Tag: Hope

going out weeping, coming home rejoicing

[4 minutes]

They weep as they go to plant their seed,
but they sing as they return with the harvest.

Psalm 126:6

The Bible isn’t a guidebook, it is a life book. It’s not a collection of principles to live by, but life-giving truth to rest in.

With refreshing transparency, Andrée Seu Peterson confessed her once weak-kneed approach to scripture during a particularly painful season of grief. While “grousing” she read from another writer who leaned hard into the Word of God in her own similar season of trial.

In her book Won’t Let You Go Unless You Bless Me, Andrée Seu said she was more prone to “pursue minimum Christianity: saved by the blood, but entitled to grouse.” Patti McCarthy Broderick, however, believed when the Bible said ‘suffering produces character and character hope,’ it means that suffering produces character and character, hope.’*

Andrée Seu:

I, on the other hand, have interposed a baroque system of hermeneutics between the Bible and my life. I have seminary training. Unlike simple people who obey the Bible because they don’t realize how complicated it is, I find ambiguity in every verse. I don’t obey scripture, I discuss it.

She and Broderick had both heard the same statistics and psychological findings regarding the ‘natural’ course of grief and the amount of time needed to ‘process’ it. “I went with the statistics and gave myself permission to be as bad as I wanted to be. She, more simple-minded, files the following report: ‘So I chose instead to bank my life on scripture being true, and I was not going to let even well-meaning Christians talk me out of it’… 

Of Broderick, Andrée Seu said, “She took the Bible as practical…She made a conscious choice to trust in God, to take his word as truth, to see opportunity, and to wear his praises publicly on her lips. And she did not find him disappointing.”

It’s necessary to draw a distinction here between distrustful whining and trusting God even as we grieve. Some sorrows run so deep they may take years to heal. But at the heart of Psalm 126 is a promise that will never disappoint.

jerald

I still recall my friend Jerald’s beautiful exposition of this verse. Jerald served as my right hand man for several years when I was pastor in Douglasville, Georgia. I remember his teaching as if it was yesterday.

Picture it: God directs a farmer to take the precious seed, the last seed in the barn, and plant it in the dry soil of his field. It hasn’t rained for weeks.

What? Waste my seed? Why would I do that? How will my family survive?

See him as he kneels in the dust, taking the last of the seed and putting it into the dry ground. He’s risking everything on God’s coming through for his starving family. Tears fill his eyes as he surrenders to the soil, praying with uncertainty. He looks up at the sky. No clouds. He writes his sweaty brow. The seed does no good in his hands, so he presses it into the hard-packed earth.

The next week he hears thunder. He rushes outside and sees dark clouds filling the sky! Torrents of rain wash down on the farmer’s fields. The ground is suddenly bathed in precious streams of living water, as valuable to him as if he discovered gold.

He had wept when he planted the last of the seed but now he rejoices because he knows the Almighty has heard his cries and has seen his sacrifice. The farmer now laughs as he stands under the showers with arms raised to the sky…

I sat by Jerald’s hospice bed one Sunday morning when he quietly slipped off into eternity. Marie, his wife (and one of my regular readers!), joined me in singing as many verses as we could remember of Leaning On The Everlasting Arms as we kept vigil. Somewhere in the middle of the hymn, Jerald left this earthen sod.

In in his lifetime Jerald wept much because of cancer, but Marie and I were witnesses to the exact moment when her husband heard God’s gentle thunder inviting him Home. He took flight from his sick bed to where the fields of grace are always green, always growing, always lush with crops. I believe Jerald was laughing when he saw Jesus.

those who dream

Beloved, one day your soul’s deepest cries will be heard and you will be as one of those who dream about reaching the crest of the last hill after a long wilderness journey. Every thorn and desert, each and every stream of bitter water, and all the giants who towered over you and made you feel weak and unprotected, they will all be behind you, drowned in a sea of forgetfulness.

Oh, but beloved, it’s not a dream. It’s a promise for us too, not just for an ancient people who were just like us. Trust the Almighty Tear-Wiper. You will not find Him disappointing.

Those who sow in tears
shall reap with shouts of joy!

Psalm 126:5

One final word: this promise is not merely for those who cry in this life, but for those who are willing to sow their seed — trusting, believing, hoping — in the midst of their tears. They will be the ones dancing in the rain.

Selah, beloved.

*from her book He Said, “Press”: Hearing God Through Grief by Patti McCarthy Broderick

the thirty percent

[5 minutes]

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. II Timothy 4:7

How important is it to you to finish well?

