Category: Devotional Nuggets

I know what you’re think­ing. You’re think­ing, “When I was a kid what I
need­ed for East­er was a bas­ket filled with can­dy. But what do I need
for East­er now that I’m all grown up?”

And the answer is: you need a bal­lad. You did­n’t know you need­ed a
bal­lad until just now, but you do.

Hap­py East­er!

Now on the first day of the week, at ear­ly dawn, the women went to the tomb, tak­ing the aro­mat­ic spices they had pre­pared. They found that the stone had been rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were per­plexed about this, sud­den­ly two men stood beside them in daz­zling attire. The women were ter­ri­bly fright­ened and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the liv­ing among the dead? He is not here, but has been raised! Remem­ber how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be deliv­ered into the hands of sin­ful men, and be cru­ci­fied, and on the third day rise again.” Luke 24:1–7, NET

I was skim­ming through the old Puri­tan book The Rare Jew­el of Chris­t­ian Con­tent­ment by Jere­mi­ah Bur­roughs when a pas­sage caught my atten­tion:

God­li­ness teach­es us this mys­tery, Not to be sat­is­fied with all the world for our por­tion, and yet to be con­tent with the mean­est con­di­tion in which we are. When Luther was sent great gifts by Dukes and Princes, he refused them, and he says, ‘I did vehe­ment­ly protest that God should not put me off so; ’tis not that which will con­tent me.’ A lit­tle in the world will con­tent a Chris­t­ian for his pas­sage. Mark, here lies the mys­tery of it, A lit­tle in the world will con­tent a Chris­t­ian for his pas­sage, but all the world, and ten thou­sand times more, will not con­tent a Chris­t­ian for his por­tion. A car­nal heart will be con­tent with these things of the world for his por­tion; and that is the dif­fer­ence between a car­nal heart and a gra­cious heart. But a gra­cious heart says, ‘Lord, do with me what you will for my pas­sage through this world; I will be con­tent with that, but I can­not be con­tent with all the world for my por­tion.’ So there is the mys­tery of true con­tent­ment. A con­tent­ed man, though he is most con­tent­ed with the least things in the world, yet he is the most dis­sat­is­fied man that lives in the world.

Empha­sis mine. Wow.

A lit­tle before this, Bur­roughs said:

A man who has learned the art of con­tent­ment is the most con­tent­ed with any low con­di­tion that he has in the world, and yet he can­not be sat­is­fied with the enjoy­ment of all the world. He is con­tent­ed if he has but a crust, but bread and water, that is, if God dis­pos­es of him, for the things of the world, to have but bread and water for his present con­di­tion, he can be sat­is­fied with God’s dis­pos­al in that; yet if God should give unto him King­doms and Empires, all the world to rule, if he should give it him for his por­tion, he would not be sat­is­fied with that. Here is the mys­tery of it: though his heart is so enlarged that the enjoy­ment of all the world and ten thou­sand worlds can­not sat­is­fy him for his por­tion; yet he has a heart qui­et­ed under God’s dis­pos­al, if he gives him but bread and water.

You can see more here.

I just saw a cool video of Joel’s prophe­cy (the one quot­ed by Peter in Acts 2) made by The Work of the Peo­ple

. It’s def­i­nite­ly worth tak­ing a minute and thir­ty-nine sec­onds to watch.

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Around 15 years ago, I heard Eric Treuil quote Dorothy Say­ers to the effect that the car­pen­ter from Nazareth nev­er built any shod­dy tables. It was fab­u­lous. I’ve been think­ing about that obser­va­tion off and on ever since.

I recent­ly stum­bled upon it again, this time in its orig­i­nal form. It’s found in the essay “Why Work?” by Dorothy Say­ers which appeared in her book Creed or Chaos

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Here’s one of my favorite pas­sages:

over her dead body divx The Church’s approach to an intel­li­gent car­pen­ter is usu­al­ly con­fined to exhort­ing him not to be drunk and dis­or­der­ly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sun­days. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his reli­gion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.

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Church by all means, and decent forms of amuse­ment, cer­tain­ly – but what use is all that if in the very cen­ter of his life and occu­pa­tion he is insult­ing God with bad car­pen­try? No crooked table legs or ill-fit­ting draw­ers ever, I dare swear, came out of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could any­one believe that they were made by the same hand that made Heav­en and earth. No piety in the work­er will com­pen­sate for work that is not true to itself; for any work that is untrue to its own tech­nique is a liv­ing lie.

