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

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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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I was chatting with De Wen (a student in our ministry) yesterday and he made a comment that really resonated with me: “God wants friends, not fans.”

A lot of us settle for being fans. I often settle for being a fan. But there’s so much more available — like Abraham, we can be friends with God (Isaiah 41:8, James 2:23). As he did to the disciples, Jesus yearns to say to us, “I no longer call you servants but friends” (John 15:15).

But the temptation to be a mere fan is strong. In Jimmy Tate’s memorable phrase, we substitute praise for prayer. We allow the life of the church to displace our own spiritual journey and we live vicariously through the pastor’s insights or the worship leader’s zeal. Like a dutiful fan, we turn out for the game (Sunday morning) and cheer at all the appropriate places. But we don’t call the coach after the game to congratulate him or shoot the breeze. We don’t invite him over for a victory bbq. That’s the stuff a friend would do.

We’re just fans, so we go home and talk about how great the game was.

And we miss out on something wonderful.

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