He’s Got This

 March 7, 2021

Things were getting dangerous. Jesus’ disciples had more than once walked up and down the length of Palestine, following in the footsteps of their Master, soaking in his wisdom and learning of his mission, but although he had warned them, they weren’t prepared for what lay ahead. They could feel the tension building, dread hanging like a dark cloud over their heads as they walked step by step towards Jerusalem. The noose was tightening, and Thomas put into words what they all were thinking; “let us go die with him” (John 11:16). 

Now they are in the Upper Room, which could better be called the Gloom Room. Jesus is once more talking to them, preparing them for what he knew would happen later that night. He tells the he is going to leave them, and that for the first time in three years, they cannot go with him. Peter (of course, Peter) blurts out, “I’ll follow you, even if it means dying for you.” He meant well, but Jesus knew Peter better than Peter knew Peter. “Before morning, you’ll deny me three times.”

Can you imagine the atmosphere in that room? Maybe you can. You look around you and see nothing but trouble. Everywhere you turn there are problems, danger, and looming disaster. You mean well, are trying hard to keep up with things, and are only looking for a bit of encouragement from God, but instead of comfort, he reveals what is inside you—your deepest fears, your insecurities, your failures and your propensity for failure. Instead of encouragement from Jesus, it feels like a kick in the teeth.

Hear Jesus once again: “Let not your hearts be troubled.” Don’t let the garbage all around you get inside you. Don’t even let the garbage in you destroy you. Here’s the truth we too often forget: When Jesus saved you, he factored in your fears, your failure, your foolishness. He isn’t surprised at it, isn’t discouraged by it, isn’t deterred from accomplishing his will in spite of it. We worry about the future, whether we are strong enough to endure it, wise enough to handle it, courageous enough to face it. We know how we’ve failed in the past, and imagine that God can’t overcome that failure in the future. We’ve tried and failed, so we’re afraid of trying again. 

Jesus knew Peter would fail him, but he had a plan that took Peter’s failure into account, and knew that Peter would become a Rock of faith and faithfulness. Peter hadn’t yet failed, but Jesus said he would fail, but even so, “Don’t let your heart be troubled.” No matter how bad things get, don’t let your heart be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in Jesus. He’s got this!

Unanswered Prayer

March 6, 2021

One of the most common reasons we give up on prayer is that it doesn’t seem to work. We find ourselves facing cancer, a wandering loved one, a financial catastrophe, and we pray—hard. But the cancer devastates, the marriage gets worse, we enter bankruptcy. “God hasn’t heard, or if he did, he doesn’t care,” we reason. After all, if roles were switched, we would move heaven and earth to answer those prayers. The sick would be healed, the tears would be wiped away, the rescue would come.

But it doesn’t happen, and we give up. It’s understandable, but regrettable. Isaiah wrote to a nation going downhill fast. He and other prophets had been warning Israel for generations, to no avail; when momentarily they turned back to God, it lasted only as long as the prosperity held out. Israel was discouraged, so Isaiah wrote...30:18–“The LORD will wait, that he may be gracious to you.” 

We want God to act NOW, but perhaps unanswered prayer is sometimes the only way he can give the grace we really need. It’s in the extremities of life that we discover both our strength and our need of strength. On the one hand, we see God’s hand, on the other, our need, but only the trial exposes either. Love untested cannot know the depths of love. Untested love can only imagine the depths. 

It isn’t enough to pray that those I love be spared from sorrow and disappointment. Such prayers are unrealistic. I must pray instead that in the calm their faithfulness helps prepare them for the inevitable storm, and that in the storm, they remain strong in Christ.

 

Seventeen

March 5, 2021

“It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” So began Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, his epic novel of love and loyalty in midst of the collapse of a nation. Looking back seventeen years ago today, these words came to mind. It was the best of times. Linda and I were in Rochester waiting for our first grandson to be born. Waiting anxiously outside the delivery room, we talked softly, silently willing the door to open so we could meet this child whose name their parents hid from everyone till Todd named him in the presence of his family. This child would never bear my last name, but he did hold my heart, and still does.

Miles away, our friends Harry and Beth sat at a table with three other couples—our monthly dinner group from the church. Things had been tense for about a month as the hostess of this group seethed beneath the surface because (in her own words) I didn’t give her the recognition she felt she deserved. Apparently, the atmosphere around the table was somewhat chilly, and Harry being the straightforward man he is, said he thought they ought to get the issues out of hiding and deal with them. Not having been there, I cannot say precisely what transpired or what was said, but needless to say, it didn’t go well. My friend took the shots that were meant for me; something I’ll never forget. Not content to air their grievances, or even to merely leave the church, the host and hostess and other two couples soon left the church, taking about a third of our members with them. It was the worst of times.

