i am a green olive tree

[7 minutes]

But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God. I trust in the steadfast love of God forever and ever.

Psalm 52:8

David wrote this only one chapter removed from his confession to God when a broken, sinful man. The chapters aren’t chronological, of course, but their arrangement seems to be — for me at least — by design.

Looking back over the arc of our lives, we can dredge up seasons when we wondered if we’d ever get past our failures. In other seasons, we’ve known the inestimable joy of intimacy with God we never wanted to end. Hello sanctification.

In Psalm 51 David is the guilty man. In Psalm 52 he is gutted by the crimes of another man — Doeg the Edomite. Doeg brazenly murdered 85 innocent people in cold blood. The slaughtered were priests, together with their wives and children. Their crime? They gave David sanctuary when he was on the run from King Saul. David was beside himself with fury.

“How dare you, Doeg! You will face the wrath of a just God, you dog! You think you’re a big man, all high and mighty, plotting my demise. But it is you who will go down. Me? I’m a green olive tree in God’s house, big boy. You, on the other hand, are kindling for the lake of fire.”

No doubt David was reeling from the news of the priests of Nob and their families. It wasn’t enough for the vile Edomite to kill the priests, he massacred their families too. They died because they all stood with David!

Talk about survivor’s guilt.

selah

In the middle of this painful psalm is a Selah. It’s a strange place for a Selah, sure, but David tacks one on.

You love evil more than good, and lying more than speaking about what is right. Selah

(v3)

Selah.

Catch your breath.

Gather your wits.

Get quiet.

Be still.

John Andrew Bryant has battled mental illness his entire life. His brain never turns off; it is always noisy in there. His affliction is a daily surrender and his dependence upon God for the healing of his mind is evident in his words. John describes finding a “foothold” in those especially stormy times when his brain is firing in all directions.

“What I have in Christ is the simple, painful renunciation of the urges created by my brain, the ability to say no to desires and compulsions that will not just go away. I wish it was more. But that is all it’s been: a foothold in the storm of thought and feelings…that foothold, that boat, that kernel, is not a place where I do something to be okay. It is a place where I don’t. That patient, quiet understanding is the place where I stand with Christ and don’t do anything to make things right or win or be okay. It is the place where I don’t fix, the place where I don’t defend myself, the place where I don’t figure things out, and the place where I don’t know for sure. The place where it is somehow possible to not engage those compulsions. The place I stand with Christ and endure what it feels like to not do those things. The place where I’ve learned to stand with Christ by being quiet.”
A Quiet Mind To Suffer With, p17-18

That is David’s Selah here in the 52nd Psalm. He reminds himself with that Selah that however much evil swirls about him, he is not its victim. He must not surrender to it. Lady Macbeth told her husband to “screw his courage to the sticking place,” and this appears to be what David – albeit righteously – was telling himself to do.

I am tempted to substitute the name Jesus where I see a Selah in scripture. I don’t think it breaks any rules, personally.

My heart is broken. Jesus.

I’m hanging on by a thread. Jesus.

Lord, I don’t understand. Jesus.

My only hope is you. Jesus.

This too shall pass. Jesus.

Once upon a time, twelve men sat for an important gospel meal. The scene was humming with observable tension as it was the last Passover in which Jesus would take part. While he was speaking, John, we are told, leaned against his Messiah’s breast. Although the atmosphere was charged, the beloved disciple anchored himself to the Rock.

Think of Selah, then, as pressing into Jesus. Selah, where you don’t fix or defend or try to figure out. You listen. You wait. You trust. You are still.

Like a tree.

a green olive tree

David imagines himself in verse 8 as a tree, but not just any tree. He is God’s tree, a temple tree. He was a well-manicured olive tree, not some scrub tree out in the wild. His roots were resolutely screwed into the sticking place of holy soil.

David, consummate lover of nature, appreciated the beautiful trees in Jerusalem. Adorning the temple grounds, no doubt, were flowering olive trees whose aroma misted the air. He knew they provided the oil for worship in the holy place and said “I’m one of those trees.”

Before I’m anything, I’m a worshipper of God. The Lord made me to love him and enjoy him forever. Doegs and Sauls and Goliaths come and go, but I’m rooted in the faithfulness of God.

