day no. 16,572: shut in and shut out

Genesis 7:16

The Lord shut him in.

Noah was shut safely inside from the shenanigans outside. In Christ within, he was shielded from the chaos without. When God shuts us in, He shuts out the danger. In one motion, He closes the door on the danger and secures the saints. He interrupts the reign of the riot and inaugurates the realm of rest. 

“Outside the ark was all ruin, but inside all was rest.” — Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Morning and Evening 

God gave the ark to Noah. He provided the plans and the time to prepare. He declared His will and provided the wood. Noah had to throw his back into it, but he didn't have to make the trees. He had to swing the hammer, but he didn't have to keep his heart beating. He had to labor, but He didn't have to look for the blueprints. God delivers what He demands. Safety and security were given by grace to Noah in the warning, the work, and the welcome.

Noah built the ark that God provided and once inside, God shut him in.

Matthew 25:10

The bridegroom came; and they that were ready went in with him to the marriage: and the door was shut.

The same door that safely shut in the wise virgins surely shut out the foolish ones. The same opportunity that energized the wise virgins' work guaranteed the foolish virgins' eviction. When God closes a door, He protects and punishes in one fell swoop. As C.S. Lewis observed, "A heaven for mosquitoes and a hell for humans can be accommodated by one place." 

day no. 16,571: finneas is twelve

Finneas Haddon Foxe, you are TWELVE years old today!

I am so proud of you.

I like being your dad. You make every day fun. You are full of enthusiasm for life and love bringing a smile to others. You have perfect comedic timing and a brilliant knack for finding the right words at the right moments. You make the adventure a joy.

You are a good brother. You love your siblings and take care of your little sisters and look up to your older brother. You look out for your little brother and do your best to give your older sister a run for her money. You both keep each other on your toes. You are learning how to live with others and have plenty of people around you to practice on. There are little girls to console and big brothers to battle. It's a good life and I'm glad you're part of it.

You have a great smile and wear it often; and just as often you are putting smiles on other people's faces. You like to tell jokes and thing of funny things to say. Your mom often mentions how sharp and how quick you are. You get it. You see the joke before anyone else and you say it before most have noticed. You are on top of things.

You are a winner. You find a way. Your will be done more... often than not. That is a great power and an even greater responsibility. When you have an eleven, you can outlast most. You are at the helm of most situations. We walk in the garden of your turbulence!! ... YEAH!!! All that to say, you were made to dominate. You are a conqueror. God made you to rule and by His grace, you will rule well and the world will be blessed because you beat them.

You like being goofy. You're not afraid to be funny. You're not afraid of much of anything... except for that weird few months at our last home where you were really concerned about flooding. Other than that... fearless.

You often set out the plates for pizza party night on Fridays while I'm out getting the food. You also help Lolo with the chickens by providing cover fire for her to feel safe when it's dark out. 

You run towards the roar when it comes to bugs. You aren't grossed out by them as much as you are interested in them.

You love listening to music on Sunday afternoons after church. You like to throw on your headphones and jam the day away. You have favorite bands and favorite songs. You like singing and have a really good voice. More often than not, you are goofing around, but even still, anyone can tell you have a good voice. You love to drum and often turn the dinner table into a percussion solo. You often take the place of drummer in whatever air band is being assembled.

You have lots of friends at church and don't find any difficulty making new ones whenever you feel like it. 

You are a good kid and I like being your dad. While I am sad to see 11 year old Finneas meet his Maker, I am excited to see all things that 12 year old Finn will do.

So, here;s to you, my son. Happy Birthday and to many, many more!

Love, 

Dad

day no. 16,570: win the well-fought day

Soldiers of Christ, arise,

and put your armor on,

strong in the strength which God supplies

thro' his eternal Son.

Strong in the Lord of hosts,

and in his mighty pow'r,

who in the strength of Jesus trusts

is more than conqueror.

Stand then in his great might,

with all his strength endued;

but take, to arm you for the fight,

the panoply of God.

Leave no unguarded place,

no weakness of the soul;

take ev'ry virtue, ev'ry grace,

and fortify the whole.

To keep your armor bright,

attend with constant care;

still walking in your Captain's sight,

and watching unto prayer.

From strength to strength go on;

wrestle and fight and pray;

tread all the pow'rs of darkness down,

and win the well-fought day.

— Charles Wesley,

Soldiers of Christ, Arise

In Christ, we are more than conquerors, not less.

When you choose to fight, you must also choose to win. If something is worth going to war over, it must be worth your best effort. God has called us to crush serpents in the train of His Son.

Romans 16:20

And the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Amen.

Peace is at war with enmity.

Christ is at war with chaos.

God injected enmity into the world in order to resist and overcome evil (Gen. 3:15). The grace of God led Adam and Eve to oppose the serpent who had already been opposing them. The goodness of God compelled men to resist the evil they previously reached for. The God of peace will prevail everywhere. Peace will impose itself upon restlessness and the wicked will either submit to the ease of His yoke or be broken underneath His feet.

The demonic strongholds really are entrenched, but their gates, we are told, cannot prevail against the onslaught of Christ's Kingdom. Jesus is busting down doors and we are called, like Samson, to storm the gates and carry them off. Evil has no safe space. It is under siege and overwhelmed, going down, and dying. The darkness will be snuffed out.

day no. 16,569: we do not need more men without mentors

1 Timothy 5:8

But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.