Things got ugly, but we weathered the storm. There were lean years—very lean, indeed, and times I wasn’t sure how we would make it. Photos from those days show the leanness in our faces; what they couldn’t reveal was the leanness in our hearts. But through it all, we had Ian, the light in our darkness. Thankfully, those times are all behind us. It took ten years, but we were able to hand over a healthy congregation to my successor when I retired. 

Grace is God’s undeserved favor towards us. We have experienced it in many ways through the years, but one of the most enduring is through our grandchildren, and in this story, through Ian. The leanness is gone, but today Ian turned seventeen.

 

Burn

 March 4, 2021

“Then there appeared to them divided tongues, as of fire, and one sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” —Acts 2:3-4 NKJV

What is it about fire that fascinates us so? We will sit around a campfire late at night in the summer, talking or just staring into the flames till they are mere glowing embers. Our woodstove heats us through the winter, but we have a furnace for that. We don’t sit around the furnace watching the flames flicker and dance as we soak in the warmth; we have the woodstove for that.

The ancients considered fire as one of the four elements that were the building blocks of life. Wind, water, and earth rounded out the quartet. Like the wind, there is something mysterious about it; I’m sure scientists can explain the physics of it, but I am amazed at how fire releases the energy stored in the wood. 

Then there is the grill. The flames sear the steak, sealing in the juices and adding flavor to the meat. Frying a steak in a pan over an electric grill isn’t quite the same.

It’s not all cozy, though. Uncontrolled, it destroys homes, devastates forests, and kills anything or anyone caught in its path. Fire is both a blessing and a curse.

When I hear someone speak about wanting Holy Spirit fire, I wonder if they understand what they are invoking. They mysteriousness of fire fascinates us; like gazing into a summer campfire with its endless movement, we can be mesmerized by what we see but don’t fully understand. Power is certainly there to bless, warming the stone-cold heart, but there is also the danger that comes if the fire breaks out of the confines of the stove. What was meant to bless can become a raging inferno, consuming everything in its path, including the one who prayed for the fire to fall. 

I can’t claim to even begin to understand the mystery of fire, and even less so the mystery of the Holy Spirit. What I do know is this: there is power—great power—to bless, but also destroy. My prayer is that the fire of the Holy Spirit will burn away all that is unworthy of Christ, purifying my soul, making me a vessel fit to contain the power without it burning so out of control that it destroys even the good that God is building into me through Jesus Christ. 

Every so often, I stoke the fire. I want it to warm me through the evening. Tonight, I stoke the fire of the Holy Spirit through prayerful reading of the Scriptures, that the Holy Spirit might not only warm me, but those around me. Like Wesley, when asked why so many came to hear him preach, answered, “I set myself on fire, and people come to watch me burn,” I want to be aflame with a holy fire that gathers people to watch and be warmed.

Porcelain Poodles

 March 3, 2021

Two little porcelain poodles. That’s all they are, except they’re more than that. I gave them to my mother more than sixty years ago, and wherever mom and dad moved, they moved, too. I last saw them sitting on a shelf in her bathroom, but when mom died and we had to sort through what we would keep and what had to go, no one, least of all me, thought of those poodles. I remembered them yesterday and thought of my granddaughter who loves dogs. So I asked my sister and sister in law if they had seen them when packing mom’s stuff. They remembered, but didn’t know what box they had been put in or where it ended up. A lot of that stuff we took to the AMVETS in the city. They had another trip to make there and said they would check the shelves. Today I got the text; they checked—no dogs. Maybe mom’s stuff hadn’t even been sorted through yet.

It would have been nice to have been able to give them to my mother and then to my granddaughter, but apparently that is not to be. It’s not a big deal. What is a big deal is the fact that my brother and sister in law were willing to drive back to AMVETS, look all through the store and even inquire about them. Families often help each other out, but going out of their way for a silly couple of porcelain poodles was for me, the extra mile. Over my years as a pastor, I’ve seen my share of families with fissures that completely ruptured at the death of a matriarch or patriarch. I’ve watched as people stopped talking to one another over tiny slights and trinkets. It’s sad to see relationships take a back seat to stuff. Tonight, I am thankful that when mom died, the overall attitude was, “I’ll take it if no one else wants it,” or, “This means more to you than to me; why don’t you take it?” I saw that selflessness again with a pair of porcelain poodles, and am grateful for the family of which I am a part.

