Supper Time

 December 10, 2023

It’s after five on a Sunday evening; I’m sitting in my chair by the fire trying to remember what pastor Joe preached about this morning. I remember that he preached well; he was engaging, passionate, and spoke from the Scriptures. But without looking at the notes I took, I just can’t recall what he said. 

It’s no reflection on Joe. When I was actively preaching, I often couldn’t remember on Monday what I had said the previous Sunday. The way thoughts slip away from me, sometimes I think the inside of my head is teflon coated and sprayed with WD-40. And it’s not just sermons. I couldn’t tell you what I had for dinner the night before last, or for the entire past week. If I were being interrogated regarding a crime, I’d be in really hot water: 

Detective: “Where were you at 4:30 pm last Tuesday?” 

Me: “I can’t remember.” 

Detective: “Can anyone verify your whereabouts?”

Me: “I don’t know if anyone was with me, or not.”

Detective: “Read him his rights.”

Like I said, I don’t remember much. I repeat names over and over to myself, but when I see the person again, I can only hope my face doesn’t appear as blank as my mind. But when it comes to sermons and meals, I’m not sure remembering is the important part. Week after week, I listen to a sermon and am spiritually fed. Day after day, I read my Bible and am spiritually fed. Day after day, I eat what Linda sets before me, and my body is fed. I don’t remember the specifics of the meals, whether it is Linda who sets the table, or pastor Joe, or the Holy Spirit. I am fed, and I know that if I neglect sitting at the table, my body—or my spirit will begin to wither and weaken till I am unable to handle even the most basic activities of life.

Don’t worry if you can’t remember. Don’t let your forgetfulness keep you from the table. Go to church, read your Bible, sit at the Table of the Lord. Even if you forget what you ate, you will be better for having sat with Jesus.

Promises

 December 9, 2023

Well I remember singing the old gospel song, “Standing on the Promises.” The tune is lively and the words encouraging:

Standing on the promises of Christ, my King,

Through eternal ages let his praises ring;

Glory in the highest, I will shout and sing,

Standing on the promises of God.

Refrain:

Standing, standing,

Standing on the promises of God, my Savior;

Standing, standing,

I'm standing on the promises of God.

Standing on the promises that cannot fail.

When the howling storms of doubt and fear assail,

By the living Word of God I shall prevail,

Standing on the promises of God. [Refrain]

Standing on the promises of Christ, the Lord,

Bound to him eternally by love's strong cord,

Overcoming daily with the Spirit's sword,

Standing on the promises of God. [Refrain]

Standing on the promises I cannot fall,

List'ning ev'ry moment to the Spirit's call,

Resting in my Savior as my all in all,

Standing on the promises of God. [Refrain]

We sang this song frequently, but never do I remember anyone inquiring exactly what those promises were that we were supposedly standing upon. Don’t get me wrong; it’s still a great song, but if we don’t know what God’s promises are, we’re really standing on quicksand.

Today’s Scripture lesson took me to John’s gospel, chapter 16, verse 33 where we hear Jesus promising two things:

“These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”

We love the promise of peace. I am very content to sit by my fire watching the birds at our feeder as the snow gently falls. I love the fact that our home is pretty tension-free; neither Linda nor myself can tolerate so much of the drama that is a daily occurrence in many homes. It feels good to sit with friends over coffee, laughing or just talking about everyday life. I love the promise of peace. 

Problem is, Jesus doesn’t stop there. He also promises tribulation—trouble in this world. His peace is not the absence of trouble, but a settledness through it. If it were up to me, I’d choose sitting by my fire sans the trouble, but the way Jesus says it, it’s a package deal. He wants to demonstrate his power in us by showcasing how we can go through difficult times without getting rattled by them. That kind of peace, Jesus says, is found only in him. If I have to face life all by myself, it will take me down every time. But I can have peace in Jesus because he has overcome the world. That too, is his promise.

