Grace Archives - Page 9 of 18 - call me pasturescott

the noonday devil

I am struck by this sledgehammer of words that careened off the page in the direction of my heart:

“The noonday devil of the Christian life is the temptation to lose the inner self while preserving the shell of edifying behavior.”
—Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel, 135

Thank you, Father; I rather needed that.

So much so I find myself praying Manning’s closing chapter prayer aloud (and might again a time or two before it’s over):

Lord Jesus, we are silly sheep who have dared to stand before You and try to bribe You with our preposterous portfolios. Suddenly we have come to our senses. We are sorry and ask You to forgive us. Give us the grace to admit we are ragamuffins, to embrace our brokenness, to celebrate Your mercy when we are at our weakest, to rely on Your mercy no matter what we may do. Dear Jesus, gift us to stop grandstanding and trying to get attention, to do the truth quietly without display, to let the dishonesties in our lives fade away, to accept our limitations, to cling to the gospel of grace, and to delight in Your love. Amen.
—Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel, p144

Amen, indeed.

It’s easy to point fingers at the collective church and say, “The problem with the American Church today is…” and leave ourselves entirely non-mea-culpa. We would do well to remember a Chesterton take on the subject:

When the The Times of London posed this question to several prominent authors: “What’s wrong with the world today?” well-known author and philosopher G.K. Chesterton is said to have responded with a one-sentence essay:

_Dear Sir,
__I am.
_Yours sincerely, G.K. Chesterton

The noonday devil tempts us to pretend we are an Instagram version of ourselves. And be okay with it.

I’ve learned much at the feet of David Pawson, now with the Lord. At one point in his ministry, rumors had been spread about the Bible teacher and speaking engagements were summarily cancelled.

Pawson was up in arms over the whole ordeal and complained vigorously to his wife. She told him to go the the Lord. He did. The Holy Spirit’s say in the matter was: “David, the worst they can say about you is not as bad as the truth.” He laughed. But the point was taken, with God adding, “I know the worst, but I still love you and will use you.”

That truth stuck with Pawson the remainder of his years. He even titled his autobiography, “Not As Bad As The Truth.”

As I once heard said, if our bosom sins were written on our forehead for all to see, most of us would be inclined to wear broad-brimmed hats everywhere we go.

Mr. Moody of Chicago once heralded,

“What we want is to be real. Let us not appear to be more than we are. Don’t let us put on any cant, any assumed humility, but let us be real; that is the delight of God. God wants us to be real men and women, and if we profess to be what we are not, God knows all about us. God hates sham.”
—Dwight Lyman Moody

Did you catch that? “…but let us be real; that is the delight of God.” It would seem the Father is waiting for us to shed the act and embrace the truth. For our own good.

In this selfie culture fascinated with filters, it might just be a sign of maturity to put ourselves out there completely unadorned by the deceptive magic of sham and confess to our ‘followers,’ “This is me. I am dark but lovely. I’m out here tending to vineyards but I’ve been neglecting my own.”

Why must we either surreptitiously rumor ourselves as the hero of our stories or manipulate public acclaim by using the tool of fake humility? Neither is the truth. Somewhere in the middle is true and honest. “Jesus is the hero of my story and I am his humble servant.” And mean it.

Back to Manning. One of the things I love about him is how he completely got over trying to impress (or as close to it as anyone I know). There is such a down-to-earth honesty in his oeuvre, as if he had been there, done that, and was so sick and tired of the whole nasty business of mask-wearing.

Are we prepared to live in community (and before the world) with this premium grade honesty?

Rich Villodas rightly observed, “Evangelical Christianity is often characterized by a deep desire to have ‘Christianity’ pervade our culture but not have Christ permeate our being.”

It may seem an odd thing, but I believe the world would sit up and take notice of this brand of being the church when we the saved are more known as image-bearers of Christ and to an infinitely less degree, image-protectors of self.

It’s high time we exorcised some demons. You know the kind: those “all-dressed-up-in-church-clothes“ demons who offer us phony piety at a discount price. I’m beginning to think they’re among the ones who come out only by prayer and fasting.

