Mathetes

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart,     and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him,     and he will make straight your paths." (Proverbs 3:5-6) If we were to compile a list of short Bible verses that encapsulate the life of the believer, this would surely make that list.  But this kind of total trust is not natural to us.  In some ways, the longer we walk on this earth, the better mechanisms we develop to try to handle the trials of life on our own.  Often, it is ironically our God-given strengths that we employ to this end.  But where we place our trust is what we ultimately look to as "god", even if that god is self.  In his Small Catechism, Luther said, "A god is that to which we look for all good and in which we find refuge in every time of need.  To have a god is nothing else than to trust and believe him with our whole heart."  For me, one of the biggest areas I struggle with trusting God i...

It's interesting that one of the criticisms of non-religious folks is that we're using "religion" as a "crutch."  Years ago, I would have become defensive and argued at the idea, but today I happily admit that Jesus is like a crutch but so much more.  Why the change of heart? Often we're tempted to think that our spiritual walk with God is a lot like physical therapy for person recovering from a crippling injury.  When many of us first come to believe, we imagine we're like someone who just awakened from a horrible accident and received the diagnosis that our legs don't work.  We rely heavily on God, especially at first, like a recovering man would with crutches or a walker.  And we imagine that as we work our spiritual muscles, as we do our disciplines and try hard to be good people, as we do more spiritual therapy, we get stronger.  God lets us walk through some hard times too, perhaps, and that gives us the extra push to work out a little hard...

There are some things we get ourselves into trouble with that are the result of direct poor choices we have made.  There are other things that trouble us because they are afflictions we did not directly choose, burdens seemingly placed upon us that seek to destroy us.  Most of us would say that the first describes sin -even all sin (which often has lumped in with it things like depression and anxiety)- and the second describes something else, such as having a debilitating illness.  But in the context of what the Bible teaches, these overlap and both describe sin.   Many sins involve deliberate, poor choices.  Take adultery, for example.  Still, we know from Scripture that even bad decisions stem from what's already in the heart.  Other sins or spiritual maladies, in particular what our spiritual forefathers would call “besetting sins," are more heavily on the spectrum of crippling afflictions than they are deliberate poor choices.  To underst...

I have at least three things in common with everyone I will meet, no matter what gender, race, sexual orientation, or political persuasion.   The first is that we're both created by God as His image-bearers and placed in this moment in human history.  The second is suffering.  This person before me either has suffered, is suffering, or will suffer.  The third is that we're both "sinners" -spiritually lost, dead, and bankrupt, in ourselves, in need of God's grace, forgiveness, and life found only in Jesus.

Below is an example of how the proper distinction between Law and Gospel is both practical and pastoral.   Chesterton's quote "We fear men so much because we fear God so little.  One fear cures another," is true, for all I understand.  I remember reading a whole book on this subject called "When People are Big and God is Small."  I was desperate to find a solution to what I was painfully experiencing, which some had diagnosed (and which I self-diagnosed from reading too many internet articles) as "fear of man."   I remember as I began reading the book, I was excited.  Many things written in the book resonated with me, and I had some hope.  But as I approached the end of the book, my countenance and hope had fallen.  Why?  In retrospect, I believe it's because though I had hoped for a solution, something I can do to change this, to free myself, and the truth is that the book was long on diagnosis and very short on a useful prescripti...

 John was by all appearances a good husband.  He always remembered their anniversary, and was diligent in doing things like helping his wife with the kids, buying her flowers, and being kind to her.  He read all the right books, was part of the latest fad movements in the Church that focused on man's responsibility, and he even led men's ministries to help teach other men how to do what he did. It was their tenth anniversary, and John was certainly not going to forget that.  He came home early from work with a bouquet of long stemmed roses.  His wife opened the door, and he handed her the roses.  "Oh, thank you, John! I love them!" she said.  Confidently, he replied, "Think nothing of it.  I'm just doing my duty like I always do!"  Upon these words, her countenance dropped.  The roses fell to the ground, and she turned and headed to the bedroom in tears. Bewildered, John’s first reaction was to become angry.  After all, as he played...

Being offended is the new pastime, but it doesn't have to be.  Long before it became cool on social media to be offended, I took up the sport of holding onto offense.  I've been a true pioneer in the art of brooding, a regular Tom Brady, a man ahead of his time, and I know I'm not alone in that.  But holding onto offense is like the worst kind of sport you can play.  The only ones involved in this game are you and those unwilling participants within the radius of the steam fuming out of your nostrils.  Any spectators who get close enough to watch are more like witnesses of a slow train-wreck.  Plus, there's no amazing come-back story where the score gets flipped in overtime and your team, the "good guys", win.  There are no wrongs righted in the making of this movie, and there's no happy ending to it. The only thing that happens, in our cosmic protest, is we hurt ourselves and those closest to us.   The offense game is  addictive, though...