Note well that this overcoming is a promise. When we look around, it doesn’t appear that Jesus has overcome much of anything. That’s because this isn’t what I would call a universal promise. Instead, it is the promise that he has overcome the power of the world around me to infiltrate and destroy his world in me. The storms may rage, but as I’ve often said, it’s not the storm outside that sinks the ship; it’s when the storm outside gets inside. In Jesus, that never needs to happen. 

So even today, I stand on the promises of God, that the trouble will come, but in it, I can still have the peace of Jesus in my heart. 

Remember

 December 7, 2023

“Never Forget!” We heard these words again and again after 9-11. A scant twenty-two years later, it often feels like we have amnesia. Today is Pearl Harbor Day, the eighty-second anniversary of the Japanese attack on our naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, catapulting us into World War II, the deadliest conflict in human history. But apart from a few history buffs and a few remnants of the Greatest Generation, the day goes largely unnoticed.

A few months ago, the invasion of the Ukraine was all over the news. Less than a year later, though people there are still fighting and dying, there’s scarcely a peep from the media. It seems our American penchant for immediate gratification isn’t limited to fast food and sex.

The Bible repeatedly warns us to “not forget,” to remember. Israel forgot her God, forgot his deliverance and his demand for absolute and exclusive worship. Their resulting history was a series of decay, debauchery, and destruction punctuated by occasional short-lived revivals. Remembering is vital to our continued existence. When we forget (or worse, revise) our history, we are in danger of forgetting who we are, and once that memory is lost, so is our future. 

Remember! Remember where you came from, your personal or family history. Remember how that fits into the greater narrative of your faith and your heritage. The future is waiting for you to remember, then to tell your story. Remember well, and tell it well.

Ripple Effect

 December 6, 2023

Christianity, if it is lived out faithfully, has a ripple effect. My mother and father came to Christ in San Antonio when he was stationed there during WWII. They drifted away for awhile when I was little, but when I was about 11, mom decided we were going to church. We tried a couple and landed at Westside Baptist where soon after, my brother who is three years older than me, accepted Christ as his Savior and Lord. I saw such a change in him that I thought, “If this will do that for him, maybe it can help me, too. 

I prayed to receive Christ after a pre-teen meeting in the basement of the church. The lesson that night was given by an elderly gentleman who a few years later, married my widowed grandmother. When the invitation was given, I raised my hand and the pastor’s wife prayed with me outside the door of that room. It remains to me, holy ground.

After my first year in college, I counseled at Miracle Mountain Ranch in Spring Creek, PA. Each night at bedtime, we counselors would go from bunk to bunk praying with the campers and talking to them about Jesus. Thirty years later, I was introduced to a gentleman at a graduation party. This man repeats my name and asked if I liked peanut butter on my pancakes. I responded affirmatively, whereupon he gave me a big bear hug and said, “You are my spiritual father. I’ve been looking for you for thirty years! You led me to Christ in a bunkhouse at Miracle Mountain Ranch.” I never knew. Following in his steps, his children are serving the Lord in various capacities.

God has been gracious to Linda and me. All our children are following Christ. They are teaching their children how to live for Christ. They have led others to Christ. It’s not big and splashy; it will never make the evening news, but that seed of faith that was planted in my parents (and in Linda’s parents, too, but that’s another story), has grown and multiplied in ways they never would have imagined. And not just in me; my brother and his children, my sister and her children—the Good News that Jesus died for our sins and rose again to give us life—that Good News my parents believed eighty years ago has impacted people they never met, and often people I do not know. 

Live as a Christian. Speak as a Christian. You never know the ripple effect your testimony will have.

Productivity

December 5, 2023

For months now, I’ve been intrigued by Jesus’ words in John 15:4–“Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me.“ The word “abide” and “abode” derive from the same root. The first is the verb form, the second, the noun. To abide, therefore, means to be at home. Home is where we land when we don’t have to be somewhere else. It’s where (hopefully) we find rest, renewal, and encouragement. Jesus is saying to us, “That’s what I want to be for you—where you turn when nothing pressing is of necessity keeping your thoughts elsewhere.

