"To Him be glory forever": September 2020

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Standing In Awe

This morning I finished reading the Call of the Wild to our boys. Recently our family had seen the movie remake and so, having a copy of the book since I was a child, I decided to read it to them. One of the things that stood out to me this morning was the way the story’s central character, a dog named Buck, was portrayed in the closing pages.

He’s a dog, but a quite remarkable dog. The experiences of the past year have transformed him, inside and out. Stronger than any ordinary sled dog, more fierce and wild than any wolf. His owner, to whom he was devoted, has died and he has cast his lot with a pack of wolves. He stands among them as one of their own, but also as a creature who is very different from them. The wolves accept Buck as their leader and gather around him with what is best described as awe. They are like him, but unlike him. They share the same basic image but they can never be him. They can never equal him.

This afternoon I was reading Psalm 22 and these thoughts on the Call of the Wild came to mind as I read verse 23, which says this in the second part:

“All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him, and stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel!”

The “him” of the psalm is God, the Lord God Almighty. The One True God. The Maker of heaven and earth. We humans are created in His image, and in some ways like Him, but we are also so very unlike Him. Our human nature continually seeks to see Him in ways that aren’t quite true. To make Him more like us than He really is. To look on the Son, who is fully God in every possible way, as merely our friend, rather than to hold Him in awe as our Savior and Lord.

Today I want to encourage you to look to God. See the Father. See the Son. See the Holy Spirit. See how you share in God’s image, but even better, to see how God is completely different from you and I, differences that are all for the best. Differences that leave you and I standing in awe as we glimpse Him and His holiness.

Tuesday, September 22, 2020

The More Things Change…

…the more they stay the same. Such is life during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I started writing this post 6 days ago and had written just that first line before going onto work on a different project. I had an idea for a post, wrote the first line, and then planned to get back to it the next day. Little did I know how the next few hours would unfold.

After dinner that evening Robin and the kids spent some time outside, while I went off to take care of some pastor business. An hour later one of the boys called me on Robin’s phone, telling me that Kat had been hurt and that there was an ambulance at the house. I arrived home to see Kat laying in the yard while the ambulance crew tended to her. She had fallen about 6 feet and landed on her shoulder, neck and head.

The initial assessment looked pretty good but the ambulance crew consulted with their doctor and decided to transport her to the hospital in Farmington to make sure. The fire department sent over help to get Kat on the stretcher and into the ambulance. Robin went with Kat and I got the boys settled in to bed, laying out clothes and blankets should we need to go to the hospital in the night.

A bit after 10 PM I got the call that the CT scans and other tests were all negative and that the girls were ready to come home. I woke the boys, loaded the van, drove to Farmington to pick up Robin and Kat, drove home and helped get the boys back to bed, and then got onto bed myself just before 3 AM. Quite a day!

The picture is from our family’s worship last Sunday. It marked the 27^th Sunday this year that we have gathered around the computer instead of in the church next door. When all of the pandemic restrictions started last March I had no idea that they would still be in place over half the year later. And today, Tuesday afternoon, the first day of autumn, I don’t have any idea for how much longer they will continue.

Last week Kat’s fall was a close call for us, in terms of potentially major life changes. They could have been the kind of changes that I know well from my previous career in health care. She was spared and for that we are thankful. Worshipping around the computer is getting a bit old but I know that Robin and I were both glad for it this past Sunday, instead of any number of other ways things could have gone.

Sometimes things change and sometimes they don’t. The pandemic has been a big change but six months into it many of those changes are simply our new routines. One thing that hasn’t changed is the God who holds all things in his hands, all the time.

Powerful, good, holy, merciful, kind, righteous, just, wise, loving, trustworthy, reliable…you name whatever things about God are your favorites. Whatever they may be he is those things perfectly and constantly. Life has changed and it will change again. God remains the same, and that is a good and precious truth to hang on to.

Sunday, September 13, 2020

The Timing Will Always Be Right

“I keep praying and praying but nothing seems to be happening.” I’ve heard that comment and similar thoughts several times over the past few weeks. People have sought me out, as a pastor, to talk about what is, or is not, going on in their lives. The problems are serious. Their prayers are sincere. But the answers…where are they? Their seeking of answers seems to be more a matter of when, rather than how.

My answers are somewhat indirect. Yes, God hears your prayers. Yes, God cares about what is going on in your life. No, God isn’t too busy with other things. Yes, God has more than enough power to do whatever is needed in your situation. No, God never abandons his children. No, God never fails to keep any of his promises.

I often find myself bringing up the matter of the point-of-view. There is a tremendous difference between our human point-of-view on any situation and the view that God has of the matter. Our is close-up and limited. God has the wide-angle, seeing all the pieces, the connections with other pieces that we can’t even imagine, and the grand scale of time. And God sees his purposes in the situation, which is often beyond the ability of ours to imagine, and always directed towards his own glory.

And so my bible reading plan brought me to Psalm 69, where verse 13 says:

“But as for me, my prayer is to you, O Lord. At an acceptable time, O God, in the abundance of your steadfast love answer me in your saving faithfulness.”

David, the psalm’s author, is in a world of trouble as he cries out to God for rescue. Follow the link and read the psalm for yourself. It’s a bad time in his life and he desperately calls on God to save him. But what stood out to me, in consideration of my recent conversations, was David’s recognition that God’s answer would come in God’s timing.

