Coming Up For Air

From 1 Thessalonians 3 – 1 Therefore, when we could no longer endure it, we thought it good to be left in Athens alone, 2 and sent Timothy, our brother and minister of God, and our fellow laborer in the Gospel of Christ, to establish you and encourage you concerning your faith, 3 that no one should be shaken by these afflictions; for you yourselves know that we are appointed to this. BM Palmer in his sermon "The Family in Its Civil and Churchly Aspects" counsels that this is God's gracious design of the family as a civilizing instrument: "Power is less severe by the ease and constancy with which it is exercised." That we would practice this continuity in grace with our spiritual family as well, the Holy Spirit directs Paul to open what comes to us as 1 Thessalonians 3 with this sort of heart in action. Spiritual that he is, these wee ones in the faith, he will say, are constantly in his thoughts. This concern is aptly demonstrated in the right timing and the...

"If your boss is angry at you, don't quit! A quiet spirit can overcome even great mistakes." Ecclesiastes 10:4, New Living Translation "You can’t win a war in your head," admits Chris Kyle in American Gun: A History of the US in 10 Firearms , "but if your head ain’t right, you’ve got no chance at all." Solomon comes to much the same conclusion in Ecclesiastes 10:4. He insists on the integral nature of the ability to maintain perspective in problem-solving. Where we tend to measure both our outrage and our demonstrated determination by the size of the obstacle in front of us, Solomon coaches a deliberate tampering down of our reaction. The quiet spirit he teaches us to draw from allows room for creative inspiration and patient progress. I find his setting for this life lesson instructive also. Surely, having a boss who is angry at us or disappointed in us can prompt some healthy introspection, but what does King Solomon know of bosses? Perhaps he ...

1 A Song of Assents. Of David. I was glad when they said to me, "Let us go into the house of the LORD." 2 Our feet have been standing within your gates, O Jerusalem! 3 Jerusalem is built as a city that is compact together, 4 where the tribes go up, the tribes of the LORD, to the Testimony of Israel, to give thanks to the Name of the LORD. 5 For thrones are set there for judgment, the thrones of the house of David. 6 Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: "May they prosper who love you. 7 Peace be within your walls, prosperity within your palaces." 8 for the sake of my brethren and companions, I will now say, "Peace be within you." 9 Because of the house of the LORD our God I will seek your good. Psalm 122, New King James Version John Piper once remarked that one of the reasons Paul heard the Lord so clearly is that the apostle walked everywhere he went. Piper contrasted a walking age with its built-in stretches for contemplation, its technological inability to f...

From 1 Thessalonians 2 – 2 But even after we had suffered before and were spitefully treated in Philippi, as you know, we were bold in our God to speak to you the Gospel of God in much conflict. 3 for our exhortation did not come from error of uncleanness, nor was it in deceit. 4 But as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the Gospel, even so we speak, not as pleasing been but God tests our hearts. I think it was in The Kid , although Google is failing in its customary function of backstopping my erratic memory. Bruce Willis is a successful consultant. Although he can adapt to help clients in a variety of fields, we quickly find that his fallback counsel is similar regardless of setting. Do you know what the number one killer is of, he will ask, filling in the demographic blank of his audience? His answer is as blunt as it is universally applicable. "Self-pity." In this case, Bruno's voice sounds a lot like the voice of the Holy Spirit behind Paul's...

"I rejoice in your promise like one who finds great spoil.” Psalm‬ ‭119:162‬ ‭NIV‬‬ "This I know," thunders Charles Spurgeon in Morning and Evening . "I had rather have God for my banker than all the Rothschilds." He continues, "My Lord never fails to honor His promises, and when we bring them to His throne, He never sends them back unanswered." The inspired writer of Psalm 119:162 makes the same valuation. Put treasure or spoil in my hand or in my vault, he speculates. I'll weigh the promises of God in His Word at least equally. Yes, the Word itself is a gift incalculable, but I think there is more here. That's why like the focus of the New International Version specifically on the PROMISES of the Word. God's promise that He will provide is functionally the same to the psalmist as if he already saw the means of provision, indeed of abundance. We may consider, in fact, that we, his heirs, have the better deal. Jesus warns that he ...

Who is like a wise man? And who knows the interpretation of the thing? A man's wisdom makes his face shine, and the sternness of his face is changed. Ecclesiastes 8:1 Charles Schultz often used his Peanuts character Linus to deliver the author's insights, whether historical or theological. It is intriguing, then, that Schultz connected the fact that Linus tends to understand more with the fact that he tends to worry more. That connection extends beyond the comics. If we understand more, even in a limited area, than our peers, with increased perception comes worry. We often count it our responsibility to double down on our thought for tomorrow in a kind of anxiety intercession for our peers who can't see its troubles yet. If you were smart enough, we seem to say at least with our countenance, you would be worried, too. God gives a rebuke to this sort of thinking from an interesting source. Solomon, the smartest man who ever lived save the Lord Jesus, accompanies his in...

