20pluscommunitydigestion
There is a great difference in excellency, usefulness, and comfort between people of clear, digested knowledge, and confused, undigested apprehensions. -Richard BaxterArchive for the human condition
means test
The LORD has strident words for Israel (the Northern Kingdom) through Hosea, but, at least in 1:7, the words for Judah (the Southern Kingdom) were conciliatory: mercy would still come Judah’s way in the way of deliverance from external forces. But the promise of deliverance would be, the LORD says, through unconventional means. Not by military prowess would Judah escape the imperialistic aspirations of Assyria.
It may be trying too hard to make a principle of a slight phrase, but I think there’s something to learning to trust God through unconventional means of accomplishing His purposes. Read the rest of this entry »
Advent musing, II
if you’re looking for reasons why to make time for preparing and participating in the Lord’s Table, here’s my take on how the observance of Advent almost requires it.
Do you remember ever reading the play by Samuel Beckett entitled Waiting for Godot? It’s the story of two hapless nobodies waiting for one who ends up never coming. The play ends where it begins, on a broad plain by a dead tree, and the scene never changes. And at play’s end, we are left not in admiration of these two poor sops’ patience, but in pity of their willingness to wait for what seems will never come. Read the rest of this entry »
Saturday Night….Life
Now that you may have tried your hand (your heart really) at Lectio Divina, it might lead you to consider this:
We tend to think of Saturdays and Sundays as air-tight compartments in the sense that they don’t have much relationship to one another. Saturday is Saturday’s business. Sunday is Sunday’s. But what if part of what it means to “do” Sunday properly entails a certain way of “doing” Saturday?
Here’s a quote from one of the Puritans, George Swinnock. He has something to say about preparing yourself as the sun sets on a Saturday for what is to come when it rises again Sunday. His words are so foreign to our sensibilities, I think. Read the rest of this entry »
pornography: a form of suicide
Pornography: ubiquitous, an inordinately lucrative industry, it’s very definition debated in the highest corridors of public discourse, and a devastation to innumerable relationships and careers.
This is an imagined story of what is probably an all too real experience, repeated more often that we’d care to know.
There was nothing particularly noteworthy about Richard. He garnered neither many complaints nor many compliments. He, like many his age, had parents who loved him, but they had their own marital problems-sometimes so severe their caustic words sprayed at each other like acid. Richard and his siblings, while still children, had always felt paralyzed whenever their parents fought, desperate for them to stop the angry shouting but never knowing how to intervene. As teenagers they resigned themselves to living in their parents line of fire and quietly retreating whenever tempers flared. Read the rest of this entry »
the fruit of the Spirit and its implications for marriage
They are now Mr. and Mrs. Brian Black (and, at their request, I presented them as Mr. and Mrs. Married-Filing-Jointly in a nod to their common profession of corporate tax), and they married last weekend. They picked the text. I tried to link its implications to marriage. The English Puritan, John Owen, said that no sermon (or wedding homily, for that matter) is fit for others until it has been preached to the preacher, himself. I’m reading it again for my sake this morning.
22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, and self control, against such things there is no law. 24 And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh in its passions and desires. 25 If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit. 26 Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another.
If you happened to be at the base of Mt Rainier or somewhere in the Himalayas, and you saw a man preparing to climb to the summit of either, outfitted only with a single rope and a granola bar, you might think for a moment that this man was brave and tenacious.
But it’s more likely that the outcome of his attempt to climb with only those items will reveal he was neither brave nor tenacious, but merely foolish. The climb before him would be magnificent and worthy of the ascent, but it’s treacherousness would require a kind of preparedness he did not account for.
You’re stepping into something this day that is both magnificent and treacherous. Read the rest of this entry »
sex in the Spirit
this from a little ditty on Galatians 5:16-26 a couple years ago
Say “desires of the flesh” in mixed company and you’re likely to get what? Smirks, chuckles, and people moving quietly away from you. Why? Because it seems an outdated phrase, or that those desires are, instead of reviled, now championed, exalted. What am I getting at? These desires are what many people would reason: “those are good things; they’re what make life worth living. Any proscription of them is just an outdated attempt at keeping people in line; or they’re overreactions to otherwise harmless expressions of pathos.”
But Paul puts these out here. And we’d be wise to consider what they’re really expressions of. Most people would see them for the most part as essentially harmless. But Paul means not only to clarify what is in opposition to the life guided and led by the Spirit, but to expose what those kind of expressions reveal about those who engage in them. For every single one of them—every single of these fleshly desires—is a good desire gone bad. A perfectly natural and holy desire twisted into something destructive, and in the end, pleasure-killing rather than pleasure-finding. They are desires divorced from their intended ends.
Consider fornication: Read the rest of this entry »
laugh at your work
in honor of our little getaway this weekend on His Will and Our Work, we pay homage to that hapless office of men and women who all dream for something. . .more.
bringing the close of the book, perhaps, close to home
Do you feel like the church has elevated marriage over singleness? Insinuating, if not articulating, that life begins when you
betroth yourself to another?
Or has the meteoric rise of divorce–even within the allegedly marriage-fortifying context of the church–sullied an earlier, more positive, view of marriage? Does the incidence of divorce and the precarious state of marriage insinuate that life might, in a sense, end when you say “I do”?
I’d like to wrap up our discussion of Tripp’s book on change and counsel by having you help us create a realistic-as-possible profile of someone in the church whose desire to be married has caused them to be so preoccupied with finding a mate, that one of two moods has emerged: either so despondent at the slight prospects of a marriage in the near-term, or so reckless in their pursuit of a mate. Specifically, I’d like you to envision how someone with either outlook would manifest that outlook in their day to day living. Read the rest of this entry »
beware not just the rank, but the rank-and-file
Cultivating the Quiet by Gary Thomas
More than 200 years ago, the English cleric William Law observed that “The lowness of most people’s virtue, the imperfections of their piety and the disorders of their passions … is generally owing to their imprudent use and enjoyment of lawful and innocent things. … We must not only abhor gross and notorious sins, but we must regulate the innocent and lawful parts of our behavior and put the most common and allowed actions of life under the rules of discretion and piety.”
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