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A Rationale for Their Misery

Formerly, if men were miserable, they went to church so as to find a rationale for their misery; they did not expect to be happy — this idea is Greek, not Christian or Jewish.

– Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, p. 38

I heard this quote paraphrased by Carl Trueman in an interview recently. It resonated. Why? Because of my own testimony of how Christ called me to himself. It’s good to remind yourself of the mighty works of God in your life. So indulge me.

I wasn’t raised in a Christian home. My parents were divorced in my early teens. My dad and I were basically two bachelors trying to figure it out. I wasn’t ready for college life at 18. I failed big-time. And it was my own fault.

After a year of partying, skipping class, and getting put on academic probation, I came home with my tail tucked between the limbs I walk on. But, in God’s providence, I came home to find that my grandmother was ill. I came home in May. She died the following October. She asked me to come to her house and visit as often as I could that summer. She knew she wasn’t going to be around much longer.

I never heard my grandmother talk about Jesus. But I knew she went to church. I knew she read the Bible. She told me at some point that summer that she read the Bible through each year. She had a Bible reading plan. She was weak. Would I please read to her? So I did. Several times. It got my attention.

I didn’t know anything about the Bible. But now I wanted to read it for myself. So I started reading it on my own. What else could I do but begin at the beginning?

Again, I knew nothing about the Bible. But I remembered that when I was a child, my family took a trip to Natural Bridge, Virginia. While we were there, we went to their ‘creation’ show. They still do this. You can find it on YouTube. It involved a man and a woman playing the parts of Adam and Eve, with someone reading Genesis 1-3 over the public address system.

I remembered that, hearing those early chapters of Genesis, I asked my dad, “Why didn’t they know they were naked?” He didn’t know how to answer the question. He just shrugged and it was never spoken of again. [Note for parents: no how to explain sin to your child].

Fast-forward to something like twelve years later. I’m reading Genesis 3: “their eyes were opened, and they knew that they were naked.”

It was like sticking a paper clip into an outlet. Electricity. I understood it instantly. The Bible was talking about shame. For the first time, Adam and Eve experienced shame. And reading that, it was the first time I truly experienced shame. It gave a name to all that I had been feeling but couldn’t put into words or apply to my heart. It changed me on the spot. I was in church the next Sunday.

I had a lot of baggage from my parents’ divorce that I didn’t know how to deal with. I had a lot of pain from some things that happened in high school. And I was partying my way through those things. I was numbing myself. I was acting like an idiot. Only I didn’t know this. Reading that Adam and Eve realized that they were naked and hid themselves from God made me realize that I was naked and hiding myself too. I was looking for a covering for my shame.

Genesis 3 gave me a rationale for my misery. It cut open my chest and exposed the guilt and shame of my heart. Did joy come from this? Yes. Because it led me to Christ, who is my joy. But I needed my miserable condition explained to me. I needed to understand why I did the terrible things I did (and do). I needed to understand how sin, guilt, and shame were abiding in my soul and how to confront them. I needed to know that I was naked before Christ could clothe me with his righteousness.

People who downplay the necessity of talking about sin see it as something negative; something that will get people down and depress people. On that day in the summer of 2000, I saw it as the explanation for all that was going on in my miserable soul. It made sense of everything – my feelings, my actions, my confusion, my mistakes. It was a supreme act of God’s blessing that he showed me my guilt. It was a positive thing that God showed me my sin, guilt, and shame. It wasn’t a downer. It wasn’t depressing. It was the thing that made sense of my whole life.

I am a pastor now, but I still go to church each week seeking a rationale for my misery. I need God to remind me week by week that I am deeply sinful. And then I need him to show me what Christ has done as the ultimate remedy. Then I need him to show me how I am still continually rebelling against the lordship of the one who saved me. And I need to be reminded that indwelling sin is the cause of that rebellion. Then I need to be reminded of Christ’s cross once again.

And it’s only through this – the rationale of my misery – that I am driven back again and again to the rationale for my joy – the love of Jesus Christ. Skip the rationale for misery and you have no rationale for joy.

On Meteor Showers

I read about the meteor shower expected to be visible (in the southern United States) starting at about the time this post is published. I just walked outside. It’s overcast, so it’s a no go. But it leads me to story time:

I have only seen one meteor shower in my life, but it was a memorable one. Tonight I decided to do some research via Google and discovered that it was likely the Geminid Meteor Shower of 1998. I narrowed it down to this time frame, because I know that I was still in high school and that it was during December or January. This seems to be the only date that fits. The timeline I found puts the shower on the morning of December 14th of that year.

