Jon Bloom's Blog, page 16

Your Life Is Not Boring

Sometimes we need a good dose of reality therapy — a reminder that reality is far wilder and more wonderful than we often realize.

We have this strange tendency to take our own existence, others’ existence, and the world we live in for granted, as if these are just mundane facts. As if living on a giant sphere spinning at 1,000 miles per hour, while orbiting around a gargantuan fireball at about 67,000 miles per hour, in a solar system that’s traveling around the Milky Way at over 500,000 miles per hour, while the galaxy itself is hurtling through space at more than 1.3 million miles per hour is just sort of ho-hum. And the real exciting action is taking place on Facebook or Fortnite.

No, we need to pull our heads out of our virtual worlds of self-preoccupation and remember what’s real — what’s breathtakingly, gloriously real. Let me try to revive your memory by riffing on just a few astonishing things about you.

You’re Here!

First, you’re here. When was the last time you really thought about that? You’re here! And you’re here because God wants you here — regardless of the circumstances surrounding your birth, how much or little others have valued you, your abilities or disabilities, how sweetly other people have nurtured you or how terribly they have abused you, what kind of sinner you were or how long you were. You are here because God chose here and now for you.

You exist because God wanted you to exist (Acts 17:26–28). And as a Christian, God chose to make you his child in Christ. He began to love you as his own before the universe as we know it existed (Ephesians 1:3–6). And God is pursuing you with goodness and mercy every day of your life (Psalm 23:6) — yes, every day — and he will bless you exceeding abundantly beyond anything your remarkable but still relatively limited imagination has yet conceived (Ephesians 3:20).

That is your reality. Do you believe it? I mean, really? Not as a mere abstract theological fact, but as something that sometimes makes you catch your breath and your knees go a bit wobbly. Does it ever hit you that you are God’s idea and God’s creation — that he intended you to be?

There’s far more to your existence than lunch and soccer practice and Netflix and turning in that report and that broken relationship and the congressional elections and retirement savings and Abercrombie & Fitch. Yes, as Jesus said, your “life is more than food, and [your] body more than clothing” (Luke 12:23). So much more.

You Are Alive!

Now, let’s just think for a moment on the amazing truth that you have this thing called “life.” Where did you get your life? You got it from God (1 Corinthians 7:17). You are alive? Do you even understand what that means? No, you don’t — and neither do I!

No human being has been able to define exactly what life is; we just know that life is. Scientific definitions of what life is are really just descriptions of how living matter differs from nonliving matter and how living matter behaves. We might know a lot about what propagates life, sustains life, and ends life, but we can’t capture life’s very essence, that mysterious thing that is life. And that’s because all life comes from the Life (John 14:6), the one Great Existential Fact (Exodus 3:14).

Do you know how rare you are as a living being? Life in the physical, observable universe is very, very, very, very rare. And that’s a dramatic understatement. The conditions that must be met for life to exist are so restrictive that, far from it being likely that other intelligent beings exist in the cosmos, it is nothing short of a miracle that any life, not to mention intelligent life, exists anywhere.

And you — statistically speaking, you should not exist. Given the incalculable billions of sperm and ova combined with the incalculable billions of circumstantial twists and turns over the course of human history, any one of which could have resulted in you not being here at all, it’s nothing short of a miracle that you are. You, as a living being, are so rare, and as a statistical probability, so unlikely, we can scarcely begin to comprehend the marvel of your existence. You’re alive because, against all the obstacles and probabilities, God gave you life.

You Have a Brain!

And speaking of comprehension, of the teeniest fraction of universal matter that is alive, you are of the rarest kind because of your brain. That thing in your head that’s allowing you to read and contemplate this right now. Your brain is the most complex thing ever discovered in the material universe. Nothing else even comes close.

We often talk about the brain in clinical terms as if it’s just a normal, matter-of-fact thing. It is not a normal, matter-of-fact thing. It’s a miracle of matter. Through an incredibly complex nervous system, your brain manages your vision (sight), audition (hearing), gustation (taste), olfaction (smell), and somatosensation (touch), equilibrium (balance), digestion, cardiovascular system, pulmonary system, epidermal (skin) system, immune system, and a whole bunch of other systems, and synthesizes them all together so that you can go about your life thinking about and doing other things.

