Traveling man

When I took my new position with the denomination I serve, I was told I would be traveling about once a month. When Sharon and I discussed that dynamic, she said, "You like to travel. This will give you more opportunity." What I've discovered is that I enjoy travel under two circumstances. My wife is with me OR I only travel a couple times a year. The travel itself isn't always that fun. For instance there are times when "No Smoking" rooms in a motel seems to refer to the fact that no one has smoked in that room...for the past five minutes, or "Free Wireless Internet" means that it is wireless internet free (their router is down so there is no internet connection), or the motel you chose is a half hour away from where it should have been.

What God does once I get there is great fun and great to be part of. I've seen God work throughout California, Arizona and Texas (the states I've traveled to, so far). He uses different people in different places under different circumstances, but through us all (and in spite of us all) He is building His kingdom, enlarging His family.

There's a lesson here for me. The journey may not always be great. But what God is doing is great. What a privilege to join God as He works in individuals (including me) and as He builds His church.

Sin and the Wife Who Loves Me

After reading my last post, my wife asked me if there was anything going on in my life that had specifically prompted the topic on which I wrote. I had to think back to what I had written. It was about the struggle against sin and the power of the resurrection working in us as God's children. I was happy to report to her (and now to anyone who reads this blog) that while there was the usual self-centeredness and self-absorption going on in my thoughts and actions, there was not a recent sin that ranked high on the sin-o-meter that we use to rank the heinousness of our thoughts and actions.

That got me thinking. While I am glad that there was no "huge" indiscretion to have to confess to Sharon, there seems to be a sliding scale we all use to judge how we're doing in this thing called practical sanctification or holiness. I guess it is normal (and I think I could go to examples in Scripture to suggest it is also biblical) to rank sins according to their effect on us, those around us and our relationship with God. In Scripture, for instance, some sins seem to rise to the level of needing to be disciplined by a local church. Others are those we need to confess, commit to avoiding, and move on. John Stott has been helpful in weighing this by suggesting that private sins need to be confessed and dealt with privately (unless they become life dominating sins, even if no one else knows about it). Personal sins (against one other person or a small group of people) need to be confessed and dealt with personally. Public sins need to be confessed and dealt with publicly.

The point of today's musing is two-fold. One is that, while there may be more noticeable consequences to some sin, all sin affects me and harms my relationship with God and with those with whom I have relationship. From God's point of view, as the one who is completely holy, there is no sliding scale, no sin-o-meter, no greater or lesser breach of His standard.

The second is that my wife loves me enough to ask the tough questions. Think about it a minute. There was an answer to her question that she really didn't want to hear. But she loved me enough to risk hearing it so that if she heard it, she could point me to Christ and to accountability and to whatever steps I might need to take to repair my relationship with God, my biological family and my church family. That is a great love.

The Power of His Resurrection

There is a Russian devotional classic entitled The Way of a Pilgrim. The first line reads, “By the grace of God I am a Christian man, by my actions a great sinner…” Certainly this anonymous 19^th century Christian was echoing the words of Paul in Romans 7 where he confesses, “I decide to do good, but I don't really do it; I decide not to do bad, but then I do it anyway. My decisions, such as they are, don't result in actions. Something has gone wrong deep within me and gets the better of me every time. It happens so regularly that it's predictable. The moment I decide to do good, sin is there to trip me up. I truly delight in God's commands, but it's pretty obvious that not all of me joins in that delight. Parts of me covertly rebel, and just when I least expect it, they take charge. I've tried everything and nothing helps. I'm at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn't that the real question?”

Paul goes on to answer the question. “The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does. He acted to set things right in this life of contradictions where I want to serve God with all my heart and mind, but am pulled by the influence of sin to do something totally different.”

The answer, it turns out, is found in the events that took place in Jerusalem a couple millennia ago. We are only days away from focusing on the life, death, burial and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is in Jesus that we find the ultimate answer to our moral dilemma. Paul referred to it in his letter to the Christians around Ephesus. Early in his letter Paul prays that they would know “what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come.” The resurrection was proof that God had accepted, as payment in full, Christ’s sacrifice of himself in our place. In so doing, he secured forever the salvation of those who respond to God’s grace by faith.

We will all continue to struggle between the “now and not yet” of knowing that we are fully saved by Christ’s sacrifice and yet living on in these limited, sin-conditioned bodies with minds that have years of experience in choosing what we think is in our own best interest. This is one reason Paul had to tell the Philippian believers to “Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.” I’ve always appreciated Paul’s candor. “Not only.” Paul knows we need no command to look out for our own interests. What we need to do is not stop there. We also need to look to the interests of others. The power to do that comes from being in a responsive relationship with God the Father through the Holy Spirit who lives in us.

A bit later in Paul’s letter to the Roman Christians he writes, “In his Son, Jesus, [God] personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that. The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn't deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us. Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God's action in them find that God's Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life.”

As we look forward to Resurrection Sunday, we need to be reminded that it is not just a Christian form of celebrating Spring. The bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ affirms that our sins are forgiven and because our sins are forgiven, we are given the power of the Holy Spirit to move us from what we are to what we can be. May we all know the power of His resurrection.

Messy, but worth it

I currently finished Eugene Peterson's book, Under the Unpredictable Plant, for probably the fourth time. In it I discovered a section that I hadn't underlined before. The context is how messy ministry is, but his analogy from the experience of marriage is powerful in its own right.

"Lovers quarrel, hurt and get hurt, misunderstand and are misunderstood in their painstaking work of creating a marriage: apologize and explain, listen and wait, rush forward and pull back, desire and sacrifice as love receives its slow incarnation in flesh and spirit. In any creative enterprise there are risks, mistakes, false starts, failures, frustrations, embarrassments, but out of this mess--when we stay with it long enough, enter it deeply enough--there slowly emerges love or beauty or peace."

What a deep joy for me to know, by experience, the truth of these words. Sharon and I are approaching our 33rd anniversary. Our marriage, like most, has been messy and challenging and a lot of hard work. It has also been full of amazing, deep and abiding love, "the slow incarnation in flesh and spirit." Daily we commit to staying with it long enough and entering it deeply enough to be there as love emerges. My prayer is that more and more couples, especially those who know Jesus, will also learn the joy within the mess.

Hanging with my kids

I have said on more than one occasion that I would write my book about parenting after I see how my grandchildren turn out. I am still convinced that would be wise since I won't know, for sure, how transferable my parenting was until I see the next generation. But having said that, (a tip of the hat to Bernie S) I must pause and say how pleased and amazed I am that my children grew up to be adults I like to hang out with. All three of my children (now adults) are the kind of people you want to spend time with. All three are all the kind of people you look for when searching for a friend. And probably the best thing, at this season in my life, is that they seem to like hanging with me, too.