When I was younger, I took a trip to England.  During that short time, I was probably most fascinated by our stop in York.  Aside from the incredible Yorkminster cathedral we toured and the creepy "ghost tour" that we took, I was struck by how the city is surrounded by a stone wall.  The more I learn of medieval and ancient history, the more I understand how common this is because, for much of history, a wall around a large city was a critical component of the city's structure, strength, and security, providing a sense of safety to inhabitants and a deterrent to unwanted outsiders.  In a way, city walls also acted as physical container for group or cultural identity for all who "belonged" to that city. But a city that was broken into and had no walls was defenseless, weak, provided no security for its inhabitants, and was therefore easy pickings for outsiders looking to steal what they can.  Rather than having a place for refuge, the inhabitants would scatter at...

I took this photo 8 years ago.  Though I remember being in a fairly good place that day, I frequently went to this bench tucked away on a path in the woods to read and pray.  I went there often during some pretty dark times.  I brought my restlessness, I brought my anguish, and I went to seek after God.  Most of the time, I did not leave there feeling any different.  In fact, during much of that season, what I experienced most of the time was silence.  The skies seemed empty. In the Psalms, there is a phrase that is repeated often.  "Why do You hide Your face from me?"  Consider Psalms 13, 27, 44, 88, and 102, to name a few.  I am thankful for these Psalms because, among other things, they normalize the experience of what we perceive as God's absence.  The idea of God "hiding His face" speaks of His presence turning away, His hand seemingly withdrawing from our lives.  These are hard places to be in, for we know one thing well:...

Fear is a thing, but there's a thing thing about fear.  It must be faced and dealt with it or it will deal with you.  It will do its work, seeping out like a poison, strangling you and choking those you love in ways you don't see because you're too focused on the hands around your own neck. When I was a kid, I had one of those big styrofoam airplane models, and we would launch it off the back porch.  It was a 747, maybe about 3 feet long, and it came in four big pieces that squeezed together.  During one launch, the foam bird took a hard turn and crashed into the earth, snapping a wing.  I tried to repair it with super glue, but I quickly learned that super glue dissolves styrofoam.  Not only was the plane not fixed well, it never flew the same and wound up in the trash.   Fear is like super-glue on styrofoam.  When fear dominates us, we try to hold our life together through control, but it dissolves and destroys what it touches. In a way, fe...

 If God is God and I am not, and if God's Word is true, then what God says about me (and the rest of the human race) is also true, including where it says that my biggest problem is that, in my natural state, I want to "be like god."  I want to run my life my way, on my terms.  I want to justify myself, build my own meaning and identity and sense of righteousness.  And so in this sense, apart even from any idea of a God who judges, God is a threat to me.  His sheer mysterious existence is an unwelcome reminder that I am a creature, that I am not God.  I do not possess the answers to all the mysteries.  His eternal being as the One who holds all the answers, who rules over human history without explaining Himself to me, and to whom I owe my existence and allegiance, threatens my delusions of self-mastery and demand to be autonomous.  What will He do with me?  Rather than wanting to humbly bow my knee, in my flesh I want him out of my way....

In the mornings, I like to come downstairs to make coffee for April and me.  As I'm waiting for the water to heat up and the coffee to brew, I like to sit quietly for a few moments in my thoughts or to pray.  Usually, its nice and quiet, but some mornings it's hard to concentrate because our son's room is adjacent to the living room, and he likes to go to sleep watching shows on his TV.  Sometimes that TV is *loud*, and I have to find ways to drown out the voices.  I'll put a fan on, or I'll turn on the living room TV and crank some white noise.  Still, the voices bleed through. There's another voice that we like to drown out, too, but it is even more relentless in how it cuts through our attempts to drown it out.  It's not an audible voice, but it is no less real.  This voice haunts us with reminders of how we fall short of our humanity.  We try to cover it up with bravado.  We try to turn it into a motivational voice for self-improvement....

 Martin Luther, the 16th century German reformer, is one of my heroes.  Among many things, Luther taught that there are two fundamental stories in this life:  the glory story and the story of the cross.  The glory story is the natural story of all of us, fueled by our desire to secure some kind of identity and security and significance for ourselves in the face of what we know is there: our finite limitations and, ultimately, our death.  The story of the cross, on the other hand, teaches us that the glory story is essentially a lie.  There is no path to self-glory, to self-security.  It's a myth, a closed circle that ends in death.  In fact, my addiction to my glory story is my real problem.  It chains me to myself, curves me inward selfishly.  But what the cross story offers us, in our union with Christ, is freedom through death to the glory story and resurrection to the new creation where we now belong to Someone and something bigger t...