Just so you know, whatever you think of me, I can assure you it’s not as bad (or nearly as good?) as the truth. But this I know: God loves me in spite of it and it does me no good to pretend. How many would be spared a devastating fall from grace if they had preemptively confessed their sin to another?

Anyway, that’s what’s on my mind today.

Selah, beloved. (And you are.)

[tipjarwp mode=”button” link_text=”Click here to buy me a coffee ☕️ Thank you!” open_style=”in_place”]

just another miraculous birth?

“How will this be, since I am a virgin?”

— Mary, Luke 1:34

If you know me at all, you know how much I love the writings of the late Eugene Peterson. The man has pastored my soul for decades. In one of his perhaps lesser known works, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, he reminds us the birth of Messiah wasn’t the only miraculous birth in scripture, but it was the only one of its kind.

The eminent pastor turns our attention to pre-Advent scripture to briefly recount five miraculous births God was “critically and intimately involved in…”:

Abraham and Sarah (Isaac)
Manoah and unnamed wife (Samson)
Boaz and Ruth (Obed)
Elkanah and Hannah (Samuel)
Zechariah and Elizabeth (John)

And here is how he worshipfully distinguishes the heart-staggering birth of King Jesus from those earlier birth events:

The work of God in the conception and birth of Jesus through Mary is continuous with these five previous “impossible” births, but it is also different…

How so? we wonder.

In the mothers ranging from Sarah to Elizabeth, a barren womb was the impossible condition to overcome; these women very much wanted a child. But in Mary the “impossible” condition is virginity: here there is no yearning for or expectation of a child.
Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places, 55-6

Peterson quotes Raymond Brown (The Birth of the Messiah, p314), who opens to us the compelling thought of this being the first and only birth through agency of a human womb in which God took the initiative.

It was all God’s idea!

In Mary’s case, she was a virgin who had no thought of bearing a child at that time. It was unthinkable to her. Maybe someday but not at this stage of her life, and certainly not as an unmarried woman!

Her pregnancy was ALL God’s idea! He wasn’t answering the cry of a barren couple, he was answering

Himself,

His own heart,

His own yearning.

This is the heart of Advent. This is the miracle and mystery of Christmas hope. Here is the gospel: God from the start has sought you, not the other way around. You weren’t even aware of your longing but that God was already at work filling your womb, your inner cry, with his life.

When Mary visited her cousin to tell her the news of her divine pregnancy, Elizabeth called her “Blessed!”

Allow me to put an ❗️on this post by pulling from another author I greatly admire. Picking up on Elizabeth’s same exuberant emotion, Brennan Manning applies it to all of us who are caught in the thrall of Christmas grace:

You are blessed! God’s desire is for you. And Jesus is the incarnation of God’s furious longing. He is your supreme Lover. It’s true. You are blessed. Your soul’s winter is over. The snows are over and gone. Flowers are blooming inside of you. The season of joyful songs has come. To you. You are blessed! The love of God is folly. No one is excluded. All (really!) are called to the banquet table. Come, and be filled. You are blessed! You can pray like a child, and enjoy God. You are blessed! Heal, and be healed…Amen. Amen. Amen.
Brennan Manning, The Furious Longing of God

Selah, blessed and beloved!

[tipjarwp mode=”button” link_text=”Click here to buy me a coffee ☕️ Thank you!” open_style=”in_place”]

christmas is for shepherds and moabites

Looking back on this blog, I can spot times where I’ve written angsty at the church or when I’ve made the gospel seem as though it was only for the elite. I’ve written from places of hurt and sadness. There are some lighthearted posts here and there and a whole lot of essays of encouragement. On balance, I’d much rather write about a gospel that is true and gracious. And accessible.

If you drew a line from previous posts that sounded more preachy to where I’ve been ruminating in recent years you’d discover that line marks precisely when Graham passed too soon from this world. He’s my reason for this “new season” of softening.

His story has taken the edge off. How God handled Graham has taught my fingers to dance across the keyboard. I’m not spending as much time these days wringing my hands over the condition of the church, and overly obsessed with matters of who’s in who’s out. I’m still savoring the awe that my boy is with Jesus…and waking up to a gospel of attraction rather than subtraction.

