This is the day that the LORD has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it

Ecclesiastes 7:14

In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider: God has made the one as well as the other, so that man may not find out anything that will be after him.

When things go well, be happy.  Enjoy it while it lasts for this too shall pass.

When things are difficult, be reflective.  There have been good times and bad times and God has overseen each and every one of them.  As mysterious as propserity came and went, so will adversity often come and go and this too shall pass.

James 4:13-14

¹³ Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— ¹⁴ yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.

We do not know if the earthly future holds for us prosperity or adversity.  We do, however, know that our God goes before us and by faith in Him we can overcome all adversity and be humbled by all prosperity.

"This too shall pass."

All of it. The good. The bad. And the in-between.

It reminds me of the closing line of Anne of Green Gables,

"`God's in his heaven, all's right with the world,'"

If you believe He is, then it certainly is for as long as He is in Heaven everything is certainly right. Come what may, it is right. The turbulence of our lives is anchored in the constance of our King's throne and the One Who ever intercedes before it on our behalf.  By His grace, it is and ever will be right.

God's glory is the only thing that never fades and never passes.  It is and ever will be in any and every thing forever always, amen!

Thoughts from "Obsolete" by Sara Groves

This song came up on my random play list the other day while listening to my iPod (or my iTodd - pardon me if I've used that joke before). 

You can listen to it HERE.

Here are some lyrics that stood out to me:

And you don't know where you stand
And you feel so small and thin
And if you are dismissed
Will another take you in?

And you don't know where you stand
And did something pass you by?
And if you are dismissed
Will you get another try?

And I know I shouldn't care
If I'm out or if I'm in
Cause if I am dismissed
Oh You always take me in

This really speaks to our insecurities without Christ and our need for Him to heal even our continual disbelief in His sufficiency after we have accepted His sacrifice initially.

After all, what will happen to us when we are discarded?  When we fail and fall short and are no longer owed the respect for which we previously clamored?  In those moments when all for which we worked is rendered stubble, do we still have something on which (or on Whom) we can stand?  If we are dismissed, are we able to be restored? 

That desperate plea, that ache of lonely, confused, pessimistic doubt that we can be fully confident before God in Christ coupled with the positive assurance of our inability to do so confidently without Him is what we need. 

What happens to us when seventy times seven is eclipsed?  Is there an end to God's proverbial rope or a number of straws that would break even His large, long suffering back? When we are evicted by the guilt of our own shortcomings, is there anywhere for us to find respite and repose? 

Yes, Yes, in Christ Jesus, ever may our cry be, "Yes!" 

My heart is constantly prone to render these questions and desperate again and again to hear the Good News that God in Christ Jesus is for me and no longer against me.  Praise God for His reconciliation.  There was a real distance, a real eviction, a real dismissal.  And there is a real Savior, Reconciler, Redeemer, and Lord who restores, confirms, strengthens, and establishes me in His courts forever, Amen!

The Same Old Songs Crackling into the Top 40

Ecclesiastes 7:5-6

5 It is better for a man to hear the rebuke of the wise
than to hear the song of fools.
6 For as the crackling of thorns under a pot,
so is the laughter of the fools; this also is vanity.

The songs of fools are frequently the most popular.  The crackling sound of a campfire on a crisp autumn evening is soothing and serene.  But the sound is produced by flame.  Those thorns, good for nothing other than kindling, burn with brilliance and we are prone to forget their end is ashes. 

Because it is better for us to be rebuked, the airwaves are full of people making profit off telling you what your itching ears would rather hear.  Sweet nothings in your ear are preferable to statements that require reformation and repentance as a response.

Pop culture is the product of popular position.  Being rebuffed is never popular.

Fools laugh and make light of that which was intended to anchor us down.  The subjects of popular culture increasingly reflect a desire to make light that which is heavy and requires strength to carry.  No responsibility or backbone are any longer required to engage in the weigthier things of life such as sex, salvation, children, money, and marriage.  We have taken those things which ought to have required effort to uphold and made them silly, sentimental fluffy puffs that can be taken so lightly as to barely lift a finger to participate.  Yeah, there's an app for that.

It is better to have a wise man tell you that you're wrong than to have a fool sing to you the merits of your own depravity.  This is true. 

My children, listen to wise men and receive their counsel.  Beware of being wooed and sold the substance of your sinfulness being sung back to you.  When the songwriter is preaching to the choir of our shared shallowness you can be assured that nothing good will ever come of it.  Nothing.  My children, do not fall victim to the vanity of self-help and self-love so often solicited to you.  There is no solace in self, only in the Son.

Book Review: "The Call of the Wild" by Jack London

I recently read this book and took note of several passages that communicated (presumably without intention) with precision and profundity a template of God's love for us and ours in response to His.