Every person is not your person, but God does assign certain persons to us. In His providence, He gives us a father and a mother to honor. By His grace, He often provides a wife to love, lead, serve, provide, and protect or a husband to respect, follow, serve, and help. By even more grace, and a natural, normal outcome of the previous grace, He often provides children to love, discipline, instruct, and nourish in the Lord.

If you have any or all of these, they are your people. No question about it. Your father and mother, your spouse, your children, your elders, your employer, your employees, etc... These are your people. God has given your neighbor to you as a gift and has defined who those neighbors are by determining the time and boundary of your and their particular habitation. (Acts 17:26)

We must disciple our own children before we look to disciple others. Everyone is someone's son or daughter and you should not spend your time disciplining someone else's son or daughter before you have discipled your own. You merely create more young men without mentors when you ignore your own sons in order to disciple someone else’s. There is a way to do both, but that means that the other guy’s son gets the leftovers, not your own.

When God commanded us to make disciples (Matt. 28:18-20), He did not mean for us to make more children for someone else to disciple. He meant that we were to spread the Good News to the nations, who are full of sons and daughters who had never heard the Word of God and the Good News of Christ crucified, buried, resurrected, and ascended to reign. We should do our best to reach those who have not had fathers or mothers to teach them, but we should not create spiritual orphans in our own homes in order to father spiritual sons somewhere else.

Do not create more men without mentors in your zeal to mentor other men without mentors. If you abandon your son for the sake of someone else's, you merely make your son the project of another man with children of his own. Rather than discipling everyone else's children, let us begin with our own and free up resources for those who truly have no one else. Your children have you. Do not withhold what God has provided to them.

We do not need more men without mentors; we need more men who mentor the sons they've been given.

day no. 16,568: build where He has bestowed

2 Chronicles 14:7

Therefore he said unto Judah, Let us build these cities, and make about them walls, and towers, gates, and bars, while the land is yet before us; because we have sought the LORD our God, we have sought him, and he hath given us rest on every side. So they built and prospered.

Where God provides rest, we get to work. When He graciously gives us a place, we get after establishing it. Out of His generosity, He provides opportunity. So, let us build where He has bestowed and secure what He has sown. Let us construct where He has consigned and propagate what He has planted. Let us take dominion where He has directed us and prosper what He has provided. Let us turn a profit on the prophets and husband the heritage of the Lord to greater faithfulness and fruitfulness.

James 1:21b-22

Receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls. But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.

He implants; we grow... so, let's go!

day no. 16,567: the rule of resurrection

Romans 6:5-6

For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection: Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.

The world is ruled by resurrection. It is embedded into the soil beneath our feet. The seed that dies survives and the fruit we can see came from seeds can no longer. We plant, we harvest, we eat. We plant, animals eat, we eat the animals. Resurrection rules the world right now. The power of death and resurrection is the power of every plant. It is the energy that keeps everything alive. It is woven into the fabric of every endeavor. It lays the foundation of everything.

In the end, when resurrection ends all other things, it will not be a plot twist. It will be the natural climax and denouement of the entire arc. Everything is foreshadowing the final resurrection in which the entire world will be reborn through dying, but never to die again. Life is sustained by resurrection and it will be secured by resurrection. The resurrection at the end will be the resurrection of all the lesser resurrections. The final rebirth of all the rebirtthings. It will throw death itself into the lake of fire and nourish a tree of life that will never wither or die.

The ground is watered by the reign of resurrection. The world as we know it is quickened by its quickening as will be the world to come; the one without end and forever with amen.

day no. 16,566: retreat as an offense

Acts 14:5-7

And when there was an assault made both of the Gentiles, and also of the Jews with their rulers, to use them despitefully, and to stone them, they were ware of it, and fled unto Lystra and Derbe, cities of Lycaonia, and unto the region that lieth round about: and there they preached the gospel.

Retreat is permissible as a strategy, but not as a reaction to someone else's. You cannot retreat in obedience to your enemy's designs, but you can pull back in obedience to your own. Chesty Puller refused to call falling back a "retreat," preferring rather to call it an “attack in a different direction." All that to say, there are such things as strategic withdrawals.

In this instance from the books of Acts, the show was taken on the road. Note that they did not retreat in order to stop preaching. The strategy was to spread the Gospel. They did not look for somewhere safe or somewhere already evangelized. They redirected the main effort to another theater. 

It's not that it would have been wrong to seek security in Christian community, it's that their particular mission was to spread the Word, which required them to huddle up with Christian communities in order to say, "Break!" You cannot live in the huddle if you want to play the game. Since their mission was to put points on the board for Christendom, they ran to where the tacklers weren't. Not because they were too scared of being tackled to play the game, but because they were playing the game, which is trying to advance the ball without being tackled. In other words, they were not trying to avoid death, but they were trying to keep the play alive.

2 Corinthians 10:3-5

For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.

The weapons of the world cannot affect the outcome. They cannot keep points off the board. Christ is scoring on them over and over. They can tackle, they can rack up penalties, they can pay off referees to have the calls go in their direction, but they cannot keep Christ's offense off the field; and He is running up the score. Don't worry about the plays the adversary is running. They can huddle up and scheme all they like, but the defense of the devil will not prevail against the offense of the Lord.

The remainder of human history is merely a victory lap. The outcome is not at stake. The victory parade may feature a few floats with flat tires, but that doesn't make it a funeral procession. The only hearse hoists an empty coffin as a reminder of the victory won. There is no reason to fear the enemy's attempts to jeer. They cannot be heard over the cheers.