The thing about olive trees: they are capable of surviving the worst that life can dish out. There’s an olive tree in Crete that is close to 3,000 years old. Believe me, it’s seen some stuff. Paul was shipwrecked by a horrible storm that drove him into the sands of Crete in Acts 27. That tree is still producing olives today.

I’m one of those trees. I’m precious to God. He is invested in protecting me, so I will not be defeated by those who wish ill upon me. The times I’m living in will not get the best of me. I’m living in the Land of Selah.

Let that cruel dog Doeg and his ilk be who they are, they won’t affect me. They can choose evil but I will stay planted here in the garden of the Lord.

What are you going through right now, beloved? What’s got your goat? Who’s oppressing you? That hard thing in your life may be a person, it may be a condition, it may be a situation. Your hardship hurts even more because it’s out of your control and it’s not letting up. I get it.

Step back like David did and see the bigger picture. See a Land called Selah. Can you see it? Now look closer and see a City in that Land called Peace. Picture yourself there, planted in its soil, loved and cherished and protected by God. You may not think so, but you are thriving. It may feel like you’re losing, but God sees olives in you.

Let them cancel you. Let the situation play out. Ignore the lying voices inside your head. Screw your courage to the sticking place and hang your hope on the sure peg of Selah. Hollywood is going to be what it is. Politicians will be who they are. The world and its pleasures are passing away; let them go the way of the dust. Stand your ground, Olive Tree. It’s okay. He’s got this. He’s got you. You’re safe. Just be still, stay rooted, and “trust in his unfailing love” (v8).

Selah, beloved. Jesus.

sometimes miracles take time

[7 minute read]

I forgot to include this music video as a benediction to my previous post so I’ll just sit down (!) and write a new post. <Smile> You may recall I referenced the passage in Hebrews that has been ministering to my soul these days, “As things stand right now, we aren’t seeing all things subjected to Christ’s reign, but we see Jesus…” (Heb 2:8,9, my paraphrase). This song has been getting a lot of background play as I wait on the Lord to (how shall I put it?) unburden me from specific burdens I carry daily.

Full disclosure: the biggest burden is me. The unfinished me. The Scott who requires a lot more fine-tuning. Sanctifying. Paul prayed for the Galatians that “Christ would be fully formed in them” (Gal 4:19) and I’ve been asking the Holy Spirit to do the same for myself. It’s been a stretching season, to say the least, but Christ has been an ever-present help through it all. The ironic thing is during this burdensome season I’m also seeing a crazy amount of answered prayer in many other areas.

The Father keeps reminding me of the scene by the seashore in John 21. Jesus tells Peter that he will have a rough but rewarding life of following him, but compels the disciple to trust and follow him anyway. The Master is certainly worthy of it.

Peter turns and considers John for a moment then asks Jesus, “What about John? Is he just going to traipse off to heaven on flowery beds of ease?” Who among us hasn’t fretted about our assignments once or twice?

Why don’t they ever seem to struggle?

Why does she always get her way?

Why does everything turn out fine for him?

Why do I always have to take the high road?

Why does John get all the love?

Why, why, why. There’s probably a reason “why” starts to sound like “why-ning.” (Lord, make me/us better.)

This morning Sandy remarked that our journey has often asked more of us than others’ journeys do of them…or so it feels. [Truth bomb: faith > feelings] We know in our hearts that God is for us, his ways are perfect, and the payoff in following Christ is worth living — and suffering — for.

we know in our hearts that God is for us, his ways are perfect, and the payoff in following Christ is worth living — and suffering — for.

Sometimes miracles take time. I just got off the phone with a very dear ministry friend, a faithful reader of this blog, who is in AFib and requires a pacemaker to control his heart function. He was told by more than a few that he would “feel like a new man” with his pacemaker, but, days later, he’s still not feeling it. He’s waiting for a miracle.

No one likes being told to wait. Waiting almost feels like delaying the inevitable the same way a streetwise child hears a parent say “We’ll see.”

In Practicing the Presence of God, Brother Lawrence tells of someone who “would go faster than grace” (she was impatient to become holy) and I hear that same caution in my life today. I’m so eager for God to get everything sorted out I’m not surrendering to his meantime mercy. While we’re waiting for our miracle, God is busy doing a thousand other things for us.

while we’re waiting for our miracle, God is busy doing a thousand other things for us.