Forgiveness is one of the most unnatural and difficult things anyone can do, and the difficulty is proportional to the real or imagined size of the offense.  I say that it is unnatural because the natural person lives as though there is no God, at least not functionally.  Unless God has done a work in a person's heart to reveal His grace to them (and their need for it), the most natural thing in the world is for a person to say, "No, I won't let it go.  I won't forgive that person.  They did something that is too awful and has made my life something I didn't want."  The natural person is all about this life.  They are all about their form of justice.  They do not believe that God will ever make things right.  They do not believe that God permitted it for a reason.  They only see that what they wanted that was taken or lost. It matters not how illogical unforgiveness is.  You can explain how unforgiveness doesn't truly restore anything th...

In the suffering and death of Christ on the cross, we have three loud voices spoken to our hurts.  First, we have a voice that understands what it is to suffer.  He was rejected unfairly.  He was the object of ridicule and whispers behind the back.  He was betrayed.  He suffered an agonizing death.  He identifies with our hurt, and, as those who belong to Him, we identify with His.  Some only want to stop at this, however, and therefore don't find what it takes to heal.  They want to be affirmed, validated (which, depending on the wound, can be understandable) but not to move on and change.   Second, there is a loud voice that proclaims from the cross, "This was required for YOU."  The cross of Christ is the public indictment of our sinfulness.  We see that we also *cause* hurts, even out of the hurts we've received.  We see that we also transgress against God and neighbor.  We need forgiveness, too.  In this way...

I woke up this morning from another rough night's sleep.  Nasal congestion, a headache, foggy brain, scratchy throat.  Allergies, again, it seems, and probably a little sleep apnea. It's been pretty bad lately, despite my attempts to find the right combination of medications and to drop a few pounds and get in shape to aid my night time respiration.  As I'm writing this, on mornings like this... I don't feel invincible like I once did.  I feel like a slow foretaste of death.  As my dad says, "Getting old sucks!"  And that's just it... I'm not old.  I'm barely to my mid-forties.  I'm relatively healthy.  But the difference between how I feel today and how I felt just a few short years ago is palpable.   As I'm reading through David Gibson's book, Living Life Backwards, I've been thinking about death a lot, which probably sounds morbid at first blush.  However, I appreciate how Gibson walks us through the words of the Preacher in...

These are crazy times. What I am struck by, and have been struck by over the past number of years, is how incorrigibly religious we are. I'm not talking about what church we belong to or what organized faith we claim to ascribe to. I'm talking about how we turn literally anything into a "religion" in the worst sense of the word. I see it happen today with politics and with just about any social issue or cause that is out there. What does it mean to "religionize" something? It means at least these three things: 1. We turn that thing into the way we mentally divide the world into good and bad, part of the solution of part of what is wrong in the world. 2. That thing is viewed as at least part of the solution for fixing the world. ("if we would all just... then everything would be better") 3. That thing becomes part of our sense of righteousness and identity. We're on the "good" side, and those other people aren't. We're...

I remember kneeling down closer to make out the Latin inscription on the grave stone, as we all walked about the Charter St. Cemetery in Salem. This particular stone belonged to Christian Hunter (died March 18, 1676), the first wife of Captain Richard More, the only one of the Mayflower Pilgrims to take up residence in and be buried in Salem, MA. The words etched just below the primitively macabre winged-skull read, "HODIE MIHI, CRAS TIBI". My Latin is a little rusty, so thanks to Google I was able to translate into the sobering English phrase: "Today me, tomorrow you." It's one of those things that stops you in your tracks and cuts through all the layers of "stuff" that constantly occupies our minds and hearts. It makes me think of what the writer of Ecclesiastes said (Ecc 7:2): It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart. As on...

As Christians, we are exhorted to be examples to others.  Christian parents teach their children to be examples to others -to younger siblings, to peers in school, etc.  But it raises the question... an example of what? "Well, we are to be a light." Okay, I agree.  But a light to what?  To whom?  This needs to be fleshed out a bit more, I think.  Otherwise, we can easily run the risk of being an example of something other than we intend. I've talked to young teens who are raised in wonderful Christian families who feel the pressure to be an example to people, and they have struggled because they have thought this means that they never laugh at inappropriate things, they never complain, never show any negative emotions, etc.  They almost feel as though they have to be perfect, and while they are very sweet and well-meaning, it can sometimes end in a result they don't want.  It can just make peers feel bad.  They aren't pointed to Ch...

When a fellow believer tells me how disenchanted and depressed they feel because they fell and did some bad things or don't even seem to have a heart for God anymore, I hope I can always remember to tell them this: "Cheer up.  You're much worse than you think." The only thing that happened is that you discovered a little more of what already resides in your heart.  But God has seen it all the whole time and still delivered up His Son for you. The power of the Gospel is not in it's ability to make us feel good about ourselves or minimize our sin.  It is in its ability to slay the old Adam with the truth of our foolish condition and create in us a man of faith, who doesn't live for himself but for Him who died and rose from the dead for him.