In the early hours of that morning, between 4 and 5am, I boarded a john boat along with two of my friends for a morning of duck hunting in the muddy Mississippi River Bottoms of Northeast Arkansas. It was still quite dark; and, as always, we used a spotlight to guide our journey through our normal ditch (as we call such bodies of water back home).

It was very cold; according to another site I found, it was certainly below Freezing. Because it was cold, I followed my normal practice of lying down in the bottom of the boat in order to shield myself from the wind. And as I lay there, I looked up to behold the marvelous sight of fireballs shooting across the sky. At the time I thought they were shooting stars (I had never seen a meteor shower. In fact, I didn’t know what a meteor shower was). There were dozens of them during our half hour boat ride. We hardly said a word about them afterward. I think we said a few things like, ‘Boy, there sure were a lot of shooting stars this morning.’ That was about it.

At that time I was not a Christian. I knew nothing about God. I had hardly darkened the door of a church, and the times I had done so had been when I was a very small child (I couldn’t remember them). But that morning, though I said little about it to my friends, I experienced true awe for the first time. That meteor shower has stayed with me through the years. I can still see it in my mind. Every time, like today, I hear of an impending meteor shower, I begin to long for the experience anew. But, alas, like tonight, I find an overcast sky.

When I first read Surprised by Joy, by C.S. Lewis, this was the first experience that came to mind as Lewis recounted his own experiences of Joy. A forgotten (for many) or non-experienced (for most) meteor shower in December of 1998 opened up to me the world of awe and wonder. This post is my way of giving a late ‘Thank You’ (almost 16 years late) to the One who stretched the shining dust across the sky and put me in place to see it fly.

I pray that someone else has an experience like that this morning.

___________________________________________________________________

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?
Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor (Psalm 8:3-5).

Thirteen Years

By the grace of God I was brought to faith in Jesus Christ in October of 2000. Each October I make it a point to spend time reflecting on my conversion, taking inventory on the progress of my sanctification, and thanking God for his steadfast love in Christ.

It has become sort of a tradition that each year I think back on the earliest days of my Christian life through the lens, if you will, of the songs I learned during that time. These past couple of weeks, I have kept going back to a song called ‘There must be more.’

The words are short and simple:

Lord I’m tired, Lord I’m weak.
I need your power to work in me.
But I can’t let go, I keep holding on,
Because there must be more.

The song ends with a cry for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

In the days leading to my conversion I found myself expressing that same idea – there must be more. Of course I didn’t know then the famous quote from Augustine, ‘Our hearts are restless till they rest in thee.’ I had been not been raised in a Christian home, and was basically a heathen, which suits my name. And I was restless to say the least. I was directionless. My only direction was toward hell, and I had a sense of it in my heart – not a sense of flames, but a sense that I was beating eaten up inside by my own wandering and emptiness.

In Jesus, first, I found a friend. I didn’t understand sin. I didn’t understand the nature of free grace and forgiveness. But I did understand that a great man, who claimed to have risen from the dead, invited me to be his friend. I liked that.

I later learned of the holiness of God, of the cost Jesus paid to call me his friend in light of that holiness. His friendship drew me. The cost of that friendship has sustained me. The older I get the more I appreciate his work on the cross. The more I am resolved to know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

In my early days I was hesitant to confess the Apostle’s Creed because it claimed that he ‘descended into hell.’ What exactly that means is up for interpretation, but I no longer hesitate to confess it, because I now see that regardless of the creed, Jesus had to walk through hell to reach out his hand to me. I was a brand plucked from the fire.

In recent years my favorite hymn has become O For A Thousand Tongues To Sing by Charles Wesley. It has become somewhat politically incorrect because of one allegedly insensitive stanza, but it is that stanza that I relate to so well:

Hear Him, ye deaf; His praise, ye dumb,
Your loosened tongues employ;
Ye blind, behold your Savior come,
And leap, ye lame, for joy.

That was me, it is still me, apart from him. And now I leap for joy by his strength.

I encourage Christians to thank God every day that they are a Christian. We take it for granted. We don’t realize that it’s a miracle. His mercies are new every morning. Sometimes I wake up and wonder if it has all be a dream. I think of the words of George MacDonald:

Sometimes I wake, and, lo! I have forgot
And drifted out upon an ebbing sea!
My soul that was at rest now resteth not,
For I am with myself and not with thee (Diary of an Old Soul, 1.3).

But I always find that he is still there, and that the dream is not a dream. And I thank him.