Therapy

 March 2, 2021

I Corinthians 12:12-27

“The pain you feel in your hip isn’t really coming from the hip. The problem is in your core. The muscles there are weak, which allows your spine to go out of alignment, which causes the hip pain.” In other words, “The head bone’s connected to the neck bone; the neck bone’s connected to the backbone; the backbone’s connected to the hip bone...” The first sentence is what my physical therapist told me two weeks ago. The second is my interpretation of it. Today began week three of therapy to deal with the shooting pain in my hip that’s been aggravating me for three years.

My therapist was simply reminding me of a truth we know instinctively, but which we independent Americans tend to forget: everything is connected. We admire the Lone Ranger, the Rambo who tackle institutional ills all by themselves, beating the odds, and emerging victorious, but that’s rarely how things turn out in real life. In warfare, stealth operations have their place, but battles are won with a concentration of firepower and manpower.

In the realm of the spiritual life too, everything is connected. A private moral lapse, an unhealed hurt, a hidden resentment, may not be apparent at the beginning, but like a crack in a windshield, it will eventually spread till the whole is spoiled. Looking at the problem as it manifests, you would never imagine where it started. 

Churches and other institutions are filled with these spiritual connections; like spider webs, they are spun over the course of years. The bonds that bless us can become the bondage that binds us. All it takes is an offense taken, forgiveness withheld, a grudge nursed. No one sees it at first, and often by the time the matter is discovered, the poison has spread through the whole body. 

My bones and nerves were designed by God to function smoothly together, but if I get into the habit of bad posture, or receive an injury, the very structure God intended to enable me to live and serve becomes an avenue of pain and disability. I am engaging in specific exercises to strengthen parts of me I didn’t know had been weakened. I do it so my body can function as God planned. It is just as important to engage in corrective spiritual exercises to realign my heart and soul so my inner life corresponds to God’s will. And it is equally important that the entire body of Christ engage in whatever corrective therapy is needed for us to function as the Father envisions.

Reading Backwards

 March 1, 2021

Recently, I got to thinking again about Jesus’ parable of the Sower. To recap, he said the sower cast seed on the path, on stony ground, amidst thorns, and on good soil. He explained that the different ground represents different people. The seed is the Word of God, and that sown on the path doesn’t penetrate because the devil snatches it away before it can sprout. The seed on the stony ground takes immediate root, but withers when the sun comes out and bakes the thin soil. The thorns are the cares of this world that choke out the seed. The good soil is people who receive and bear fruit.

What if we take this story in reverse? Here’s how it might play out: God sows good seed, blessing us with all kinds of fruitfulness. We are prosperous and comfortable, but slowly, we forget the Source of those blessings, get complacent, and begin to allow all the good we’ve received from God to choke out his Word in us. Weeds start to pop up because in our complacency, we stopped weeding. Pretty soon, they begin to overtake the seedlings, crowding them out. Yet we still sit, comfortable and apathetic to the garden of our hearts.

The day comes when the rains that watered the garden cease, and the sun beats down incessantly upon the land until the ground gets so hard that the seed cannot penetrate. The Enemy then snatches it up and we are left with hard, unproductive soil. 

God has blessed us with fruitfulness, but we’ve gotten comfortable, and this comfort has bred apathy. We’ve allowed the weeds—the cares of this world—to crowd out God’s Word. We’ve become unfruitful, but that’s not the worst of it. Because the Word has been crowded out, when persecution comes, we have no deep inner resources to face it. We wither until there is nothing left but a hard, unproductive, useless path as the Enemy walks right in unresisted. 

It is a trajectory that is being played out before our very eyes. We’ve become so accustomed to the blessings that we look to them rather than to the One who gave them. We’ve allowed them to replace our trust in God. When the day of persecution comes, we will see the emptiness of our faith, but it will be too late. Without deep resources of Scripture, worship, fellowship, we will wither away till there is nothing left. 

It’s not too late. The weeds have gotten away from us, but with determined effort, we can reclaim the garden of our hearts, sending our roots down deep. Then the Psalm will have found fulfillment in us:

“[Our] delight is in the law of the LORD, And in His law [we] meditate day and night. [We] shall be like a tree Planted by the rivers of water, That brings forth its fruit in its season, Whose leaf also shall not wither; And whatever [we] do shall prosper.” —Psalm 1:2-3