The king delights in a wise servant, but a shameful servant arouses his fury… The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty… Like an archer who that random is one who hires a fool or any passer-by. Proverbs 14:35, 21:5, 26:10 Tim Keller insists in God's Wisdom for Navigating Life , "Organizing is a matter of… Being organized. Disorganization is selfishness, a lack of sacrificial love in little things." I'm maturing through the convicting and stretching application of this principle. I've excused haste and the resulting neglect of details because, so goes my self-justifying script, it flows from the fact that I care more. Now, I am learning to seek care as much in calm, diligent planning with foresight as in the moment of overwhelming action or jaw-dropping inspiration. While God is free to act by unanticipated epiphany, much in Proverbs also suggests He willingly limits His usual action to principles He establishes beforehand. It is ...

Hold me up, and I shall be safe, And I shall observe Your statutes continually. Psalm 119:117 Mark Hall as the lead singer of the Christian band Casting Crowns has proclaimed the Bible in song to thousands upon thousands. It is perhaps surprising, then, to hear him admit, "We can't cry to a worldview. We can't lean on a Book." He has a point, one reinforced by the candor of Psalm 119:117. That author admits he needs to know that God cares before he cares what God knows. He needs, Mark Hall needs, every faithful follower of Christ needs to know that we are held safe in His Provenance before the buzz of panic quiets enough for us to start learning from His particular instructions. As we, by grace, develop that relationship, that shared experience with the Author of the Bible, we approach its precepts differently. The Word does us good, alludes George Whitfield, when we find it spoken to us in particular. We hear not just rules, and good rules, but the voice behin...

"And whatever you doing word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him." Colossians 3:17 "Bondservants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh, not with eye service, as men-pleasers, but in sincerity of heart, fearing God." Colossians 3:22-23 As conveyed in Lincoln and the Power of the Press , a writer that was a contemporary of the President's said, "Lincoln means to sync the man and the public officer." So does God's Word. Consider the continuity of Paul's inspired words in Colossians 3. The 17th verse is a delighted catchall, insisting that Christ's character can go public in whatever it is we do. And what sort of character is Christ's? The character by which He served the Father gladly, and still does. Christ is positioned, reminds Paul, so that we still give thanks to the Father through Christ. His office, his job, his function delightfully undertaken day after ...

"I understand more than the ancients, because I keep Your precepts." Psalm 119:100, New King James Version Benjamin Wallace-Wells considers in his article "Battle Scars" in the December 4, 2017 issue of the New Yorker that every time we enshrine monuments and collective memories, we run the risk of invigorating bitterness. Psalm 119:100 is an effective remedy to the explosive politics he was addressing of venerating one memory over another. The verse's celebration of God's Presence in the present through His Word is an equally effective suppressant of any tendency to romanticize the past. It is easy, after the battles of previous generations have been fought and won, to see the heroism of participants in a straight line, and to believe that our own day suffers by comparison. This psalmist will have none of it. He celebrates what CS Lewis's fictional demon dreads, the continuity between obedient saints in the current generation and those who have go...

Psalm 119 – 98 You, through Your commandments, make me wiser than my enemies; for they are ever with me. 99 I have more understanding than all my teachers, for Your testimonies are my meditation. "The activity of interpreting," discerns Tim Keller in Songs of Jesus , "might be understood as listening for the 'song beneath the words.'" The psalmist in Psalm 119:98-99 delights in this subtle continuity provided by Scripture. If in a particular verse in his life song enemies seem to predominate, he sings on. He is wiser than his enemies, he says, because in place of ruminating over confrontation his continual habit is to keep God's Word with him. The Bible is his disciplined reset in grace. Lest we only come to God's Word when we need healing from a warning or in bettering encounter, the next verse quickly follows. When God uses particular teachers mightily in our lives, when we are, in a sense, fashioned in their image, for the healthy believer S...

Martin Luther's wife Katerina once attended to one of the reformer's black moods by donning funeral garb herself. Since God is dead, she reasoned, she figured she would join him in mourning. Conscious that my anxiety or discouragement can be contagious to my household, and not always in instructive jest, I find myself resolving to contain and constrain it in light of impending adoptive parenthood. So far as this desire that my daughter see what is good in God's world reflected on her father's face, this is edifying for us both. But so far as I then worry about the compounding cost of my worrying to succeeding generations, I have just redefined legalism with the excuse of focusing on my family. I'm pretty sure, as the eldest sister on Madam Secretary said to a brother who did not want to distract from his mother's presidential campaign with less than sterling college performance, is just fear with a hat. There is encouragement here even in a biblical passage...