God not only has the last word, he has the next-to-last word, too. And all the words that come before that. In a later psalm of David, he praised a God who knew every page of his life, start to finish. How wonderful! This means that the Almighty is just as engaged in every minute of our days (good and bad) as he is committed to our telos (finished product).

Miracles take time sometimes. And sometimes, if we’re being honest, they may never see the light of day — at least not in the way we hoped. There are rebels who adapt to the far country just fine and never come home. Some diseases aren’t cured. Marriages fall apart no matter how often we pray and fast and hope against hope they don’t.

I don’t remember where I heard this, or read it, but I’ll tell it as I remember it. Most of us know that Charles Spurgeon, for much of his life, suffered with deep, dark depression. Sadly, he lived with depression the rest of his life. He saw himself as a lonely lighthouse, beaming the light of the gospel out to the hopeless souls lost at sea, though he himself remained in darkness. Not the darkness of being lost, for he carried the gospel light within him, but the darkness of never being healed from the oppression that plagued him. Even still, he embraced his ministry with gladness, knowing countless others were rescued and set free.

I’ve often prayed to walk again, but I will keep trusting and living onward and upward; I’ve got thousands of other healing stories anyway. I happen to be in the middle of one right now.

Sometimes miracles take time, and sometimes they get unexpected upgrades. When I, a permanently disabled man, prayed for a wife, I had no idea how blessed my life would be. My idea of a miracle was to get married at all. God’s miracle was Sandy. Yahtzee!

sometimes miracles take time, and sometimes they get unexpected upgrades.

I’ve written about this before, but my lifelong dream was to see the Grand Canyon. It would take a miracle to get me there at all, what with all my health problems and near-death experiences. But God gave me my miracle…and upgraded it to the best road trip ever…with some of our dearest friends…witnessing the grandeur of the canyon after the most beautiful snowfall…a picturesque sunset…dozens of dazzling photographs…and a thousand-and-one other grace-happy moments to relish and treasure.

And all of us born again brothers and sisters. What upgrade did we get? We didn’t just get our sins forgiven; we got eternal life, the indwelling Holy Spirit, the mind of Christ, a new spiritual family, new mercies every morning, ongoing sanctification, answered prayers, hope in our suffering, power for living, grace for dying, a heavenly Father, a heavenly home…and (drum roll) Jesus.

If I may, I’d like to pray for us, knowing a post like this affects us all in varying degrees. Each of us carries the “yes, but not yet” reality like a counterweight to our fixed eternal hope. I’d like to ask God to avert our eyes from the circumstances of our day-to-day burdens to the Living Christ who has overcome.

Father of mercies, we confess that we are often so focused on our predicaments we miss the importance of waiting. We find ourselves in the waiting room once again and ask for grace to prove faithful in this uncomfortable season. All our fountains are in you, Jesus, and we eagerly wait in hope for your promised outcome. It will be glorious, we know, because you are an Artist and everything you do is perfect. May you receive all the glory from us and in us in this season and always. In the name of Jesus, we say Amen.

Selah, beloved.

the long game of God

[7 minute read]

I’ve begun rereading Philip Yancey’s Disappointment With God (highly recommend). His writing style has always appealed to me but his daring insights catch me out even more. Try this one on for size:

If you read Genesis in one sitting, you cannot help noticing a change in how God related to his people. At first he stayed close by, walking in the garden with them, punishing their individual sins, speaking to them directly, intervening constantly. Even in Abraham’s day he sent extraterrestrial messengers on house calls. By Jacob’s time, however, the messages were far more ambiguous: a mysterious dream about a ladder, a late-night wrestling match. And toward the end of Genesis, a man named Joseph received guidance in the most unexpected ways.