…

[The Church] has lost all sense of the fact that the liv­ing and eter­nal truth is expressed in work only so far as that work is true in itself, to itself, to the stan­dards of its own tech­nique. She has for­got­ten that the sec­u­lar voca­tion is sacred. For­got­ten that a build­ing must be good archi­tec­ture before it can be a good church; that a paint­ing must be well paint­ed before it can be a good sacred pic­ture; that work must be good work before it can call itself God’s work. purse brite

The whole essay is well worth read­ing and I com­mend it to you.

Lis­ten­ing to a bad ser­mon is like eat­ing crab legs. It’s a lot more trou­ble than it should be, but you can still get a lot of meat if you are dili­gent.

So how do you do it?

Here are some tips that I some­times find help­ful, in order of pref­er­ence. I don’t want to make you too excit­ed: noth­ing is going to make a bad ser­mon good. But these might help mit­i­gate your suf­fer­ing.

1. Be mer­ci­ful. Preach­ing con­sis­tent­ly good ser­mons is a lot hard­er than it seems. Think about your worst day on the job and how you would like your cowork­ers and cus­tomers to respond with com­pas­sion and under­stand­ing. Now extend that same com­pas­sion to the preach­er.
2. Over­look the stu­pid stuff. Every once in a while even sol­id and reli­able preach­ers will say some­thing that’s com­plete­ly ridicu­lous — usu­al­ly when they ven­ture out­side their area of exper­tise. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly true when preach­ers begin using sto­ries to illus­trate a point they are try­ing to make. It can real­ly throw you for a loop. Tune it out the same way you tune out that one cousin at fam­i­ly reunions. Even your favorite book has some bor­ing pas­sages, but you judge the book on its high­lights. Judge ser­mons like­wise.
3. Be ran­dom­ly inspired. I learned this from Dary Northrop in a sem­i­nar: you should bring a note­book to ser­mons not because of how insight­ful and mag­nif­i­cent the preach­er is going to be, but because the Holy Spir­it will spark new and amaz­ing insights in you which are only tan­gen­tial­ly relat­ed to what is in the speak­er’s notes. Few ser­mons are so bad that there is no good­ness in them — even a three-year-old will say some­thing pro­found and/or hilar­i­ous if you lis­ten to them long enough. So wait for a clever turn of phrase, an obscure or unex­pect­ed Bible ref­er­ence, or a fact that you were hith­er­to unaware of and begin writ­ing furi­ous­ly. Doo­dle as well. Repeat as nec­es­sary.
4. Pre­tend it’s oppo­sites day. don t look now free down­load
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   had a tra­di­tion in his Chi Alpha min­istry. Once a year he would preach oppo­site: “Why You Should Not Pray”, “Why God Is Untrust­wor­thy”, etc. He did it dead­pan (well — as dead­pan as Har­low ever gets). The first time he did it he was wor­ried his stu­dents would­n’t catch on that he was mere­ly exag­ger­at­ing and then repeat­ing their own doubts back to them in order to demon­strate how ridicu­lous their doubts were, but it was a huge suc­cess. Even the guests got it. It became an insti­tu­tion. Ever since he told me that sto­ry, I game­ly pre­tend that a real­ly bad ser­mon is mere­ly the results of “oppo­sites day”.

5. Improve the ser­mon.
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   This is risky because it can lead to pride and also can be dis­rup­tive if peo­ple around you notice what you’re doing, but there are times when it’s your only pos­si­ble psy­cho­log­i­cal defense. There are two fun­da­men­tal kinds of bad­ness. There’s bad deliv­ery. That’s the best kind. The preach­er has good things to say, but the inabil­i­ty to say them well. The whole ser­mon can be spent fruit­ful­ly para­phras­ing and improv­ing the sol­id con­tent of the ser­mon. For exam­ple, you might reorder and reword the out­line for greater impact or log­i­cal flow. There’s bad con­tent. The preach­er is dis­tort­ing the text or not think­ing things through. That’s hard­er, but can be even more divert­ing. You can com­pose your own out­line from scratch on the same pas­sage or top­ic that the preach­er is endeav­or­ing to address. One or two of my best ser­mons has come about this way.

Final­ly, my apolo­gies to those who have had to endure a stinker from me. I know it has hap­pened before and have no doubt it will hap­pen again. It’s my job to be the best speak­er I can be and it is your job to be the best lis­ten­er that you can be. I’ll do my job whether or not you do yours, but if we work togeth­er this whole thing will go much more smooth­ly.