He gave the Israelites new manna each morning that they might trust in him to sustain them. And so he gives us new mercies with the dawn of each day that we might trust in his persevering grace. Part of Jesus being a friend that sticks closer than a brother is that he is always close. Thank God.

Here’s to another year.

Memory: Remember, Testify

  • Daniel 4:2 It has seemed good to me to show the signs and wonders that the Most High God has done for me.

I’ve been attempting (albeit superficially) to work out a biblical doctrine of memory over the past couple months. I wrote about it HERE and HERE. This post was not intended initially to deal with that subject per se, but after some reflection I realized it is relevant to the series.

I remember preaching a sermon on Nebuchadnezzar’s words in Daniel 4:2 and his personal testimony which follows. I argued for the importance of the testimony of believers. It is good to declare the works that God has done for you – that was my theme. Near the end I mentioned the fact that some commentators, and Christians in general, look down on a man like Nebuchadnezzar. He was prideful, power-hungry, and fickle. He had faults. He had sins. But he had experienced grace. Therefore he was not ashamed to bear testimony to the work of God to the entire world – in writing, so that he, and all others, for centuries, might remember. His testimony still stands. ‘Don’t you dare,’ I said, ‘Think badly of Nebuchadnezzar if you are afraid to bear witness in the way that he did.’

I reflected on my own testimony tonight as our family read the end of the Gospel of Matthew. As he called upon his disciples to make disciples, he was calling them to be his witnesses. Certainly there was a peculiarity – that is, a distinct type of witness that only the Apostles could offer – but, nonetheless, we are witnesses still.

I began to share some of my own testimony with my family. I’ve done this before. My wife knows the story well, she was there for a good portion of it, and is still here to see God’s continuing work in my life. But my daughters need to hear it. They need to know that their daddy wasn’t always a preacher – indeed, that he wasn’t always a Christian.

Christ’s call came to me when I was 19. Next month (October 2012) will mark twelve years from that life changing encounter. I knew nothing of him. I had seen a picture of him (i.e. that was supposed to be of him) on my grandmother’s guest room wall. That picture always scared me. I thought it looked kind of creepy. I had hardly ever been to church, and the few times I had been were before I was 5 or 6, which meant I couldn’t even remember them. My dad was a professing agnostic and my mom, well, I’m really not sure what she was. I’m still not sure.

For 19 and a half years of my life, no one ever told me about Jesus. Not even my Christian grandparents.

My grandmother was a godly woman, but she never shared the good news with me. She did, however, in October of 2000, do something. She encouraged me to start reading the Bible. I’m eternally grateful to her for that, and will praise her in the gates. She was ill. She didn’t have much longer left to live, and I think she knew it, though I was to naive at the time to realize it. I had had a really bad year. I flunked out of my first year of college – something that still haunts me. I was a mess. My life was a big wisp. You could have called me willow. But I wasn’t wise enough to realize how screwed up I was both emotionally and spiritually (not that I’m necessarily separating the two).

I was still coping with my parents’ divorce. I didn’t realize it at the time. I was too busy. I thought I was just living, moving forward. But years later I still haven’t fully dealt with the family issues I had as a child and young man. I was still coping with failed high school relationships and my utter failure in my first year of college (which I had partied away). But all these things seemed like things simply to be pushed out of my mind, and so I filled up my mind with all kinds of mess. The last thing I was looking for was Jesus.

But I started reading the Bible – and there he was, in all his glory.

I was like the Ethiopian Eunuch. I was reading, but I had no one to explain to me what I was reading. I remember early on thinking that Adam and Eve must have been blind when they were created, because they couldn’t see that they were naked. Still, I kept reading. I read the Bible cover to cover in a few months. I didn’t understand it well, but with my reading and the help of a few television preachers I realized that I needed Jesus in my life badly.

I started going to church with my grandmother. A friend started going with me, and that encouraged me. Behind the scenes she had asked him, essentially as her dying wish, that he do whatever he could to keep me in church. He didn’t have to do anything. Long since he has gone out of the picture I still can’t wait for Sunday morning. Virtually every Sunday morning feels like a resurrection to me – it’s always like starting all over, again and again, like the covenant is being renewed – the covenant of grace that is.

My (now) wife then came into the picture. She was/is a Christian. She was so much more mature than me it was pretty ridiculous. She has been the greatest influence on me for Christ bar none. We started alternating Sundays going to her home church, which was Baptist, and the church I had been attending, which was Church of God. Though I had been attending a Pentecostal church, I never felt that I fit in very well. I don’t want to sling stones in this glass house, so I’ll say that the positive thing I took from that church was the music. I’ll refer to this again in a moment.

