You love justice and hate evil. Therefore God, your God, has anointed you, pouring out the oil of joy on you more than on anyone else. Myrrh, aloes, and cassia perfume your robes. In ivory palaces the music of strings entertains you.
Psalm 45:7-8, NLT
I enjoy laughing. I’m told I have a pretty good laugh and I’ll take it. My male and female friends are some of the funniest people I’ve ever met and they also happen to love Jesus more than anybody I know. Sandy, the life of my party every day, is a hoot to live with; she has lightened my mood so many times I’ve lost count. I love laughing with her.
A couple I pastored years ago enjoyed the way I presented Jesus as being as real – with real emotions – as you and I. They gifted me with a print of the “Laughing Jesus” and it’s still one of my favorite depictions of the Savior rendered by any artist.
Jesus, Man of Joy
Jesus would be the life of any party. Based on the scripture above, he has more joy than the happiest person in the room. He is delighted (“stringed instruments make you glad” v8) when he hears good music. I think he’d sidle up to the house deejay and suggest a tune and everybody at the party would enthusiastically approve.
There have been many gloomy kings, sad kings, bad kings, and even some mad kings, but few glad kings. David came as close as any with his hymnbook and his harps, but many of David’s great songs are drenched with tears. Jesus will be a happy King—anointed with the oil of gladness above His fellows! His reign will fill the world with sunshine and song.
– John Phillips
Just today I was reading someone encouraging us that reading the psalms wasn’t just reading the words of David or some other Hebrew worshipper. We’re actually given the pleasure of singing along with Jesus much as he sang them with his followers. That hit me in a sweet spot. Singing alongside the Savior!
Sure, there are dirges and choruses in the minor key, but think of the volume of joyous anthems and Hebrew ditties. Picture Jesus, Man of Joy, with head thrown back, belting out hosannas and riffing on bouncy melodies and beaming as he scans the happy faces around the fire, urging them to join in with gusto.
Far be it from me to miss any party Jesus is attending. My name’s on the list for the Party of parties – the Mother of all parties – that’s coming. You know, the one Psalm 45alludes to.
There’s always party-poopers, of course. One day the Cold Water Committee™️ showed up to crash a dinner party one of the newly-minted disciples threw for Jesus. Levi invited all his buddies from his former life, raising the ire of the party police. “Why do you eat and drink with such scum?” they demanded to know.
Who the prickly pontificates called “scum” Jesus called his “friends.”
It’s gonna be a “Friends-only” Party (FOP) in the New Creation. Jesus will, no doubt, be laughing and singing as he serves us (!!!) and we will marvel at how beautiful and full of joy he is. We are going to feast and dance and laugh until the cows come home. And those kind of cows, my brothers and sisters, they never come home.
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?” Whoamong 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.
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.”
