My Savior, it is this especially that I crave at your hand: unveil to me the love of your heart that makes you long so much after me. I know that this is one of the secret things that remain for your dearest friends, and I hardly dare reckon myself among them. And yet, Lord, may I venture to do so. Grant me, I pray, one more glance into your heart, that I may know how earnestly you desire me.
You would have me as your own possession.
You would enter into the deepest communion with me.
You would communicate Yourself to me.
You would become one with me.
You would have me for Yourself.
My Jesus, if this be really so, cause me to feel it. Let not my heart remain in darkness. Then shall I turn away from all else, and my life shall be filled with one supreme desire – Jesus, my King and my Friend.
WHY CAN’T I GET ANYTHING OUT OF MY TIME IN THE WORD?!?!?
God told Ezekiel to eat the scroll, the whole scroll, and nothing but the scroll. John the revelator was told to do the same. Yeah, there are some bitter moments in those sacred texts, but, oh, land sakes, the sweet times you find when you chow down then lie down on the feathery-down passages of hope and mercy. Unhurried time in the Word is like a good nap after a really great meal.
Yes, indeedy, there are those head-scratching, confusing, deeply mysterious parts, but these are offset by truths so simple and beautiful a child could use them as jump-rope songs.
Was it to Hosea God said “My people are starving on stale bread crumbs when they could be feasting on fatted calf” or something to that effect? We almost prefer spoonfuls of sugar to mega meaty bites that require us to chew, chew, chew.
Consider Jen Wilkins’ sobering observations in her blog post, “The Instagram Bible”:
I saw in my vision by night, and behold, I dreamed of a world in which every copy of the Bible was gone, except those portions we had preserved on Instagram. Consider this Bible, my daughters, if you will:
Its perfect squares are friend to the proverb, the promise, and the partial quote, leaving laws, lists, land-allotments, and long-stretching lessons to languish off-screen.
It comforts but rarely convicts.
It emotes but rarely exhorts.
It warms but rarely warns.
It promises but rarely prompts.
It moves but does not mortify.
It builds self-assurance but balks at self-examination.
It assembles an iconography whose artists, by spatial necessity, are constrained to choose
brevity over breadth,
inspiration over intellect,
devotion over doctrine.
Beware its conscribed canvas, where calligraphy conquers context.
Beware.
If the Prosperity Gospel offered us all the things,
the Instagram Gospel offers us all the feels.
It preaches good news in part, but we need the whole. It may move us in the moment, but it cannot sustain us through the storm.
How can we minister God’s Word to someone who just found out their spouse has been cheating on them when all we can call up is Jeremiah 29:11 because we just saw it all flowerdy and gussied up on social media?
Is John 3:16 enough for someone whose teenager is questioning their gender?
Where does one turn for scriptural strategy when the effects of pornography are poisoning the well and destroying them from the inside out?
Is a lyric from a worship song sufficient? I ask you.
Hear me. I’m not in any way minimizing the stand-alone power of any one scripture to do its supernatural work in a myriad of unexplained ways, but our lazy approach to the whole counsel of God (even the uninstagrammable parts) is producing an entire generation of biblical illiterates. Social media, with all its bluff and bluster, multiplies the problem with its ‘way-out-there’ spin-jobs from armchair exegetes.
Not to mention this nibbling approach to scripture is embargoing ourselves from some really, REALLY cool texts that are food for the long haul. In our “insta” world we just want our breakfast on the go or ‘something to tide us over.’
To spend real time with Jesus means you’re gonna find yourself on some unfamiliar routes and inconvenient detours. The trend is more toward hopping on the quick-app interstate with its predictable views because we prize the ‘getting there’ more than the ‘going there.’ And doing it over a hurried cup of coffee. Too bad, because (metaphorically speaking) there’s a really amazing hole-in-the-wall restaurant three towns over off County Road 77. Best barbecue for miles around, I’m told. Worth the trip.
