preaching to myself

[4 minutes, 710 words]

Do you talk to yourself? I do, and fairly often I might add. Don’t judge. I’ve heard it’s actually a pretty healthy activity that helps improve one’s cognitive function. It’s also an indicator that you’re a verbal processor, aiding in clarifying thoughts and solving problems. Self-talk does become problematic if one were to, say, carry on an entire conversation with one’s self — out loud, mind you — in the supermarket, on the public bus, or while waiting in line at the Chikfila.

Psalm 42 offers a classic example of why it’s so important to preach the gospel to ourselves when we are starting to go dark. One of Israel’s ordained worship leaders¹ was shaken to his core.² He had hard questions for God. He asks why He’s not coming through for him eleven different times. It’s an intensely personal psalm, packed with 50 personal pronouns.

In the middle of his pity party, this anonymous son of Korah recognizes how asinine his accusations against God have been and gives himself a good talking to.

Why, my soul, are you so dejected?
Why are you in such turmoil?
Put your hope in God,
for I will still praise him,
my Savior and my God.

And for good measure he chastises himself once again — using the very same words — at the end of his psalm³. Apparently, he’s a lot like you and me: we need to remind ourselves we aren’t God, we don’t know everything, and we aren’t always our own best counselors.

I pray this often: Lord, give me a love for Your Truth so that I will not be deceived. I don’t even want to deceive myself!

The Apostle Paul gravely warned the Corinthian believers:

Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks he is wise in this age, let him become a fool so that he can become wise.
1 Corinthians 3:18

When’s the last time you’ve had a sure enough come-to-Jesus meeting with yourself? Is it long overdue? Sitting and stewing and spewing out dark words without reprimand will harden you over time. If left unchecked, unbridled blame and bitterness will stain your soul.

“Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself?”

— Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression

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“Don’t just listen to your worries, preach to them.”

– Michael Reeves

The psalmist wearied of listening to the sound of his own voice. His vinegar words were like hot desert sand in his throat, drying up his reserves of inner peace and consolation.⁴ His onerous self-talk sounded like this:

God, don’t you care about me?⁵

Why should I trust you?

I’ve prayed and prayed until I’m blue in the face; you don’t listen. What good are my prayers?

I thought you were good. I guess not.

If you are entertaining these thoughts, it’s time to tear up that script and find another. If that kind of language is living in your heart, repent. Find a better sermon to preach to yourself.

Hey yo, I’m preaching to myself.

Every time I’ve said, “God, can’t you see what’s happening? Can’t you fix this?” (which is more often than I’m comfortable admitting), I’ve heard the Lord’s voice in my ear say, “What makes you think I don’t see? What makes you so sure I don’t have this?”

Why my soul are you so dejected? Why are you in such turmoil? Put your hope in God! C’mon, Scott, you know better!

I’m such a dunderhead sometimes. In those wildly unattractive moments, I need to stop listening to myself and start talking to myself. I need a long-winded, Spirit-led, grace-filled, life-changing sermon to get me to the altar.

Join me in this new year, won’t you, and may we reform our ways; let’s stop listening to our thoughts and emotions and begin preaching a better gospel to ourselves.

As such, we should take a page from the psalmist’s playbook:

Put your hope in God⁶
Praise Him in all things
Remember all the many other times He’s come through for you⁷
Never question how much He loves you…unfailingly so⁸
Trust in God’s round-the-clock protection⁹

Selah, beloved.

The signature for this psalm is given as a “son of Korah.” Such were entrusted with the organization and implementation of temple worship ↩︎
“turmoil,” v5, pictures a loud moaning that can erupt into a scream; Jeremiah uses it in Jer. 4:19 to describe his anguished heart beating loudly inside him ↩︎
Psalm 42:11 ↩︎
Psalm 42:1-3 ↩︎
Psalm 42:9 ↩︎
Psalm 42:5, 11 ↩︎
Psalm 42:6 ↩︎
Psalm 42:7 ↩︎
Psalm 42:8 ↩︎

the quiet protest of praying before a meal

[5 minutes]

Everything God made is good, and is meant to be gratefully used, not despised. The holiness or otherwise of a certain food, for instance, depends not on its nature but on whether it is eaten thankfully or not, It is consecrated by the man who has accepted the message, and thanks God for food.

1 Timothy 4:3-5, JBP

I’d like to share something with you in this post that you may not have thought of before. At least not thought of in quite this way. But first, some background:

A young ‘Timothy’ and I are going through Paul’s first letter to Timothy together. He has recently come into my life and has been such an unexpected blessing. We’re learning about a very complicated church in first century Ephesus, seeing it as more of a battleground for Timothy rather than the promising church Paul birthed. In short, Ephesus Church was a hot mess.