"Love, genuine passionate love, was his for the first time. This he had never experienced at Judge Miller's down in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley. With the Judge's sons, hunting and tramping, it had been a working partnership; with the Judge's grandsons, a sort of pompous guardianship; and with the Judge himself, a stately and dignified friendship. But love that was feverish and burning, that was adoration, that was madness, it had taken John Thornton to arouse. This man had saved his life, which was something; but, further, he was the ideal master. Other men saw to the welfare of their dogs from a sense of duty and business expediency; he saw to the welfare of his as if they were his own children, because he could not help it."

We have experienced relationships that were purposeful, productive, protective, and pal-around (had to keep the "p" thing going, I apologize).  We were created for relationship.  But only one relationship provides that which our heart and soul find complete.  It is in the passion of responding to God's amazing love that we find overflow of joy and dignity and charity and levity with regards to ourselves. Being joyfully indebted to one who has served you is one thing.  To have this same One also be intent on further serving and loving you is another.  We have experienced the generosity of time, energy, money, or service of another and felt indebted.  How much more so when that same One does so without a implication of repayment and further continues to pursue and provide for you as though They are the one acting to repay you continually for something you cannot remember or imagine you are owed?

"Thornton alone held him. The rest of mankind was as nothing."

In a world where many may have influence for better or for worse, the reverance of one above all others ought to be reserved for God so much so that any and every other is regarded as nothing.  Jesus commands a devotion so focused that all other commitments could be considered "hateful" in comparison to the love of Christ.  This is not Christ asserting any should hate their mom, dad, son, or daughter; but rather asserting by hyperbole the degree to which your first priority in Him is above and beyond that of any and every other priority that would follow (even that secured as second priority).

"For Thornton, however, his love seemed to grow and grow. He, alone among men, could put a pack upon Buck's back in the summer traveling. Nothing was too great for Buck to do, when Thornton commanded."

Buck would do anything for Thornton.  Nothing was too much to ask.  If it was Thornton asking, the answer was always, "Yes."  I hope my heart would be as this towards God and thank God that His Christ was so devoted to His Father as to secure my eternal hope by His perfect obedience and devotion to God on my behalf.

"He had caught the contagion of the excitement, and he felt that in some way he must do a great thing for John Thornton."

It is a natural response to endeavor to do a great thing for God in response to the greatest thing imaginable He already has done for us. It is a beautiful thing to observe in another when you know its sincerity is not seasoned with penance. There is a beauty in those, who have fully accepted and realized the love of God in Christ for them, working so hard to make the most of the evil days in order to make so much of Him in them.

There is a reason this book makes the top 100 for men HERE. It does document and capture the desire to lead and survive among a world of "kill or be killed" (or perhaps more literally dog-eat-dog *ba-dum-dum-chi*).  It is a half-time speech to the men of the world to rise up and take something (which exists by nature an impulse easily prodded), but I found its most poignant power in the themes of love begetting love and selfless sacrifice begetting selfless sacrifice (which exists in Christ an impulse that cost Him everything to impute).

Ultimate Death Match: Funerals v. Festivals

Ecclesiastes 7:2

It is better to go to the house of mourning
than to go to the house of feasting,
for this is the end of all mankind,
and the living will lay it to heart.

It is good to think about death.  So good that it is better than party planning.

Really? 

Let's think about it:  Every person  you have ever met will die. And they deserve it.

It is because of sin.  Adam sinned in eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and in so doing has imputed to all of us our death.  In Adam, we all have sinned.  By nature and by choice, we have reaped the harvest of sickness, sin, and death.  We daily see the fruit of our efforts in the horrors committed against one another in our private fantasies and public obervations. 

Your sin, my sin, our sin.  None of us are exempt.  We have all contributed to the ever-growing river of condemntation currently damned up by God holding back His damnation, that wrath that will one day be vented fully on those fully deserving.

If you are alive and reading this, consider the fact that you will die and much sooner than you think.

“It has rightly been said, ‘Man is mortal.’ And sometimes suddenly so.”

Thoughts from (Book Review): "The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov

                                           

I am posting this as "Thoughts from..." rather than "Book Review:" because I have to seek out some people smarter than me to figure out exactly what I just read it would be quite the undertaking.  That and I have recently just began posting everything not from the Bible as "Thoughts from..."

I recently read this book and found one line of particular import: 

“It has rightly been said, ‘Man is mortal.’ And sometimes suddenly so.”

We all acknowledge that we will die one day, but for most of us that "one day" is a far off fairy tale.  We are all of the sudden mortal and never more so than the day we unexpectedly die. 

The Bible speaks of us being frail and a vapor and like flowers of the field that fall.

