“Psalm 23 teaches us to embrace the immensity of the adventure that takes us home. David has been there. He knows. He’s learned the twists and pitfalls, the sunny trails and the dangerous cliff edges. He knows where the forks are and the spacious green fields. He’s painted us a picture in this stanza. He’s set a table in the wilderness for us and invited us to hear his adventures by a roaring campfire…
“I’m not home yet. But I’m closer than I was 35 years ago when my dad read me this psalm that calmed my terror-stricken heart back then. Wild dogs were snarling at me from that dark valley of death but goodness and mercy were there all along, leading me home.
Every mile, every trial, every cross, every loss, Every step, every stop, All has been mercy and grace.
Through every danger, toil, and snare Mercy and grace has followed close beside, nipping at my heels.“
I could as easily have called this message “Dad and Me and Psalm 23” because the two are so intimately entwined in my life. You’ll see why.
What you’ll hear today is from a recent sermon I shared with the wonderful people of West Huntsville Baptist Church* back in late May. Ipray it’s a blessing and encouragement to you…and that the calming grace of our Shepherd God will lay a blanket over yoursoul.
As always, thank you for listening – and by all means, please share this podcast episode with others who might need the Lord’s comfort as well.
* I absolutely LOVE these people! My wife and I had our very first date on their campus wayyyy back in 1982 – just 4 months after my life-altering, life-bettering ‘accident’ (go to the “My Story” page)! Then youth pastor Pastor Scott (whose wife’s name is also Sandra) invited me to share my very new-to-me story at their fellowship’s Valentine Banquet, so I took my future sweetheart along for the occasion. Scott has been one of my life’s most important encouragers. So, what you’ll hear today is us being with our faith family of three decades…
[This is from a talk I was blessed to offer to some really great (weak) Dads at 6:30 yesterday morning…]
After the talk a guy walks up to me, wiping away tears, and sits down. He says “I’ll be your son.” We hugged, wept, and I learned his own story of addiction and recovery. He pulled out his 5-year sobriety chip and handed it to me. “I want you to have this,” he said. “It’ll remind you that your son’s struggle is over and his chains are gone.” I humbly received this amazing gift and told him, “5 years sober? Do you know how the ancient followers of God saw the number 5? They said it represented grace and redemption.” This is our hope, our message, our undying belief: what the enemy means for evil, God turns it for good.
I have the distinction of being a dad though childless. I had one son and I lost him to heroin. If ever you’ve known a weak, helpless dad, I’m one. Believe me. However,
“I am not ashamed (the Greek includes having no fear of it letting me down, no embarrassment in its being insufficient, or no guilt of my being unable to merit its blessings) of the gospel for it is the power of God to salvation…”
I had a pastor friend who consoled me years ago – at the apex of my son’s rebellion – by reminding me God had His own prodigal *children* – not just a prodigal child. His whole family was profligate!
God laments that in Isa 1:2:
Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth; for the Lord has spoken: “Children have I reared and brought up, but they have rebelled against me…”
David, too, had a pretty rough go at being a dad – some say he was too lenient because his dad was too hard on him and aloof because he was often overlooked. I was struck recently by the unfulfilled ‘dad-dream’ of David in 1Chron 29:19 –
“Grant to Solomon my son a whole heart that he may keep your commandments, your testimonies, and your statutes…”
But this is what he got –
1 Kings 11:4 “For when Solomon was old his wives turned away his heart after other gods, and his heart was not wholly true to the Lord his God…”
He wanted a son who would expand the kingdom, establish peace throughout the realm, and, chiefly, have a WHOLE HEART for God. Instead, the kingdom divided, unholy rulers would reign from Jerusalem for many generations, and the nation would always stray, come home, get restless, and leave home again.
This was pretty much the staus quo of Israel because his son couldn’t keep it in his pants. Oh, that, and Solomon became an enabler for child-sacrifice (a nation’s most heinous sin, hint, hint), plus the fact he couldn’t nurture a WHOLE HEART for God, but a HELL HEART, an EMPTY HEART due to rebellion and chasing after wind.
I remember holding my newborn adopted son alongside my wife in front of Mountain View Church in 1989 as we dedicated Graham (namesake of the great evangelist) to the Lord. If you’d told us at Sunday dinner afterward how it would turn out, I’d have taken issue.
He was a miracle.
He was a joy.
We could take him everywhere.
He was raised in church.
He loved being a PK.
He was fiercely protective of his disabled dad.
He volunteered for mission trips.
He gave his only pair of shoes on one trip to a kid in Honduras.
He always gravitated to the most outcast kid in the room.
His heart was so big, so generous, so fierce, and so alive in the moment.
But our son battled unknown, untold demons.