And what kinds of things are those “other things”? Grinding prescription eyeglasses and building skyscrapers and managing newspapers and choosing homeschool curricula and designing space shuttles and engaging in cross-cultural evangelism and preparing delicious meals and architecting a landscape and programing computer software and installing indoor plumbing and undertaking Bible translation and installing kitchen cabinets and projecting trends in global finance and coaching youth soccer teams and painting with oils on canvas and planting 500 acres of wheat and teaching graduate level English literature classes and installing water wells in arid regions and conducting pharmaceutical research and composing symphonic scores and planting churches and monitoring grocery store inventory and writing a difficult email and organizing a public library and repairing automobiles and planning convenient gas station locations and playing hide-and-seek with children and placing a satellite into orbit and creating GPS maps that talk to you while you drive and composing a sonnet and laying the footers for a suspension bridge in deep ocean water and committing Scripture to memory. These and a hundred billion “other things” are the result of the human brain — like yours.

Who You Are

This is only the tip of the iceberg of the awesome reality of your existence. Take this in any direction you choose and just let yourself think about the astounding thing it is to be alive and conscious in this incredible world.

Don’t let the morbid and horrific commandeer your thoughts, neither allow your weaknesses, discouragements, sins, or defects to cloud your skies. These are realities, but they are subordinate, fading realities. Cast what you must upon the cross, but then pull up and soar above introspection. Remember for a while that your existence — and the world’s — are wild things, awesome things, fearful and wonderful things (Psalm 139:14). And remember who holds them together “by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1:3).

You exist because God wanted you to exist and you are who you are, what you are, how you are, where you are, and when you are because God made you (John 1:3), wove you in your mother’s womb (Psalm 139:13), called you to be his own (John 10:27; Romans 8:30), and assigned you a life to live (1 Corinthians 7:17). And this infuses your entire life — its good and evil, its sweet and bitter, it’s health and affliction, its prosperity and poverty, its comfort and suffering — with an unfathomable dignity, purpose, and glory.

Jesus Understands Your Loneliness

Do you ever think of Jesus as lonely? Certainly his moments in Gethsemane and on Calvary were uniquely and terribly lonely, but what about the rest of his life?

In some sense, he may have been the loneliest human in history.

Loneliness is what we feel when we’re isolated from others. Loneliness often has less to do with others’ physical absence and more to do with feeling disconnected or alienated from them. Or misunderstood by them. In fact, these are far more painful species than mere absence, because we feel the isolation of being despised and rejected.

Which is precisely how Isaiah prophetically described Jesus: “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). Given who Jesus was, this experience would have begun decades before his public ministry even began. Which means Jesus is able to sympathize with your loneliness far more than you might have previously thought (Hebrews 4:15).

Unsurpassed Homesickness

Jesus humbled himself to be “born in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:7). We have little ability to comprehend just how much this cost him. He experienced both the absence of his Father and human rejection at levels we can scarcely begin to imagine.

When I say that Jesus experienced the absence of his Father, I don’t mean that he didn’t enjoy spiritual communion with the Father through the Spirit on earth. He did, and it was sweeter than anything you or I have yet experienced (Matthew 3:17; John 1:32; 5:20).

Yet in order to be incarnated, he left, in some sense, the manifest and holy presence of his Father and the glory he enjoyed there from an eternity before the world existed (John 17:5). He had to endure living in a world under the power of the evil one (1 John 5:19). Think of when you’ve been far away from your dearest ones in a lonely, perhaps even desolate, place. Speaking to them by phone may have been sweet, but it was not the same as being with them. This is a poor analogy, but it makes the point. As the apostle Paul said, there is nothing like being face to face (1 Corinthians 13:12). Jesus would have experienced a “homesickness” for the presence of his Father far more profound and painful than anything we’ve experienced.

Alone in the World

Now, imagine what living in this world was like for him. Jesus was without sin (Hebrews 4:15). We might think this sounds like a pleasant problem to have. I doubt it was only pleasant. I suspect it tormented him. If Lot experienced daily torment while living in Sodom because of the “lawless deeds that he saw and heard” (2 Peter 2:8), how much worse was it for sinless Jesus constantly surrounded by sinners and demonic powers, rarely if ever able to fully escape their defiling presence?