Genesis slows down when it gets to Joseph, and it shows God working mostly behind the scenes. God spoke to Joseph not through angels, but through such means as the dreams of a despotic Egyptian pharaoh…

…But shift for a moment to the perspective of God the parent. Had he deliberately “pulled back” to allow Joseph’s faith to reach a new level of maturity? And could this be why Genesis devotes more space to Joseph than to any other person? Through all his trials, Joseph learned to trust: not that God would prevent hardship, but that he would redeem even the hardship. Choking back tears, Joseph tried to explain his faith to his murderous brothers: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good….
— Philip Yancey, Disappointment With God, 71-72

Yancey really got me thinking about how God goes about his business…and not in the way we would expect. Of course you know this.

For example, the three matriarchs of Israel – Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel – were each affected with some form of barrenness at one time or another. You would think that God, in inventing a new nation, would have the foresight to choose fertile young women who could pop out babies right and left on a whim to launch his people-project. Not so.

God seems to go about his business in less than flashy style, the hard way. A virgin-born baby in a frontier town. Barren matriarchs who are hardly able to eke out a child or two. The runt of the litter as king of the nation. Even in creation, one of the grandest displays of his majestic purposes, God throws out a little at a time: day one, wait, day two, I’m good, day three, that’s enough for now, and so on. Why not fling everything into being all at once in a monumental great big bang?

He scripted a Church that would stymie the gates of hell… and who did he choose as its first adapters? A handful of rough-and-tumble blue collar types; the foolish, weak, and despised. His M.O. was so frighteningly scandalous he picked the Sanhedrin’s favorite hit man to reform and apostle the growing church toward spiritual maturity.

We know God can dazzle (Matt 17:2) but he specializes in the unnerving manner (to us) of plodding and waiting and delaying. He doesn’t do things the conventional way. He’s not in a hurry and he doesn’t do flashy all that often. We want him to call down fire but he wants us to pray for our enemies. Even when he stepped out of character to curse a fig tree, he walked away from it, leaving it intact… until the next day.

He’s liable to tell us that he has big family plans for us so we get busy preparing the nursery only to have it sit empty for a quarter of a century. My ways are higher than your ways, he reminds us. He’s liable to hear that we are sick unto death then wait four days to show up. By then it’s our funeral, not our sick bed.

Jesus shied away from being coronated too soon and, on other occasions, curiously charged his healed followers to keep it between them and their priest. Turns out, he was playing the long game.

I know how disappointment with God can creep in and lead to discouragement. I’ve been there more times than I care to admit. You might be there yourself. Yancey dedicated his book “For my brother, who is still disappointed.”

A sorely disillusioned Sarah laughed over the prospect of pregnancy in her well-past-due date, and when she did so, exposed a deep well of hurt inside her. Maybe at sixty-five, she sniffed, but not hardly at ninety. God recognized it at once and spoke a sure word into her void: “Is anything impossible for the Lord…?” (Gen 18:14)

Whatever you’re going through, however difficult it seems, just keep on trusting Jesus. Sometimes we’d like it better if God stopped playing the long game and wrapped things up all nice and tidy. Quick like. Allow me to share something with you that has anchored my soul in these recent days.

“As it is, we do not yet see everything subjected to Him. But we do see Jesus…” (Hebrews 2:8-9, CSB)

Read that again. Slowly. Let your soul bathe in those words.

Here’s the thing that mollifies me today. What does the writer of Hebrews emphasize time and again about what Jesus is doing right now? He’s sitting. He’s not pacing and fidgeting; he’s not wringing his hands worrying over how to turn the tide.

Jesus is sitting down.

On a throne.

Reigning like a boss.

Right now we’re in the disquieting realm of “yes, but not yet.” We just had no idea how long not yet was going to last. But right now Jesus is ruling and reigning and interceding. Imagine: the King of the Universe has our names on his heart day in and day out and is working behind the scenes causing chief cupbearers to suddenly remember, giving dreams to Pharaohs, putting you on a different platform, orchestrating famines in other places to bring hungry families to your doorstep, and reconciling and subjecting all things – and persons – to himself. He’s not just “sitting around,” mind you, he’s quite busy making all things new.

The present seems pretty messed up, if we’re being honest. But if we can manage to squint through the fog and gloom of the present “as it is,” and adjust our focus, we’ll see it all coming together — in Christ Jesus — just as God promised long ago.

Don’t lose hope, dear one, long game notwithstanding; I won’t either. See Jesus and, in the comforting words of Julian of Norwich, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Selah, beloved.