So…
Graham chose a harder path, one steeped in rebellion and addiction, spending the lion’s share of his youth and young adulthood in the far country of Fool’s Folly – all uphill and adventure on the ascent with the slippery slope of guilt, shame, and death on the backside.
He was found in December all alone in an abandoned parking lot, frozen, with a heroin needle in his arm. His mates had put a portable heater in the car, shut the door behind them, got another ride and left him alone there in the night. They did care enough to call 911 after they were long gone and, while there were no vitals at the scene, the doctors put him on a vascular by-pass machine in hopes to ‘jump-start’ him by warming him up, he was so cold. None of the doctors gave much chance of that happening, however.
When Sandy and I (1,123 miles away) got the news (she at work, me at home), we immediately sought the Lord.
Will our boy live? If he dies, will he be with You? How will we know? Lord, HAVE MERCY! Christ, HAVE MERCY!
I have to admit, my theology would’ve struggled to put Graham anywhere else but hell right then. It’s horrible to admit, I know. My own son!Oh Absalom, my Absalom!
God knew that, and He met my unbending dogma with – what else? – the Gospel (not easy-believism, mind you; remember, God acted in mercy to discipline my son so dramatically; Graham always had a place for Christ in his heart, no matter how covered over with sin it was). I needed the Gospel more than anything. I needed His Good News to break into my world of bad news.
In those moments – as Sandy raced through the warehouse and parking lot of UPS to her car, and as I sat in a stupor at our dining room table – with an open Bible – God preached the gospel tenderly to us in the only ways our agonized hearts would both get it. He cued a worship song on her car radio, and to me He gave a pointed scripture. Tomlin’s “Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone)” was the first thing my wife heard as her car roared to life. Psalm 85:2,3,8-10 was my portion in the exact moment He was singing over Sandy on Fulton Industrial.
“You forgave the iniquity of your people; you covered all their sin. Selah You withdrew all your wrath; you turned from your hot anger…
Let me hear what God the LORD will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, to his saints; but let them not turn back to folly. Surely his salvation is near to those who fear him, that glory may dwell in our land. Steadfast love and faithfulness meet; righteousness and peace kiss each other.”
We got our answer immediately, even independently. “Graham is here with Me.”
Four years earlier, God told us to stop fretting, toiling, enabling, bearing guilt, hearing the accuser say “if you had only…if you didn’t…if you never…if you hadn’t” and trying to “fix” our son. I was tired of failing as a Dad. Harsh words and illogical punishments were clearly not working. I was weak, helpless, and totally out of options. Hope was elusive. My wife pulled away from life and cried, prayed, pled, and begged. We were both at a loss.
LORD, SAVE US! REDEEM THIS!
The Father asked us to do a very hard thing: let go. To do this was to admit we couldn’t. We were ‘failures’ at parenting. While learning to trust God to parent our boy was humbling, sure, but it was also one of the most freeing things we ever imagined. So we did, and that mercy gave my wife and I four whole years to heal and prepare for December 16, 2013. It was during this time God spoke clearly to my broken-down Dad heart: “from now on, when your son calls for money, give it to him – NO QUESTIONS ASKED. When he needs an emergency place to crash, you are not to refuse him. Kill him with kindness.”
On the last night we ever saw him, because the next day he would move to Minnesota to live with his birth-mom and get away from the mean streets of Atlanta, my wife took him shopping and bought him a whole new “Minnesota wardrobe.” Her only child, whom she was sending to live with the mother who didn’t raise him – with no guarantees she’d ever see him again – she took him out and spoiled her boy one last time. She mercifully killed him with kindness.
In the end, it was the Gospel that saved our family. And it was the Gospel that rescued my son from his hell on earth.
“I am not ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of God for salvation…”
The Gospel that got us through was:
“I am for you.”
“I will not leave you alone in this mess.”
“Trust Me to redeem this and bring you through.”
Paul, a weak, suffering apostle, said:
“The Gospel is the POWER – the δυναμις – of God for salvation…”
Then he proceeds to develop what salvation is throughout his long letter. He says it’s sufficient to forgive, cleanse, and justify us before a holy and vengeful God. He further says it brings us into Life with God, not only saving us from sin and hell, but empowering us for holy living and fitting us for glory. Finally, he blows us away with the future hope of our ultimate glorification and eternal joy as “sons of God”!
Paul says it’s all predicated on the Gospel.
Paul says our daily survival is grounded in the Gospel.
Paul said our only power comes from the Gospel
Paul says our only hope is…the Gospel.
Scott Sauls wrote “the gospel isn’t merely a message but a power because it’ll change you.”
Of the 6 words for power, Paul chose the one that best describes divine energy. He says the Gospel is “dynamic”! (Dynamite comes from this word – Rome, you know, was all about power – Paul said the Gospel was more powerful still!)
