then, what was I doing telling her what she should give up? What about me?

Twenty Years

Last week the church I pastor celebrated the fact I had been their pastor for twenty years. Twenty years – that is a long time by anybody’s measurement. The church threw a great party for me. I was excited and nervous and proud and humbled, all at the same time. They were still glad I was their pastor – and I was glad too. The party was wonderful.

Twenty years. I got married when I was twenty years old. After twenty years of marriage, I sort of knew what I was doing. I’m sure my wife thought I needed at least another twenty, which means I’m not there yet.

When I came to First Baptist of Rolla, I had no idea my wife and I would stay for twenty years. At that time our kids were still in elementary school, and I figured we would be around ten or twelve years. There were opportunities to move to new places of service, but that never happened. I would continue to look at First Baptist and feel that there was so much unfinished business and I didn’t want to leave things half-way done.

There have been times I wondered if God had forgotten me. Tough times when things weren’t going the way I thought they should. Paul encourages young Timothy to preach in season and out of season, and I have to admit there have been lots of out-of-season times. But there have been many good times and some truly wonderful times and I have always felt the tug of the Holy Spirit back to this place. I decided God hadn’t forgotten me after all.

I had a friend tell me that when you have been in a church as long as I have, people begin to treat you like an old piece of furniture. They just take it for granted you are there, and they don’t see the richness of the grain or the comfortable fit or the continued usefulness. I suspect the same can be said for pastors looking at their congregations – it is easy to freeze people to what they once were, to not grant the possibility that God may do a new work in a person’s life. I pray all the time that God would grant me the ability to see others through His eyes, to see what He is up to and how His work of transformation continues. I want to see other’s giftedness, their value to God, their worth to the Kingdom. Dear God, don’t let twenty years blind me to what You are up to in the lives of those I have devoted myself to serve.

I have always feared failure – that is probably something most of us fear to one degree or another. However, I tend to see success and failure in terms of Jesus’ parable of the talents. You remember, a series of talents were given, amounts of money that could be used or saved or squandered, and after a season the master came back to see what had been done. A couple of servants used their talents well, winning them the “well done” of the Master. One had a jaundiced view of the Master, negative and hostile and fearful. “I buried what you gave me,” he said – “here, you can have it back.” The master did not say well done.

I would lie if I claimed I never had those urges to say, “Here Lord, you can have this congregation back, I can't lead them. I don’t have a clue what I am doing or what you are up to – have what is yours.” But those urges are eclipsed by other prayers, “Lord, I don’t have a clue what I am doing or how to be the leader and servant you want me to be – so help me, train me, compel me to grow if you must, use the gifts You have given to me – and in the end, may your work flourish and may I be successful in Your eyes and may I hear your well done.”

I believe God is doing a good work in this church. We are doing things we haven’t done in a long time, if ever. Our focus is more outward, the church is leaving the building (if reluctantly at times), we are paying more attention to the community in which we live. We are looking less and less like a cookie-cutter church and more and more like a dynamic church shaped to meet the needs of those around and to share Christ in that context. It can be messy and confusing at times, and even frustrating, but also exciting and invigorating. Not long ago I had a friend ask if he could submit my name to a prestigious church. I looked at the church’s website and was bored by what I saw. It seemed so neat and tidy and dead. Of course I would go wherever God would want me to go – but all the Holy Spirit did was tug me back here. I was grateful.

At the wonderful party the church had in our honor there were several people who said they hoped I would stay another twenty years. That was nice of them. I smiled and thanked them – but do you realize how old I would be if I stayed another twenty years?

However long the Lord permits me to stay, I am grateful. I serve at the Lord’s pleasure. I hope you do too.

Midnight Closeness

I shared a favorite story with our Sunday night Bible study group this past week. We are in the midst of trying to bring some light into the darkness that surrounds the existence of evil and suffering in this world. I made the point from the book of Job that we are largely unaware of the vastness of God’s care for us – and then I shared the story Keith Miller told in his book Habitation of Dragons.

Miller speaks of a tender scene in his own life. In the middle of a winter’s night his daughter cried out in the darkness, “Daaady!”

You can imagine his surprise, for his children normally called out for their mother. The moment she called he got up, stumbled into her room, and carried her into the bathroom.

The only light was a soft red glow shining on her face from the gas wall heater. He sat her on the little potty chair and bent over to hold her so she wouldn’t fall. Her head lolled gently to one side and then she would catch herself, but never quite awaken. He would steady her, protecting her, holding her.

As Miller gazed at his daughter, he was filled with the most amazing sense of gratitude and love. He tousled her long blond hair, kissed her gently on the nose, and thought, “Some day you and I will remember this as a time of great closeness.” He pictured talking about this night when she was a grown girl, how they both would smile and laugh and remember.

But then he realized -- she would never remember this midnight closeness -- because she had been asleep the entire time he was holding her. She would not remember, for she was not even aware.

And neither are we!

We are not aware of how God cares for us during those long nights of doubt, those times when we are spiritually asleep, suffering loss, immersed in pain or fear, oblivious to His presence. We are not aware of even a fraction of what God does for us, how in His care He sustains us and walks with us and picks us up and loves us.

Job’s last words are those of amazement. Job 42:5, “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you.” What Job sees is the fact that there was never even one moment when God averted His gaze from his life.

Remember that the next time your life is plunged into darkness for whatever reason. When you are tempted to panic, when you feel the wintry blast of fear, remember our Lord’s promise to be with us always. He hasn’t abandoned you or gotten distracted. As Psalm 139 declares, He is intimately acquainted with all our ways.

Even when you forget all that, take courage in the fact that He has not forgotten you. You may sleep through those moments of midnight closeness, but He never does.