Sandy and I recently moved from our sweet little house on Christopher Court with its cozy, fenced-in, lush backyard and its many colorful varieties of songbirds. Boy, I sure do miss my backyard.
A few years ago I was convalescing from sickness that nearly took my life and found I needed something to do to get me outside in the fresh air and sunshine; something, anything. I thought to myself: Self, I’m going to just sit in my backyard and watch birds with the sun on my face.
So…
I bought me a camera and set up a bird-feeder and waited. And waited. Several days went by until my first cardinal showed up. And suddenly the trees got lively. Over time there were grosbeaks and goldfinches, wrens and nuthatches, woodpeckers and titmice, and then along came the hummingbirds. And, because it got so populated, gigantic Cooper’s hawks joined the party.
I remember one time, after a great long while of waiting and watching, I counted fifteen varieties of birds around the feeder in an hour’s time. It became a common occurrence but not without great patience, a lot of expensive birdseed, and a determination to go out there every day, rain or shine, cold or blistering heat, and sit with the birds.
And it changed my life.
May I go ahead and assume you know what I’m getting at, dear reader?
Perhaps F. B. Meyer would be kind enough to expand on my metaphor and shed some more light:
“Christian[s] will attend conventions, plunge into all kinds of Christian work, read many good books about the Bible and Christian living; but they give the Bible itself the most cursory and superficial heed. And it is for this reason that the Bible does not speak to them. (Emphases throughout mine)
“If you would know all the wondrous beauty of a forest glade, you must not be satisfied with passing through it with hasty foot and in company with a troop of merry children whose ringing laughter carries panic into the hearts of thousands of shy living things that, with trembling hearts, keep still in hole and brake and nest.
“No, you must go alone and sit quietly down on the log of some felled tree and wait. Then the mystery of beauty will begin to unfold itself: the fairy bowers, the mossy glens, the interlacing boughs. Presently a note will sound from yonder bough, as the signal for the outburst of many sweet-voiced choristers, and the woodland will ring with the music of the birds while the squirrel runs up some neighboring tree, and the rabbits come out to feed, and the young foxes play about their holes.
“All this is hidden from those who cannot wait. So there are mysteries of glory and beauty in Scripture hidden from the wise and prudent but revealed to babes. There is no book that will so repay time spent over its pages as the Word of God.
“If the people who are now perpetually running about to meetings for crumbs of help and comfort, would only stay at home and search their Bibles, there would be more happiness in the Church and more blessing on the world.”
– F. B. Meyer, Elijah
Selah, beloved….as you make Jesus your daily meal!
Your words leave me grasping for words that don’t smack of buttoned-up pietism or following predictable lines. As I mentioned earlier, I believe the Lord has kept me on an essential fast from offering you words that might lose their impact as soon as they touched your device! It’s now the middle of the night and I feel I’m awakened by God with a direction in response to a repeated cry to him for such.
A couple weeks ago I was in the Poconos of Pennsylvania with Sandy where I served as the guest speaker for an audience of disabled folk at their annual July Camp. I try to only preach what the Father burns into my heart (I wish I always succeeded at this, but it is my fervent intent), and, for reasons known only to him, I was given the task of preaching through the book of Ecclesiastes.
I know.
It could *only* be his prompting.
Long story short, it was a marvelous dive that was wonderfully received (praise God!) and His gospel came through each session through the book and I believe he got what he was after through it. That became clearly evident as I counseled many in between the chapel services.
During one of the sessions I went off script and shared my story (which you’ve heard) and was asked afterward by a woman who was there as a volunteer if I’d ever been bitter about the whole ‘satan-meant-it-for-evil-God-intended-it-for-good’ drama of my life. Never hesitating, I said “never, not even once.”