Dictionary.com: 1. pertaining to or characterized by energy or effective action; vigorously active or forceful; energetic.
What does the Gospel mean for weak, helpless Dads?
The Gospel is our daily power:
as men in this culture, husbands to our wives, and dads to our kids!
What does the Gospel tell us?
• How lost we are. • How loved we are.
(“You’re a good, good Father, that’s who You are And I’m loved by You that’s who I am”)
It also tells us:
• How weak and helpless we are. • How strong and capable He is.
Tell me something: is the Gospel only useful and powerful to get us to heaven? Or is it the power of God to get us through this life? This day? This trial? This heartache? This situation?
Take it from me: GOD IS GOOD. Take it from me: GOD LOVES WEAK DADS Take it from me: HE STILL WORKS EVERYTHING – EVERYTHING! – TOGETHER FOR OUR GOOD AND HIS GLORY Take it from me: HE’S STILL MAKING ALL THINGS – YOUR THINGS, MY THINGS – NEW Take it from me: THE GOSPEL IS STILL GOOD NEWS Take it from me: THE GOSPEL IS STILL THE POWER OF GOD – THE δυναμις – FOR SALVATION OF ANY AND EVERY SITUATION
So Let’s light this candle. How can we see Gospel power move in us, through us, for us?
Three words:
LIGHT.
THE.
FUSE.
Fill your personal universe with the gospel (Rom 1:16,17)
Unilaterally surrender to the kind demands of the gospel (Rom 4:13-26; 6:1-4)
Stand in His gospel grace that equips you for everything…and anything (Rom 5:1-4)
Encourage yourself in the gospel promise He works everything together for our good and His glory (Rom 8:28,29)
Nietzsche said “if you stare into the abyss too long, the abyss stares back at you.”
Today’s post features a man who stared into his own abys-mal heart and knew at once his hellish iniquities were taking hold of him.
Being a politician with a mistress is nothing new (blue dress, Oval Office, anyone?). The litany of world leaders who either hid their extramarital pleasures or openly flaunted them is uncomfortably legend. While some presidents preferred blondes, only a few went so far in the cover-up to commit murder. That we know of.
But there’s one whose abysmal act we know, every sordid detail. He wasn’t some unregenerate despot, or a power-mad, sex-starved tyrant either. He’s the storybook country bumpkin who made good, largely because his heart so eloquently spoke the native tongue of the better angels of our nature. His folkloric life as pure as poetry and flawless in character captured the love and imagination of a nation.
Until the fateful day his office took a backseat to his libido, that is. Until that twilight hour he coerced a young married woman into satisfying his unchecked lust, the power of his position leaving her with almost no choice. Then, as the age-old story of “could see that coming” goes, got her pregnant. All of it, every spiral stair descending, leading him to the psychopathically illogical tidying-up of ridding himself of his rival, his friend – the innocent, faithful, endearingly noble husband. Poor man is murdered without ever really knowing why. Ironically, the culprit will himself write in his own memoirs about being betrayed by a close ally, a companion, a friend once upon a time. I wonder if he thought back to his own treachery.
James 1:15, The Message Lust gets pregnant, and has a baby: sin! Sin grows up to adulthood, and becomes a real killer.
No, this isn’t some Hollywood script, but rather ripped from the ‘more harrowing than fiction because it’s true’ archives.
Remember, this is a good man.
A military hero.
A prolific statesman.
His tenure as a global leader is the standard by which many others have themselves governed.
And yet this startling figure holds a very, very dark secret. His interior universe is as black as pitch and he will come face to face with it in the aftermath of one of history’s most courageous interventions. So far, only three people know of the deed: the offender, the woman, and the man responsible for carrying out the murder.
But there’s a fourth.
And it is this man who is tasked with the unenviable responsibility of approaching this unhinged, unpredictable, unsafe potentate in the privacy of the ruler’s own fortress to accuse him of these federal crimes. He had insider information and it was time to tell it – some nine months removed from the scandal.
Nine months, give or take. The perp has to be feeling the coast is clear and the proverbial dust has settled, surely. To confront him now is the most dangerous thing a subservient can do, albeit a spiritual adviser. Still, bearing the burden of a Higher Mandate, the man entered the king’s quarters.
And spun a yarn.
And raised the ruler’s blood pressure.
And blind-sided the man.
Thou.
Art.
The.
Man.
If you’re keeping score at home this is all eleven and twelve chapters into the Old Testament book of (as The Donald might say) Two Samuel.
Suddenly:
The universe is stopped dead in its tracks.
The future of the dynasty hangs in the balance.
(Not to mention, the future of the man in front of the king is in question.)