Biblical scholar and teacher Dr. J. Robert Clinton studied the lives of one hundred main characters in the Bible. What he discovered was hard to swallow. Fewer than 30% of them finished well.

Which people of the Bible might you add to a list of those who patterned exemplary faith? Joseph! Daniel, for sure. You have to include Ruth. Job had his moments, but he ultimately came forth as gold. Remember, it’s not about being perfect — or whether you stumble along the way (we all do!) — but rather how you finish.

There are noteworthy examples, but none more deserving than Paul. When I die, I hope with all my heart that I am able to echo what Paul confessed before he left this world:

I fought hard.

I ran a good race.

I’m ready.

“Finished” in the scripture highlighted above is τετέλεκα — an echo of the very proclamation Jesus made from the cross: It is finished. While the Savior completed his divine mission to perfection, Paul faced his own human death with Christlike finality.

Do you know what I really love about Paul’s ‘death-bed’ confession to Timothy? Ten years earlier, Paul had a shoreline meeting with some church elders at Ephesus when he declared at that time:

However, I consider my life worth nothing to me; my only aim is to finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me—the task of testifying to the good news of God’s grace.

—Acts 20:24

A decade later, Paul sent a letter from a Roman prison to the young pastor of that same Ephesian church to say: “Mission accomplished.”

I fought the good fight.

I ran a good race.

I kept the faith for a good death.

Oh how I long to meet my Savior having the same bravado! I pray I’ll not to be a shipwreck or footnote.

In Clinton’s study only 50 of the 100 Bible characters researched had enough print about their life to determine whether or not they finished well. That means the other 50 didn’t have enough data points to know one way or the other.

Brothers and sisters, I don’t want anyone guessing about my life. I pray there is ample evidence to sift through! One day, by the grace of God, I hope a flag is planted over my bones that declares, “Here lies Scott Thomas Mitchell. He loved Jesus to the death.”

Last October one of my ministry heroes, Charles Swindoll, preached his final sermon at age 90. In a time of great shaking, scandal, heresy, and controversy in the pulpits, it is refreshing to hear of a man who faithfully ran his race and finished his course in a worthy manner.

And yet — shockingly — as the celebrated pastor was preparing for his exit, one of his own staff pastors was fired for moral misconduct a few months earlier. Two men. Two entirely different outcomes.

It’s a mercy of God that as we age our goals for end of life become more streamlined, focused. While in our younger years our dreams were all over the map, old age has a way of shaking them out and latching on to the ones that stick.

Early on in ministry I had a pastor/mentor say to me, ‘You know what my goal is? When I die, if they say ‘he loved God and he loved his wife and family’ then I’ve achieved my goal.’ At the time I thought that was incredibly lame. Years later, I get it. Such wisdom.

— an anonymous pastor

Aging Scott gets it, too.

Three verses after anticipating his own triumphant homegoing, Paul grieved about a man named Demas. Still bruised, the apostle sadly reflected over the tragic outcome of his former companion’s faith.

Howard Hendricks, a renowned seminary professor who died well in the Lord, interviewed 246 men in the clergy who had started out well but failed within two years. Here are some of the common threads he found in those 246 case studies:

  • None of the men was involved in any kind of real personal accountability.
  • Each of the men had all but ceased having a daily time of personal prayer, Bible reading, and worship.
  • More than 80 percent of the men became sexually involved with the other woman after spending significant time with her, often in counseling situations.
  • Without exception, each of the 246 had been convinced that sort of fall “would never happen to me.”

It’s not only pastors or church leaders who should be wary of finishing poorly. In a letter to a congregation in Greece, the apostle Paul offers this solemn charge: “So, whoever thinks he stands must be careful not to fall.” (1 Cor. 10:12)

Consider for a moment this alarming statement:

In American Christianity today, there are more defections than conversions. 

— The American Beliefs Study, 2022

There is plenty of evidence corroborating people leaving the institutional church, but the above annotation is taken from a study of those leaving the faith.

Jesus himself knew the sting of such numbers. As the gathering shadows fell across his popular ministry years, a raft of followers decided his way was no longer their way.

Finishing well is hard work. Paul called it a fight, a grueling race to be legged out. The world, the devil, and our greedy flesh each distract and frustrate us to no end. We drop the baton. Knock over a hurdle or two. Or three. We get downcast. We fall and lose precious ground. But we keep legging it out.

The race isn’t over. Wherever you are on the track, beloved, there’s still time to jump back in. Run for the prize. Compete for the crown. Be one of the 30%.