In Men's BASIC, the men's minisry at my church, we are going through "Crazy Love" by Francis Chan this summer.  Chapter 2 of his book is all about dying.  Check out what you are missing below.

For Christ's Sake: Brokeness

Today at church Pastor Troy taught from Mark 14:27-72.  I love my church and I love Pastor Troy.  I am greatly encouraged by the thought and effort that is regularly placed into the service:  the music, the lyrics, the preaching of the Word, the hospitality to strangers, the church family business discussed, etc... 

My heart was stirred by the Spirit while Troy was preaching today in thinking specifically upon these verses:

Mark 14:27-29

²⁷ And Jesus said to them, “You will all fall away, for it is written, ‘I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.’ ²⁸ But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.” ²⁹ Peter said to him, “Even though they all fall away, I will not.”

Mark 14:50

⁵⁰ And they all left him and fled.

Oh, the patient endurance and long-suffering of our Lord.  He knew they (i.e. "we") would all abandon Him.  He knew it ahead of time.  He did not speak these words as a tough-love attempt to increase Peter's resolve so that Peter would stay loyal later.  He did not speak these words in spiteful pessimism as He looked at a gloomy forecast foreshadowed.  He did not speak these words in bitterness or resentment.  He spoke them because they were true.  Peter would deny Him.  Jesus knew this.  Jesus' commitment to Peter was stronger than Peter's to Jesus.  Peter over-estimated His love and loyalty for Jesus.  Peter did not yet know the full weight and level of Jesus' love for Him.

It led my soul to ponder the brokeness and humiliation of having fallen short.  How Peter must have wept bitterly over his failure and embarassment in having so boldly sworn loyalty to Jesus only to so cowardly distance himself later from Jesus in fear. 

Jesus tells us that we will wander and that our hearts will falter.  Our response is either to muster courage and resolve to combat His prediction to prove Him wrong or in devastation lament the poverty of our efforts and despair of any hope of ever measuring up or fulfilling our desires.  We desire to be loyal to Jesus for our own's sake.  We do not want to let ourselves down. We are often obsessed with our own whiteness. 

We bemoan the futility of our efforts and exalt the depravity of ourselves in response to the increasing banquet of disloyalty we prepare before God.  We wonder how Jesus could ever forgive such treason.  We are heart-broken over our failure and wish beyond wish that we could change who were are, what we've done, what we do, and who we still are.

All of this and sometimes no thought to Jesus. Just our dirtiness.  Just the gravity of our plight.

We are broken over our own disappointments.  We are broken over our fears of rejection in not measuring up.  We are broken over our disillusionment in the human will to manifest its desires.  We are broken and none of it again with any thought to Jesus, but only to ourselves.

We are sad that we do not measure up.  We are sad for our own's sake.  We are not sad for Jesus' sake. We do not sorrow that He will not receive His due glory and honor.

He deserves our love, our devotion, our worship, our praise, our everything.  He beyond any and every person you have ever met is worthy of it all.  He deserves our love and loyalty.  And when we fail and fall short and flee from Him and His sufferings, we are sad.  Not because we have failed to give Jesus what He deserves, but because we had hoped for so much more from ourselves.  We had wanted to give Him more, to praise Him more, to love Him more.  But not with any thought to Him receiving glory, but with thought primarly on the joy we have in giving it to Him.  So even in our worship we often withhold a small portion as a idolatrous receipt of self-love and comfort.

May we be broken for Christ's sake.  May we in our brokeness lament that the Son deserves our love and not merely lament the tragedy of our own disappointment in having failed to bring our all.  All of these responses are right and true.  My point is not to infer that your failure to be broken correctly is yet another weight you must add to your already burdened back.  My point is to articulate just how depraved we really are.  So depraved that the Son tells us that we will fall away and the only horror that strikes us is our immediate fear of what He will do to us for having fallen away or how hard we must work to ensure we do not fall away.  Never once do our thoughts lead us to thank Him for enduring our betrayal with such patient endurance.  He long suffers our disloyalty and does so with full disclosure set before Him. 

In that sense, I am not proposing we need to feel sorry for Jesus.  He does not ask us to.  He knew the cost He would pay for us and chose in perfect obedeince and faithful love to pay it on our behalf.  He does not need our sympathy.  He does not ask for it.  That said, it is a statement of our situation that we often never think to first apply any sympathy toward Him in having looked His bride in the eyes knowing how far from the marriage bed she would run after the ceremony and in covenant love He married her anyway. 

The strength of our bond to Christ is not in our ability to conjure up brokeness.  He breaks us by revealing to us the depths of our need for Him and the wonderous extent to which He is capable of diving down that depth to retrieve us.