The next words out of King David’s mouth saved the day:
“HAVE MERCY ON ME, O GOD!” (Psalm 51:1)
I believe the fifty-first psalm happens in the immediate aftermath of this divinely-enacted confrontation, before the baby’s illness, David’s fasting, and the newborn’s tragic death. Likely, this is the dark night of the soul that David must go through on the very night of his exposure.
There are many things that strike me about this stanza, about the despair, shame, and bloodguiltiness of the ‘found fugitive’ and the language of his tortured heart, but none more revealing than what he journals in verse ten. David cries,
“Create in me a clean heart…”
The word he chooses is used in the opening stanza of the Bible, yea, the opening line. What follows is a chaotic, unformed earth, swirling with torrid energy and untamed sea; darkness nests there. Brooding over the surface of the cataclysm is the Spirit of God…
When David’s smothered cry erupts from this refrain, he is begging Elohim to do in him what the Trinity did then: a 7-day creation-remedy of order to his own chaos, life to his death, light to his darkness, reproduction to his infertility, regeneration to his impotence, Immanuel to his isolation, harmony to his dissonance, hope to his despair, and restoration to the mess he’d made of everything and everyone.
And he needed it all in that very hour, not 168 hours, or epochs, or eons.
The thing about the creation week is that it begins with Light and ends with Rest. The Light spoken of is not simply ‘daytime’ but rather a supernatural Light akin to ‘shekinah’, the glow on Moses’s face, and the First and Final Light that is alone necessary to irradiate Heaven.
David imagines his own soul as no different from the bleakness of Genesis 1:2. His interior universe is devoid of supernatural Order and Presence and his worlds are spinning out of control. Stability is lost. It’s a felt darkness and such darkness has spread its tendrils everywhere and his heart has become haunt for jackals and demons. Break through, O God! Daystar, come penetrate the blackness of my heart! Remove the veil that separates! (day one)
The polluted king needs his oily atmosphere to get a true spring cleaning and fetch the precious moisture of heaven so he can breathe in its oxygen again (day two).
He seeks evidence of life – nothing he can manufacture himself, mind you, but the seedlings of grace that grow from the regenerated soil of his heart, much like the “hair of Samson’s head [which] began to grow again” (day three).
In David’s personal (re)creation week, he longed for motion and cycles to begin again, the sensation of ‘getting off the schneide’ and propelling forward, as the pages of an ever-turning calendar, rather than the stultifying paralysis of living under the weight of what he’d done (day four).
That long, dark night of the soul brought dreams of (dare he hope) the dance of life returning: the playfulness of being in the Creator’s heart and in harmony with His plan, enjoying the variegated pleasures of Elohim’s imagination, the teeming throngs of accessible mercies that populate and thrive in the geography of his private world, and the fulfillment of a blessed life (day five).
The sixth miracle (in his ‘Genesis-week’) for which the penitent king cries is for the dignity and integrity of his soul to find its renewal so intimacy with the Almighty can be restored. He misses the ‘uprightness’ of standing in the Presence of his Creator, re-imaging himself not as an earthly king but a Kingly man, fully under the reign of Another (day six).
Then, and only then, can this storm-tossed king with undefended heart know real shalom (“the Bible’s shorthand term to describe a flourishing creation, a[n inner] world that realizes everything that God desires for it.”1) and soul-rest: at peace within and fully reconciled on all sides…but especially to his True North from whence his being comes (day seven).
What David did was no light thing, and what he asked was no light thing either. He asked for the same power and authority (and will) of Elohim that occurred in Genesis One for all corners of endless galaxies in His creation to come to bear for himself. Such a thing would require an epic response to the void and darkness he had inflicted on his own heart.
I’ll go you one better.
The travesties of David’s sin took place in – give or take – a week’s time, from lustful compulsion to murderous cover-up. He asked for a God-week to mercifully rectify his mess.
What you and I came into this world as co-conspirators of and complicit in was far more than a human’s weeks’ worth crime spree, but an eternity of treason against God. Such a mutinous charge required a Lamb to be chosen and (in the Godhead’s mind) “slain before the foundation of the world”2 – in eternity past!
Think then on this: we needed our own God-week to reconcile and rectify our own account, but not a Genesis One week. We needed a Gospel Week that went from Sunday to Sunday, from presentation as the Passover Lamb through to inspection as blameless, slain on the most holy altar, then raised to overcome sin, death, and hell.
Hopefully you and I will never be in a position as David to be so bereft and bankrupt we have to beg God for a Genesis One Week in a single hour lest we die. But know this: if we ever do, there is no sin greater than God’s grace and the mercies of God are more eager to forgive and restore than we are even desperate to ask. And sometimes, the way forward is to go back.
Bask in this, beloved: from supernatural Light to eternal Rest, you are loved.