Keep fighting the good fight.

Stay the course.

And finish well.

Selah, and see you at the finish line, dear one.

the best of times, the worst of times: bethlehem and ramah

[5 minutes]

Happy New Year!

It is customary for many in our faith community to approach the new year with — in football lingo — a spiritual ‘fresh set of downs.’ So what’s one of the first plays we run? Right. We advance with a new Bible reading plan, right? My goal in 2025 is to tackle the New Testament along with the Psalms. Okay, enough with the football jargon.

So [opening my Bible], Matthew it is.

Matthew’s opening scenes are familiar for obvious reasons. My Advent meditations covered these passages and I quickly find myself here once again. I also spoke at a local church’s Christmas banquet using the same birth narrative as found in the first gospel. You may have read a version of it recently (“Keeping Jesus Out In Front“). I know this passage pretty well.

But, as is often the case for students of the Book, something can jump off the page that you’ve never seen before. You know what I’m talking about. That is what happened to me this morning.

Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men.

Matthew 2:16

Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah:
“A voice was heard in Ramah,
weeping and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be comforted, because they are no more.”

Matthew 2:17-18

In the same carol as “glad tidings of comfort and joy” is this tragic verse of inconsolable grief and sorrow.

How do you reconcile “good news of great joy” with “weeping in Ramah” …in the same breath?

Not even ten verses earlier, Matthew goes out of his way to stack superlatives in describing the mood of the Magi when they found themselves on the right track to find Baby Jesus. The rejoiced exceedingly with great joy! The wise men were so deliriously happy they couldn’t contain themselves. High fives, back slaps, whoops and hollers commenced!

But things looked a whole lot different in Ramah and other surrounding towns.

Herod was furious. The Magi had agreed to bring him the baby king straightaway, but they changed the script on him and kept the child’s identity and location a state secret. Hotheaded Herod was beside himself.

Who is this baby???

He would show them. Herod ordered a genocide of all the baby boys in the region and suddenly Judea’s Silent Night, Holy Night turned into terror. Like Egypt during the plague of darkness and death, only wails and loud weeping were heard across the land.

Okay. I didn’t like where this was going, but the Holy Spirit made me look. Here’s what I wrote in my Bible journal:

God will permit the deaths of innocents as he carries the story of redemption forward. There is weeping in Ramah though there be good news elsewhere.

Guido Reni’s Massacre of the Innocents

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times indeed. You can’t visit Bethlehem without hearing the wails of Ramah. That’s just how it is in this sad, tragic, very broken world.

Yesterday, in New Orleans, thousands were gathered on Bourbon Street to ring in the new year and enjoy the atmosphere around college football playoff game. Then, frenzy. Moments before a white pickup truck tore through a crowd of people, the streets were teeming with festive joy and frivolity. Seconds later, the sound of screams and sirens filled the night. Fifteen dead, dozens injured.

So what do we do with that paragraph I wrote? God permits the deaths of innocents, etc. How do we frame those words to people who are in shock over such a senseless act of terror? People who are likely to cancel you straight up for trying to pull the God-is-still-sovereign card.

I confess I want to keep my mouth shut. Just bury my nose in a book and don’t address it. But can we? There is the matter of timing, of course. Maybe don’t bring up Jimmy Carter’s political blunders on the day he died? There’s also the matter of courtesy. Waiting to be invited into the discussion instead of barging in and pontificating.

For the purposes of this post, I am speaking of an event that happened 2000 years ago not something that happened yesterday. The truth still remains, however. God does permit evil to bare its fangs now and then, but only in keeping with two incontrovertible rules:

  • God must win in spite of how everything looks right now.
  • the devil and his kingdom must be destroyed because it has been declared so from the beginning, and God can’t lie.

This world is broken and mercilessly mean, yes, but remember: God is broken-hearted by it; and he is the ONLY one with the power to change things.

Ramah is real. Rachel weeping for her children is our lot in this life. Evil people will do evil things and, I believe, 2025 is going to be filled with more evil and more weeping than in years past. Ramah is hard. Ramah is real.

But so is Bethlehem. “Jesus Joy” is real also.

Herod was the devil in Ramah, to be sure. But let’s not miss the bigger Story: Jesus still got born, shepherds told the news, souls got saved, the Church was born, Christ is exalted, the devil and his demons will burn in the lake of fire forever, and our King from heaven will return to dwell with us. And so shall we forever be with the Lord…in the eternal best of times. Weeping may last through the night, but the Man of Joy gets the final say.

Selah, beloved.