In the midst of his peril David trusts God to answer his prayer when God thinks it is best, and not according to the desires of David at any particular moment. David’s perspective here is personally helpful to me. First of all, as a pastor talking and praying with people here in Dulce, it is a biblical reminder that we have to wait on God to determine when he will act. But in a more personal sense it is a reminder that applies to some of my own prayers and the answers I would desire for them. I lift them to the Lord day after day, and sometimes year after year, trusting him to answer when the timing is right, from his point of view. He knows innumerable things about the situation that I may never know, but I do know that the action he takes in each and every situation, will always be right.

Sunday, September 6, 2020

"Therefore despair not..."

I’ve had a number of conversations this past week with people of faith and the struggles in their lives. Some were cases of bad choices acted upon and others were people who are in a time of hardship that never seems to get better. What is going on? When is God going to make things better?

I’m sometimes a little hesitant to connect hardship in life with spiritual warfare. No where in Scripture does God promise His children that all will be easy. The Bible is filled with the stories of people who are real heroes of faith, but when you read their stories you always find struggles, sometimes very hard ones, even to the very end of their lives.

But spiritual warfare does exist, as Paul writes in Ephesians 6:12:

“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”

There can be times in life where as we struggle we may wonder if perhaps God is no longer with us. Why didn’t he act when temptation came my way? Is he no longer concerned about what happens to me? Has he turned away completely?

Someone who found herself thinking those thoughts many times in her life was Elizabeth Bowes, who was the mother-in-law to Scottish reformer John Knox. Bowes wrote to Knox asking if the sin she was tempted towards, and often acted on, had permanently separated her from Christ? Knox’s response was:

“Therefore despair not, for your troubles are the infallible signs of your election in Christ’s blood, being grafted in his body. As for the assaults of your enemy, sometime alluring you to idolatry, sometime to other manifest iniquity, so that you obey him not altogether, there is no danger; but rather, the feeling of his continual assaults is the sign that he [Satan] has not gotten victory over you, but that there is a spark of faith, which you’re heavenly Father shall never suffer to quench or put out, but will keep and increase the same for the sake of his promises.”

I read that passage from Knox a few days ago and as I write this blog post I hear in it echoes of Isaiah, John and Paul. Several threads of scripture woven together to remind us that God’s grasp on his children is not a joint activity, in that he only holds us as long as we are interested in being held, but rather that once he grabs us he never lets go.

Never. Nothing that we do changes the fact that when we have faith in Jesus we belong to him forever. It is pretty easy to remember in good times but something we can lose track of during hardship. Our circumstances don’t change the fact that, as Knox states, we are “grafted in his body.”

If you are a Christian and going through a hard time right now, despair not, for God is holding you and he will never let you go.

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

What If?

Today my email had a collection of articles from a site called Flipboard. Each day I get an email from them of articles that they think I may be interested in. I have no recollection of how I got signed up with Flipboard in the first place, or how they decide what to send me links to. I do know that almost every day I skim the titles and quickly delete the email. Almost every day, but not today.

Today there was a link to something titled Top Seven Worst-Case Scenarios For The Human Species. Following that link led to a collection of videos, all beginning with “What If…?” What if we lost the Amazon rainforest? All mosquitos disappeared? There was no salt in the world? The sun exploded tomorrow? The world lost oxygen for five seconds? A coin-sized black hole appeared on earth? We burn all the oil?

Those are some pretty incredible scenarios. Previous to seeing the Top Seven article in my mail I don’t think that I had ever given any of these topics even one second of serious thought in my entire life. But now that I am aware they exist I’m tempted to say ruh roh! Or zoinks!

I’ll confess that I didn’t watch a single one of the videos. I’m guessing that each one in some way shows how critically important the particular topic is to the overall matter of sustaining human life on planet earth. Even the one about mosquitoes, which given that I've lived most of my life in Wisconsin and Minnesota I tend to doubt. Instead, the pastor in me jumped in a different direction, to a different scenario. What if a single human being died outside of having a saving relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ?

Science doesn’t have much to say about that scenario, but the Bible does, in many places. The first phrase that came to my mind as I followed this question was “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” In a story my Bible titles “The Narrow Door” Jesus looks ahead as he is asked about those who will be saved. In the story Jesus makes it clear that not all are saved, saying in verse 28:

“In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God but you yourselves cast out.”

There is even a Wikipedia article on the weeping and gnashing of teeth, noting it as “a description on the fate of the unrighteous ones at the conclusion of the age.” Even without knowing any of the specific details it's easy to see that being cast among the unrighteous is going to be pretty horrible, at best.

But things don’t have to be that way, for Jesus very freely offers something infinitely better, and, in fact, the only alternative to the weeping and gnashing of teeth, which is eternity, in his very presence. The story my Bible titles “I Am the Bread of Life” includes these words in verses 35-40:

“Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.””

As bad as the worst-case scenarios for human life that sparked this whole blog post may be, there is something truly horrible that faces every single person on earth. The never-ending weeping and gnashing of teeth for those who are eternally outside the Kingdom of God.

But there is also the perfect solution, and its available to you, right now. And that is to turn from your sin and turn to Jesus, believing in Him, and His promises, as your Savior and Lord.

Today I stood in a cemetery and preached the funeral of someone whom, at best, I barely knew. I do know that he believed in Jesus and it was a joy to stand there say, as Paul taught, that for the believer to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. May you be among those gathered, forever, in the presence of the Lord Jesus.