What is one to do when soulsmithing and wordsmithing heroes Charles Spurgeon and CS Lewis seem to collide? Think a lot, and write a little. In today's first installment of Morning and Evening , Spurgeon offers a cozy Saturday thought. His text is Deuteronomy 33:27, the reality that God is our refuge. On the way there, he relates God's grace in the refuge of our physical homes. Lewis wouldn't disagree there. He wrote in Pilgrim's Regress , after all, that God as the Landlord has knit our souls to one shire more than all the others. Break the threshold of home beyond the general idea, and we have some degree of difference between the two paragons. Spurgeon soothes, "At home, we let our hearts loose; we are not afraid of being misunderstood, nor of our words being misconstrued." Lewis, a bachelor when he wrote The Screwtape Letters as demonic handbook and as instruction to believers in withstanding demonic intent, would not have granted that premise. Screwtape t...

From Ecclesiastes 4 – 13 Better a poor and wise youth than old and foolish king who will be admonished no more. 14 For he comes out of prison to be king, although he was born poor in his kingdom. 15 I saw all the living who walk under the sun; they will with the second youth who stands in his place. 16 There was no end of all the people over whom he was made king; yet those who come after Word will not rejoice in him. Surely this is also vanity and grasping for the wind. New King James Version On the drama The West Wing , the President's political operative has found his next champion as the present administration draws to a close. He is invigorated, and he invites his veteran mentor and a close friend of the current president to join the new team. The mentor declines gently, wistfully, recollecting, "I already found my guy." In Ecclesiastes 4:13-16, Solomon is a little more wizened than wiser. He has seen the people's hopes fix on one leader, then another. As a k...

And He is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He may have the preeminence. For it please the Father that in Him all the fullness should dwell, and by Him to reconcile all things to Himself, by Him, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross. And you, who were once alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now He has reconciled." Colossians 1:18-21, New King James Version "It is a wonderful experience," baubles The Seven Storey Mountain " by Thomas Merton, "to discover a new saint. For God is greatly magnified and marvelous in each one of His saints: differently in each individual one." Paul's declaration in Colossians 1:18-21 offers similar continuity of continuity. In a sense, he is coming off of a theological high of one of the sweetest Christ-exalting passages in Scripture. Yet his tone isn't, "Okay, now...

Then I returned and considered all the oppression that is done under the sun: And look! The tears of the oppressed, But they have no comforter— On the side of their oppressors there is power, But they have no comforter. Ecclesiastes 4:1, New King James Version And this is the reason for the labor force which King Solomon raised: to build the house of the LORD, his own house, the Millo,[fn] the wall of Jerusalem, Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer. 1 Kings 9:15, New King James Version "Modern society often restrains empathy," detects Gabriel McKee in The Gospel According to Science Fiction , "encouraging us to view others as objects." Solomon might have recognized here specifically that there is nothing new under the sun. In the same Book of Ecclesiastes in which that principle is stated, Solomon detects the human tendency to treat one another as objects. He sympathizes with the oppressed, attempting to count their tears in the image of the mutual Creator of both k...

We give thanks to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, always praying for you, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of your love for all the saints; because of the hope which is laid up for you in Heaven… Colossians 1:3-5a, New King James Version all go to one place: all are from the dust, and all return to the dust. Who knows the spirit of the sons of men, which goes upward, and the spirit of the animal, which goes down to the earth? So I perceived that nothing is better than that a man should rejoice in his own works, for that is his heritage. For who can bring him to see what will happen after him? Ecclesiastes 3:19-22, New King James Version When Bob Dylan's lyrics and Ellen DeGeneres's comedic rift land on the same point, we know we have traction.  DeGeneres played a character on the 90s sitcom Mad About You who unknowingly auditioned for a role as a nanny when the infant child of the two main characters was upset. She observed, "I know why yo...

“Only be strong and very courageous, that you may observe to do according to all the law which Moses My servant commanded you; do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, that you may prosper wherever you go.  This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success." ‭‭Joshua‬ ‭1: 7-8 ‭ NKJV‬‬ A Quaker adage as rendered in the New Yorker by Rachel Aviv dictates, "Live up to the light thou hast, and more will be granted thee." The same spirit pervades Joshua 1:7. We are prone, I suspect, to think courage is other people's resource. Courage is for those whose lives are threatened. Courage is summoned for one grand burst of obedience which is talked about for ages thereafter. Here, though, the result of courage is less glare than guidance. Joshua knows of the flashie...

Still reading David Halberstam's The Fifties , I was struck by his description of the home life of a Major General from World War II. Even having transitioned into civilian life, "He treated his family as a regiment in battle." As usual, there is both worth here, and caution. Where work teaches discipline and we bring that home to model in marriage and parenthood, to God be the glory. Where work helps us to accustom ourselves to subordinating our own desires for the good of the whole and we bring that across home's threshold, to God be the glory. Where work's actual or metaphorical wars make us justly suspicious of the enemy of our souls and his opportunities to limit and misappropriate the harvest of our efforts, to God be the glory. Work and dominion are blessed for these purposes. Yet, our family members are not primarily our employees or our soldiers. We see the bleedover biblically in the life of King Saul. He creates distance between himself and his admi...