It’s been asked of me dozens or more times in these 38 years, and my response has never wavered. It’s always, “Never, Ever.” I usually go on to explain (as I did that morning with C____) that I prayed for it to happen; that my heart lifted up the offering of my legs to God in an anguished moment of surrender. He took me at face value and, voilà!, I’m a paraplegic. I am often quick to add the disclaimer: in my fevered, youthful zeal, I only meant I was willing to forfeit the ability to walk….and that only temporarily. I had no idea catheters, and pressure sores, and UTI’s, and atrophy, and bowel programs, and a hundred other debilitating, embarrassing, painful, pitiful things would be added into the deal. And for a lifetime. These, my friend – these – I have been known to rail against God about, often with choice words. And these I repent of, for reasons we’ll come to in a bit.
My son, my only child, departed this hard sod in a mean, cruel way. We (Sandy and I) did not fake a Job reaction, we lived it. “The Lord has given, the Lord has taken, blessed be the name of the Lord.” Both of us were wont to expect this would be how the story played out (because of Graham’s addiction roulette), had been waiting for the ‘phone call’ for years, not to mention prepared for it with grieving grace. The controversy with God came when we asked if he couldn’t have intervened and overwritten the genetic code with which our Graham came pre-packaged. Why, God?We accepted his death as a mercy to pull him from the self-cannibalism of addiction but wondered often why he couldn’t have been fixed.
I’m less argumentative today with the rabbi who lost a child, was eventually brought to the conclusion that God cannot be both all loving and all powerful at the same time, and wrote a bestseller about it. The rabbi waved a white flag as an acceptance mechanism that God didn’t head the tragedy off at the pass because he couldn’t, not wouldn’t. He and I part ways at his dreadful conclusion, but I do understand the pain that brought him to it.
God is all-loving, all-suffering, all-powerful, all-in, all-active, all-supportive. These truths keep me from falling away. Suffering on the scale that I have known has made me a mixture of both Arminian and Calvinist. I hold tightly to the theological rung of God‘s sovereignty; but my other hand is equally holding on to the rung of prevenient grace, that God is trusting me to hold to him for all he’s worth even when reason tells me to flee.
I had the opportunity to preach at a black church a week ago (pastored by a beloved friend I’m mentoring) and shared with the congregants the prosperity gospel of Paul. It is found in 2 Corinthians 12 and summed up in the word “weakness.” In the message I declared that my paralysis and all that comes with it, and my daily grieving for our son, has been used of God to heal the deeper afflictions of my soul: my self-godship.
When I take up a “self-pity cross” and rage against God and question his love, each and every time – whether immediately or after a season of soulish pouting – I am lovingly brought to repentance by the kindness of God. He implores me in these mercies to lay that one down and take up the cross of his design, the one for which he gives me grace to carry. I know full well when I am carrying the wrong cross, for those are the times I strive to expose him for the despot I think him to be, and all is vanity and meaninglessness.
I think I have a better grasp on why the Preacher of Ecclesiastes said going to the house of mourning is better than going to the house of feasting. Death – and mourning – have to do with resurrection (life to come), while feasting, as good and wonderful as these times can be, does not teach us we are created for something more but rather occupies us with this world.
My body would prefer my legs, and my soul would prefer my son and having some grandkids, but these fit into the category of “temporal“ things (2 Cor 4:18). Ah, but let’s not put too exact a period there – perhaps an ellipsis would do better – for an all-loving God has grace for temporal things too. It’s just that he has his eyes set on what’s after the temporary blessings of life. And so my heart prefers his plan, trusts his ways, and leans hard into his love. His love conquers all (Rom 8:31-39).
I believe these are the things the Father has awakened me to share with you, and I will trust that they might be an encouragement. Bless you, my brother. I have grieved with you … and all affected by this suffocating tragedy, and have done so nonstop.
I pray to God that none of these words sound Christian-ese, but because God woke me up, I believe they are what is on his heart for you. I remain, as ever, available to listen, to wait, and to understand throughout this process of venting and grieving. Believe me, Sandy and I know this familiar place.