As Christmas approaches I find myself thinking about the key players in the nativity story once again. I suppose it’s because our son was taken eight Decembers ago I’ve been more drawn to the people who shouldn’t be in the cast of Advent but are. People like those shepherds abiding. Imagine these guys making up the first worship team!

These were not a romanticized version of herdsman but a rough-and-tumble group of guys. Today, they would be more suited for a biker’s bar than a synagogue. Gamey and course, their arms would sport a collision of tattoos and hard lines from hard lives would crease their faces.

And yet, and yet.

Heaven sang like a choir to this audience of irregulars. Religious folk labeled them unclean. They were unwelcome in their churches because their line of work with sacrificial lambs connected them to manure and flies and death. They had one job: tend the temple sheep until they were needed to spill blood for the people’s sin. This bunch were tough.

And yet…the Light of Christmas Glory built a tabernacle around them.

A friend and I shared breakfast last week and conversation turned to, as it always does, the gospel. I mentioned I was in Isaiah in my daily reading and referenced the prophet’s hard words about an ancient people, the Moabites. But then I discovered something.

A very cool gospel something.

Virtually nowhere in scripture are the Moabites mentioned with any degree of favor. They are the sworn enemies of God’s people from the beginning. So repugnant are they, God makes them pariah in his own sanctuary.

No Ammonite or Moabite may enter the assembly of the LORD. Even to the tenth generation, none of them may enter the assembly of the LORD forever,
Deuteronomy 23:3

You’d be hard-pressed to find anything anywhere in the Bible remotely nice about Moabites. Even Isaiah, the “Christmas” prophet (Isa 7:14, 9:2, 9:6, 11:1) piled on with a plethora of judgments regarding Moab, not mincing words.

And yet. And yet.
[Here’s the very cool gospel part]

I found a lone verse where Moab is given a good ending, just like my boy. Plugging the word “Moab” into my Bible app’s search engine, this text bubbled up:

“Yet I will restore the fortunes of Moab
in days to come,”
declares the Lord.
Here ends the judgment on Moab.
Jeremiah 48:47

Don’t miss that last sentence. “Here ends…judgment.” Precisely because Jesus died for Moabites too is why that promise holds. What was announced to baseborn shepherds on the night of Advent — “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.” — applied to a congregation of misfits.

Oh, don’t you remember? Ruth….the Moabite? Right there in Jesus’s genealogy? Jesus Messiah came into this cold earth with some Moabite blood!

Jesus is heir of a line in which flows the blood of the harlot Rahab, and of the rustic Ruth; he is akin to the fallen and to the lowly, and he will show his love even to the poorest and most obscure. I, too, may have a part and lot in him.
Charles Spurgeon, The Gospel of the Kingdom

Shepherds and Moabites, prodigals and lost causes. Christmas is good news for people without a country. The only ones left in the dark are those who ignore the Main Character. He, who was born in a feeding trough, lived homeless, and was buried in a donated grave, came not for the tidied-up but for the beat-down.

I’m weak
fragile
gone in a strong gust
or wave
my bones and soul
break
like dry twigs.

It is possible to lose all

except

the love of God.

The gospel is for the unheard, the counted-out, the ones from whom friends hide their face, the shamed, the losers.

It’s “good news to the poor…liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind”

the disadvantaged
the incarcerated
the disabled

Jesus draws near.

–Quina Aragon, Spoken Word Artist

This post is for anyone out there who has a “Moabite” in their life. Some unlikely candidate for gospel change. You hope, you actually hurt, for their salvation. This could be their last shot and that pains you.

Don’t give up, beloved. Pray that some heavenly visitor, or a choir of singing angels, finds them in some forgotten field on a night they least suspect and draws them in to “join the triumph of the skies.”

God can meet them in their isolated bulwarks of hardened flesh. He came all the way from Glory to raid the devil’s domain after all.

Selah, and Merry Christmas to you and yours!

[tipjarwp mode=”button” link_text=”Click here to buy me a coffee ☕️ Thank you!” open_style=”in_place”]