Timothy wanted out. He felt the job well above his pay grade, but Paul told him to stay put, wage war (with faith and a good conscience), get prayer back into the assembly as the first order of business, remove unqualified teachers, and ordain qualified leaders.

Of course, Paul warns the GenX pastor, these strategies aren’t a guarantee that some – possibly even many – won’t still break his heart by abandoning the faith and make shipwreck of their lives. But, Paul exhorted Timothy, make it harder for them to defect by giving them life-saving truth!

Paul gave Timothy five tools for changing the culture at Ephesus Church. He instructed him to be an “example” in these specific areas: speech, conduct, love, faith, and purity. Just as David had five smooth stones at the ready to take down Goliath, Timothy had five straight arrows in his arsenal.

Words matter.
Conduct matters.
How we treat people matters.
What we believe matters.
Character matters.

“Example” is tupos, the Greek word for ‘mark, impression.’ Thomas used it when demanding evidence that Jesus was truly raised from the dead. “I’ll believe it when I see the marks of the nails!”

Leave your mark, Timothy. So live that they will know a man of God is in their midst!

There are two other surefire weapons Paul hands Timothy in chapter 4. One of them was to “make scripture great again” by reading it aloud in the public services. Stop letting false teachers share their devilish doctrines and twisted hermeneutics in the congregation. Put the kebosh on all that trifling nonsense. Make it policy that only God’s word will be preached and taught in the pulpit.

The other weapon might surprise you. It did me. In the context of zealous nitwits who had infiltrated Ephesus declaring certain things morally wrong — including food — Paul told Timothy that,

…everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer.
1 Timothy 4:4-5

“And prayer.” That’s what caught my eye.

Since the dawn of human history, food has sparked both lively conversation and controversy. Right there on the first page or two of the Bible, a crisis happened where food was involved. God created a garden world for Adam and Eve where he served up vegetables and fruits of every variety. He told them to feel free to eat anything their little hearts desired — and enjoy it — except for…

/Enter the dragon./

Food, fun, and fellowship nazis had apparently entered Ephesus Church and overturned God’s “saw that it was good” edict and put their own devilish spin on it.

Paul told Timothy to ixnay that, say grace over God’s good bounty, and sanctify it. It’s not only good, it’s very good. Eat up!

Norman Rockwell, the true-to-life artist whose paintings have been a mainstay of American lore and inspiration, painted Saying Grace (seen above) in 1951. Rockwell was inspired by a Saturday Evening Post reader who shared a story about seeing a Mennonite family praying before their meal in a busy restaurant. Rockwell was intrigued. He set to work creating a touching tribute to that iconic moment. Post readers voted Saying Grace as their favorite magazine cover in 1955.

Saturday Evening Post editors presented it this way:

The world is not too happy a place these days. There are wars and threats of wars. Anxiety and frustration are abroad, and in many quarters we see the bankruptcy of morals. So, suddenly comes the day to give thanks for the goodness of life. And perhaps this can be done most understandingly by someone like this little old lady who, wherever she may be, bows her head to say grace, speaking not analytically from the mind but spontaneously from the heart.

Sandy and I have long made it our practice to join hands and pray over our meals, whether at home or in public. Most of the time we don’t think anything about it, but there are other times we are palpably aware of people nearby; it can feel awkward.

This is why we pray before our meals. To consecrate it, to recognize it as God’s good provision from creation for us to enjoy. To believe that it sustains us and gives us life.

The devil hates Genesis 1-2. He hates God and good and living shamelessly and obedience and fellowship and harmony and beauty. He hates the imago dei and likeness and dominion and fruitfulness. He hates ex nihilo. He hates that he was created by One infinitely more powerful and wise than him.

He hates mankind and womankind.

“I’m better than either of them. I’ll prove it. I’ll have them eating out of my hands!”

The simple act of praying before a meal, then, is our protest against the devil’s narcissism and our profession that we only eat from God’s hand.

So the next time you are sitting at a table, whether at home or in a public place, and food is before you, remember that scene in the garden. Make the devil mad by bowing your head, saying grace, and thanking our Heavenly Father for giving us a world where food is on the menu.

Selah, beloved.

who told you?

“Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”

Genesis 3:11

[7 minutes]

There is a crisis of information today. No, not the lack of it, because, as we all well know, there are no limits to where we can find whatever we’re looking for whenever we need it. Alexa, how long does it take to boil an egg in the microwave? Hey Siri, what was the primary reason for the downfall of the Roman Empire?

Our appetite for knowledge is appeased through Google, ChatGPT, X, Apple News, Wikipedia, YouTube, Waze, Food Network, Zillow, and a thousand other sources as close to us as our devices. We are glutted with real-time data from every direction.