My then future wife was quiet most of the time, setting an example. But she would call me out on things when she needed to. I vividly remember an instance when we were dating that I told her I believed a Christian could lose his salvation. ‘If I killed someone and then died without repenting, of course I think I would lose my salvation.’ She was quick to respond, ‘But doesn’t that mean that salvation is of works?’ I had read all of Paul, and I immediately knew she was right. I admitted that I was wrong on the spot. I often advise young men to seek a mate who is more mature than they are. Girls typically mature a bit more quickly (though things they are a changin’ these days), so, from my own experience I say, ‘the best thing you could do is find a young woman who is more mature than you, especially spiritually. You need someone to raise the bar for you and challenge you to grow if you’re going to lead.’ It makes me marvel that my wife, who was more mature than me, was willing to submit to me as her leader. It forced me to step up, and it was good for me – you know, the whole, ‘You make me want to be a better man’ – that was truly the case, and still is.

I started reading a book called The Holiness of God, by R.C. Sproul, at the recommendation of my pastor, and it all started to make sense. I get it – this is why I need Jesus. God is really, really holy and I’m really, really not. Jesus died so that his holiness could be counted as mine. I’m unworthy, be he is gracious – it’s all of grace. This was about a year into the process. I was already a Christian, but the foundation was beginning to solidify.

I started telling everybody I could about Jesus. At work I was talking to Jehovah’s Witnesses. At school I was talking to Atheists and more Jehovah’s Witnesses. I was even starting to talk to my family about Jesus. They weren’t believers, but they were never hostile to me, and I’m thankful for that. They saw anything that would improve my life morally and emotionally as a good thing, regardless of whether or not it was true.

My ‘telling people about Jesus’ was noticed by a lot of people, one of whom was my pastor at the time. He encouraged me to get in a pulpit. I wanted to preach and so I eagerly accepted the invite. I don’t think I’ve ever turned down an offer to preach since (at least not that I can remember). For some preaching is for those who want to exposit Scripture, teach the Bible, etc. I love to do those things. And I think all good preachers will do those things. But from the beginning all I wanted to to was tell people about Jesus. Years later, 100 hours of seminary courses later, heaps of study later, I still think that’s the essence of Christian ministry. Don’t get me wrong, I know that I’m being simplistic, but above all else, we have a gospel to proclaim.

Most of the time, though it should be all of the time, I still feel that gospel is all that I have. What if I lost my wife? What if I lost my children? What would I have? Only the gospel, and it tells me that tombstones are resurrection markers.

As that great saint Polycarp stood trial before being martyred, he said, ‘Eighty-six years I have served the Lord. He has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who has saved me?’ I live without fear of major persecution. I’m no martyr. But I can proclaim with a clear conscience, twelve years I have served the Lord and he has done me no wrong.’ I have found my life to be a struggle and a joy. I have found it to be seriously happy. And I have found his mercies to be new every morning. His faithfulness is great. My only prayer is that I may continue with all my heart to follow Jesus Christ, as a disciple, till I breathe my last, and then keep following him into eternity.

One of the early songs I heard as a Christian has this lyric: ‘Where would I be? You only know. I’m glad you see through eyes of love. A hopeless case, an empty place, if not for grace. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound. I once was lost, but now I’m found. A hopeless case, an empty place, if not for grace.’ That sums it up pretty well for me.

The Apostle writes,

  • Ephesians 2:12 remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.

People ask me from time to time where my passion for preaching and evangelism comes from. That’s not easy to answer. I have to say ‘from the work and calling of God.’ But the way God has chosen to work in me is largely through memory. I remember. I remember those 19 and a half years of my life in which I was without hope, without God in the world, a stranger to the covenants of promise. May God grant me the grace to always remember, and the boldness to tell people of the wondrous works of God in Christ Jesus.

You will doubtless tell your family, friends, coworkers, etc stories about your past. Will you neglect the most important story of all – the intersection of God’s sovereign work of salvation and your little life? Tell the story. I think back to myself as a teenager. Where were all the Christians? There they were in my school. There they were in my work. And they were silent. Because they were silent I will not be silent. I needed someone to speak.

Another song I learned back then says, ‘If you could see where Jesus brought me from, to where I am today, then you would know the reason why I love him so.’ That’s it. I can’t convey it in a post. But if you could only see… I cannot convey to you the grace that he has extended to me, the love that he has shown to me. And I’m not special. This grace and love is on the table for anyone who calls upon him.

Just ask, I’d be glad to tell you much more. I remember.