Tag: Grace

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

————————-

“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.

  1. The signature for this psalm is given as a “son of Korah.” Such were entrusted with the organization and implementation of temple worship ↩︎
  2. “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 ↩︎
  3. Psalm 42:11 ↩︎
  4. Psalm 42:1-3 ↩︎
  5. Psalm 42:9 ↩︎
  6. Psalm 42:5, 11 ↩︎
  7. Psalm 42:6 ↩︎
  8. Psalm 42:7 ↩︎
  9. Psalm 42:8 ↩︎

all the way home

[5 minutes]

Thirty six years ago a baby boy was born in the same city where I first spotted the girl I would marry and who would later be his mommy. That baby was born to someone else, but that someone already gave him up to Jesus so that we could have the rapturous joy of bringing him home. That was then.

He was the answer to his mama’s many prayers and the happy surprise of his disabled daddy. He’s perfect, we said. All his fingers and toes and not a flaw to be seen. He actually favored me. I had only wanted daughters, not a son, but he changed all that with my first look. That was then.

Graham learned how to walk by steadying a pudgy hand on my wheelchair tire, trailing trustingly along as I s l o w l y rolled across the living room floor, him putting one foot gingerly in front of the other. His favorite way to travel was to perch himself between my legs and ride on my footrests, giggling and bouncing at the world in front of him. We were Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. Speed Racer and Chim-Chim. My favorite way for him to ride was when Gra-Gra climbed on my lap, pulled himself upright, facing me. When he grabbed a fistful of my shirt and pumped his legs up and down, that was my signal. Off we went, doing wheelies and spinning and carving donuts in the carpet. That was then.

We could take him anywhere. He smiled at everybody he saw and they usually smiled back. Our little guy loved to sing Jesus songs and was never off-pitch. He made friends easily. He told other little boys on the McDonald’s playground about Jesus. He loved church, he loved his cousins, and he loved Christmas and Halloween and birthdays and pretty much any other day of the year. That was then.

The boy could pick up any instrument and learn how to play it by ear. Like his mama, music was inside him and moved him. He wasn’t a great student, didn’t have the handwriting skills of his mother, but he was the spark of life in every classroom. From kindergarten through elementary school, he was rewarded as the student with the most personality, aka class clown. That was then.

The angels God assigned to our Graham had their hands full. Rambunctious, daring, and always scoping out the next epic adventure, we never knew for sure if we had a tight enough hold on him. He was so adaptable, which is a good thing on the one hand, but not always on the other. Don’t get me wrong; Graham wasn’t a troublemaker, but trouble often found him anyway. That was then.

He gave his heart to Jesus before he became a teenager. I may have mentioned it earlier, but our son didn’t shy away from telling people about Jesus. He went on mission trips, laid hands on people and prayed for their healing, traveled hut to hut with the gospel, and left his only pair of shoes in Honduras for another who had no shoes. That was then.

Prodigals aren’t as rare as you’d think. Especially not the ones who grew up in pastor’s homes. Like many of us, Graham had high hopes but he got mad at a God whom he accused of ruining his dreams. He didn’t know what to do with that, where to take all that anger. It molested him, throttled him, imprisoned him. He became addicted to it, wore it all on both sleeves, and it became the death of him. That was then.

The thing about God’s mercy is that it keeps following us and hounding us and nipping at our heels. All the way home, the psalm says. All. The. Way. Home. God’s lovingkindness never lets up. I shared with another parent of a prodigal just this week the same words that encouraged Sandy and me when our beautiful son died: the power and strength and determined will of God’s hold on us is eternally stronger than our will to walk away from him.

The other thing about prodigals is that some of them, perhaps more than we think, come home. Graham sure did.

God’s merciful love did that. It followed him all the way home, praise Jesus.

Graham would be 36 today. Sandy is in Georgia this week to celebrate still being his mom. She has many things on her docket, but none more important than sitting by Graham’s graveside and reminiscing about all the “that was then” moments. It’s been almost twelve years now, but still we grieve — and that’s okay. Some years are harder than others to celebrate his birthday while mourning his passing. This is one of those years. Sigh.

Were it not for the rich mercies of Christ Jesus, we might just stay by his cemetery plot and never leave, chained to unremedied sorrow. But a hope greater than our grieving is beating in our chests and beckoning us on. We can drive away from that plot of ground, assured and at peace, because there’s a new now, not then, past the veil and scrim of this side of eternity, where Graham is waiting for us to get Home too.

Selah, beloved.

the quiet protest of praying before a meal

Saying Grace, Norman Rockwell

[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.