As I’ve said before, too often when I have nothing pressing, I have pulled out my phone, checked emails and messages, scrolled through social media. I was abiding in an electronic world that was in reality, doing nothing for me, adding no value to my life. I am far from being alone in this. 

Today as I read this again, the second sentence of this verse caught my attention: “As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.” In other words, if Jesus isn’t my default, my life will remain fruitless, empty of meaning and productivity. I wonder how much fruit I never bore because I wasn’t constantly turning to Jesus instead of all the other false “homes” in this world. Only when Jesus is our heart’s home can we truly be productive. Only when Jesus is our heart’s home will we avoid an existence empty of meaning, purpose, and ultimately, life itself.

 

Laughter

December 4, 2023

“I once had a pet snail. He could move around quite handily, so I decided to enter him in a snail race. He didn’t do as well as I had hoped, so I figured if I removed his shell he could go faster. It didn’t work. It only made him sluggish.” 

You just read our elder son’s favorite joke. Our family is full of them, along with the laughter and groans they produce. When our kids were younger, we would sometimes sit around the kitchen table for hours, listening to the tales Nate and Matt told of their school adventures, the stunts they pulled that were always on the edge of propriety and always funny, like the time Matt sold his teacher’s new car. She wasn’t a good teacher, and it was pretty funny, but we insisted he apologize and pay for the ad he took out in the paper. We could tell dozens of similar stories, but we aren’t sure the statute of limitations has run out on some of them.

In a serious conversation not too long ago, Matt told his mother that one of the things that kept him on the right side (although not by much) of the law was that we laughed at their antics instead of getting all worked up over them. I know some people who thought they were typical preacher’s kids gone wild, and perhaps in some ways they were; Jessie excepted; she was our angel (Matt’s going to love that sentence!). I think the one thing that saved them was our insistence on respect from them. We got it, and they gave it to most of the adults in their lives. The ones that didn’t get their respect probably didn’t earn it.

Some Christians by contrast, are so dour that you would think they had been baptized with pickle juice. Life is so serious that fun and laughter are a foreign language to them. I don’t think that is of God. C.S. Lewis, in the epigraph to his book “The Screwtape Letters,” quotes Luther:

“The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.” The devil knows nothing of real joy, of the belly laugh of a good joke, or the simple fun of our family around the kitchen table, laughing till the tears rolled down our cheeks.

In the Screwtape Letters, Lewis says the only kind of laughter that the devil knows is flippancy, that sharp cutting laughter at what is sacred and holy. This is not the nervous laughter in the face of serious matters, the joking of soldiers on the front line or the patient facing major surgery. Laughter in such serious times is a primal reaction designed to reduce the tension of the moment. Flippancy about serious matters is designed to circumvent the tension so a s to escape its ability to convict and challenge. I have to admit I’ve too often responded to a serious conversation with flippancy, an inappropriate joke or comment that kept myself and others from the deliverance and help they needed at the moment. At such times, I have become the adversary (the literal meaning of the name “Satan”) of God and the grace and truth he intended to bestow.

So in these often dark and troublesome days, laugh! Take joy in the ridiculousness of much of what is happening in the world. Laugh at your own foibles, knowing that the God who made the platypus might just be laughing with you. But avoid flippancy. Don’t use the joke to avoid the work of Christ in you or in others. That laughter is devilish. All the other is from our Creator and Redeemer God who when he created the world and all in it, said, “It is very good.”

 

Home With Us

 December 1, 2023

I’ve been thinking about Jesus’ word in John 15:4––“Abide in me,” ie. “Make me where you land when you don’t have to be anywhere else.” God has been working on me in that regard, weaning me away from the distractions of this world which so easily command my attention. I’ve written about this a number of times. 

This morning, God brought another dimension of this command to my attention. It’s found a few verses earlier, in chapter 14. ”Jesus…said, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him.“

—John 14:23 

It’s one thing to make God our home, our default; where we land when we have nothing pressing upon us. It’s quite another to think that he does the same with us. Not that there is ever a time when God has nothing pressing upon him, but to think that he values us so much that he makes his home with us is even more amazing than the thought that he invites us make our home with him.