And a note to my pas­tor — relax, this was not inspired by your ser­mon this week. You did­n’t even preach. We watched a movie, remem­ber? 🙂

I was recent­ly think­ing about 1^st Tim­o­thy 2:5–6: “For there is one God and one inter­me­di­ary between God and human­i­ty, Christ Jesus, him­self human, who gave him­self as a ran­som for all, reveal­ing God’s pur­pose at his appoint­ed time.” (New Eng­lish Trans­la­tion)

These vers­es high­light the aspect of Chris­tian­i­ty that both­ers West­ern­ers most: its exclu­siv­i­ty. The notion that Jesus is the only way to God vex­es many peo­ple.

This morn­ing a thought occurred to me: almost every­one who believes in God believes that there’s only one way. Most peo­ple just don’t real­ize it.

For most peo­ple I know, their “one way” is being nice. Unless you are nice/­good/s­in­cere/al­tru­is­tic/em­pa­thet­ic/en­light­ened/ad­jec­tive-of-choice enough, you fail.

The way of nice­ness is no less lim­it­ing than the way of faith in Christ: it excludes peo­ple just as sure­ly and it is far more arbi­trary.

This is coun­ter­in­tu­itive to some peo­ple, so allow me to explain.

It is exclu­sive in that some peo­ple just aren’t nice enough. More on that lat­er.

It is arbi­trary in that the dev­il is in the details. How do you know if you’ve been nice enough? And what con­sti­tutes the right kind of nice­ness, any­way? After all, there’s no real rea­son to sup­pose that an infi­nite­ly smart Being would mea­sure nice­ness in the way that makes the most sense to you.

The Chris­t­ian prin­ci­ple of exclu­siv­i­ty makes more sense, for it flows from the sim­ple belief that Jesus is God in the flesh.

Think­ing about this for a sec­ond should make the rea­son­ing clear.

If you believe that Jesus is God, then to say you can come to God apart from Jesus is as non­sen­si­cal as say­ing you can go to Los Ange­les with­out going to Cal­i­for­nia.

In oth­er words, all that Chris­tians are insist­ing is that you can’t come to God with­out com­ing to God. This hard­ly seems con­tro­ver­sial. You may reject the premis­es of the argu­ment (that God exists or that Jesus is God), but grant­ed those two the belief can’t be cat­e­go­rized as extreme or bizarre. It’s just con­sis­tent.

The real prob­lem most peo­ple seem to have isn’t that Chris­tian­i­ty is exclu­sive. Their real prob­lem is that Chris­tian­i­ty appears to be unfair­ly exclu­sive. This is most often expressed as fol­lows, “What about those who have nev­er heard of Christ? How can God exclude them sim­ply because they haven’t heard of Jesus?”

There are actu­al­ly some very rea­son­able answers to those ques­tions. Here’s one, here’s anoth­er

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, and here’s yet a third. There are more where those came from — if this ques­tion dis­tress­es you then dig into it. You won’t agree with every­thing you read. I cer­tain­ly don’t agree with every argu­ment in three arti­cles I linked. Fig­ure out what you believe for your­self.

But here’s the impor­tant thing to real­ize: the same prob­lem con­fronts the nice­ness stan­dard. What about those born in the wrong time or the wrong place? Some of your ances­tors owned slaves in accor­dance with the cus­toms of their cul­ture (this is true regard­less of your eth­nic­i­ty) — did they fail a test they did­n’t know they were tak­ing?

Some of them like­ly burned cats to death for fun. Do they fail the nice­ness test mere­ly because they were born in the wrong time or in the wrong place?

For that mat­ter, what of you? Who knows which of our actions our grand­chil­dren will deem immoral? Per­haps you have been born in the wrong time and place to achieve a rea­son­able stan­dard of nice­ness.

You might object that we should judge peo­ple rel­a­tive to the stan­dards of their own cul­ture, so we don’t need to wor­ry about what stan­dards our grand­chil­dren will hold us up against. Per­haps. Believ­ing that would require you to stop judg­ing dic­ta­tor­ships, sweat­shops, mod­ern-day slave traf­fick­ing, and racism in oth­er cul­tures. Also, you will need to let the Church off the hook for things like the Cru­sades and the Inqui­si­tion. This is just one the prob­lems that emerges from the notion that moral stan­dards are com­plete­ly rel­a­tive to cul­ture or per­son­al­i­ty. There are sev­er­al detailed cri­tiques avail­able: here’s one

, here’s anoth­er, and here is a third (that last one is a pdf writ­ten by Car­di­nal Ratzinger before he became Pope).

So if your main beef with Chris­tian­i­ty is that it’s exclu­sive, exam­ine your own beliefs care­ful­ly. You might be sur­prised to dis­cov­er just how exclu­sion­ary they turn out to be.

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