Suffering from the tyranny of FOMO, we bathe ourselves in digital light, robotically taking in whatever it feeds us — good or bad — for hours on end. Like junkies, our habit is fixed by mainlining content that is killing our souls. The Matrix is changing us from being made in God’s image to beings who slither around on our bellies like snakes.

In the beginning, God was the only source of information. So when the Lord asked Adam, “Who told you?” the latter had to sheepishly admit to going off-script and getting hoodwinked by misinformation.

It all falls apart in Genesis 3. The First Man on planet earth had barely gotten his feet under him before he believed the lie and, tragically, became the lie itself.

who told you God can’t be trusted?

The sin underneath all our sins is to trust the lie of the serpent that we cannot trust the love and grace of Christ.
—Martin Luther

Thanks to the Original Couple, we have embedded inside us the default mechanism to accuse God of being spartanly unfair or cruel. It’s a constant battle for many to quell the urge to instinctively blame God for their misfortunes.

I find it telling that the first book in our Bibles — chronologically, that is — is not Genesis, but Job. Of course Adam and Eve walked the earth long before he did, but Job preceded the writer of Genesis by a long shot. If we can trust the dating of Job, and I believe we can, then it asks the oldest question of all: If God is so good then why do I hurt so badly?

Now you can see why Moses opened the canon with Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch. Each of those first five books provides a master class for people who have a background of suffering and struggling to “not go there” when they are tempted to believe the lie that God cannot be trusted:

This is God. This is who he is. This is how he is to be worshiped. This is how he is to be trusted. Yes, bad things happen. We know this all too well! But God is not the villain in our story; he is fighting for us and faithfully planning our blessed future.”

Job fought that same urge and won. Moses had to do battle against the devil’s lie in Midian no doubt, but he overcame and led the people of Israel to leave Egypt and overcome in the wilderness. Those who didn’t make it were those who never got the taste of Egypt’s fruit out of their mouths.

One of my daily follows on X (Twitter) posted this recently and I thought it captured quite well the common struggle of mankind:

What good is the apple when one bite makes your life a living hell?

who told you God made you inferior?

In the first page of Holy writ we are told that humans are made in God’s image, in His likeness. By page two, Adam and Eve are no longer satisfied with that and looking for an upgrade.

The present culture has bullied impressionable minds to think they are not enough. Social media influencers, cultural icons, and even medical professionals have convinced an entire generation they are born wrong, look wrong, or believe wrong.

None of it is new. The satan has been using the same tactics to mar the imago dei in us since the beginning. He laughs at our gullibility. He loves to see us stripped of glory and dressed in fig leaves.

Babies are blobs of cells.

Children are an inconvenience.

Old people are a nuisance.

All men are misogynists.

Women are sex objects.

Gender is fluid.

Fathers aren’t necessary.

Families are a capitalistic construct.

We love our labels. Many of our labels serve no other purpose but to depersonalize others and erase the imago dei from their beingness. And the devil laughs.

who told you God was finished with you?

Did you think your shame defined you?

Did you think it was over for you?

Did you think you were beyond saving?

Adam and Eve were painfully aware they were now defective. The shine wore off. The original pair were like those brand new cars you drive off the lot that depreciate immediately.

This is why humans “cover” themselves with things that hide their weaknesses.

We become defensive.

We have learned how to hide our wounds to avoid the proper remedy.

We become deceptive.

We have learned to lie and, by so doing, have become the lie itself.

We become destructive.

We will burn down the whole house before admitting we are wrong and coming home.

From that point, once the die is cast, Adam and Eve no longer see the supernatural. They can’t see God, they can only hear him coming. Their souls weren’t the only thing that went dark; their eyes went dark too.

But, as it is written,
“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love him”—
these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.
1 Corinthians 2:9-10

But God, in grace, made sure they knew his approach. We are told the very first words after the Fall were spoken by God:

“Where are you?”

He came seeking us. There’s grace in those words! Where are you? They imply they were somewhere they should not be but they still mattered enough for God to come looking for them. It’s the same for every human since.

You’ve messed up but you’re not irredeemable.

Your situation is not the end of the story.

We can’t hide too long without having to come out and face the music. It will catch up with us. We will eventually be outed. Better to come forward than die in the dark.

In Christ, we are not pursued like wanted criminals, but like wanted children, or like wanted lovers, because wrath is replaced by desire.
— Rachel Gilson

Don’t allow the voices and narratives of culture shape who you are. It’s fake news. Some of it has just enough truth to make it sound authentic, but it’s still a lie.

Beloved, God is not done with you. Wherever you’re hiding, whatever you’re trying to cover yourself up with to impersonate the imago dei, just stop. You may not see him, but he sees you.

I’m willing to bet you’re hearing his approach in these words. Why are you here? Who told you these lies? Come out, come back, come home. He’s calling you back to truer things than you’ll ever hear out there.

Selah, beloved.