And imagine what Jesus’s childhood must have been like. Do you remember what it felt like to want friends? Jesus was truly human and would have longed for human friendship too. But lacking the sin nature everyone else had, and having a divine nature no one else had, he would have been a very odd person. Holiness makes sinners want to flee. Jesus would have stuck out morally like a sore thumb, never quite being understood, frequently despised and rejected, even within his own family.

White Sheep of the Family

His parents knew who he was and loved him deeply. But they wouldn’t have fully understood him. How could they? Nor would they have been able to protect him from others’ stinging remarks or cruel mocking over his strangeness.

I wonder how much of that came from his siblings. His brothers and sisters (Matthew 13:55–56) would have grown increasingly self-conscious around him as they aged, aware of their own sinful, self-obsessed motives and behavior, while noting that Jesus didn’t seem to exhibit any himself. And they couldn’t have helped notice the unique way their parents deferred to him. What kind of sibling resentments grew? We know that all was not harmonious because Jesus’s own brothers didn’t believe in him (John 7:5), possibly not until after his resurrection (Acts 1:14).

Jesus was a sinless person living with sinful parents, sinful siblings, sinful extended relatives, sinful neighbors, sinful countrymen, sinful foreigners, and sinful disciples, not to mention the sinful spiritual entities he would have had an unprecedented awareness of and sensitivity to. No one on earth could identify totally with him. No human being could put an arm around him as he sat in tears and say, “I know exactly what you’re going through.” Jesus’s experience of rejection, sorrow, and grief would have begun as soon as he was old enough to comprehend and communicate.

And we think we feel weary. How did he bear it? What did it mean for him to sing psalms like, “My soul is greatly troubled. But you, O Lord — how long?” (Psalm 6:3)?

Most Lonely Moment in History

But that was all a precursor. There was a supreme moment of loneliness, so dark and deep that only Jesus has ever experienced. It was on the cross the moment he became sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21). In that unfathomably horrible, incomprehensibly lonely moment, he felt forsaken by his Father (Matthew 27:46) and all those he loved. He was ravaged physically and spiritually “beyond human semblance” (Isaiah 52:14). Having spent his earthly life estranged by his sinlessness, now Jesus was estranged by the sin he willingly bore — our sin.

No one has experienced or understands the depths of loneliness like Jesus.

End of All Loneliness

But he can and does understand your loneliness. He can sympathize with this weakness more than you know (Hebrews 4:15).

Jesus doesn’t merely understand your loneliness; he’s destroying it. Because he bore the sin that estranged and alienated you from God and died on your behalf, you are no longer truly a stranger or alien, but you are a fellow citizen with all the saints and a member of God’s family (Ephesians 2:19).

Loneliness, like every form of suffering, is passing away for those who love him. Ahead of you is the full family fellowship of God and all of his redeemed saints forever. The day is nearing when you will know him as you have been fully known (1 Corinthians 13:12).

So “with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that [you] may receive mercy and find grace to help” with every lonely need (Hebrews 4:16). And be a saint who helps others experience a foretaste of heaven by extending to them the loneliness-destroying love of Jesus.

Bored to Life: How to Fight Spiritual Apathy

Midsummer. American parents of school-aged kids know this as the season of boredom. The summer holiday’s novelty has worn off. Many fun things so anticipated during the final weeks of school have been enjoyed. Free time has become routine. Parents are informed that there’s “nothing” to do. This provokes parental eye-rolls with statements to the effect, “We wish we had the luxury to be bored.”

But the truth is, parents too experience boredom. It’s just that in our phase of life, boredom doesn’t take the form of “there’s nothing to do.” We’re constantly churning through a never-ending list of responsibilities, obligations, tasks, and commitments. There’s always more to do than we can get done. Our boredom takes the form of a loss of the joy of wonder.

Whatever boredom looks like at any particular moment, we need to pay attention to it. It’s telling us something important.

What Is Boredom?

What is boredom? Very simply put, boredom is disinterest. It’s the condition of finding some thing or someone or some subject or some task or some event or perhaps most everything uninteresting.

For example, when one of my kids says, “I’m bored; there’s nothing to do,” they don’t literally mean there’s nothing to do. They mean, “I can’t think of anything to do that interests me.” Which is why they tend not to make this statement to me because they know I’m likely to provide them something to do — something they’re not particularly interested in doing.

This is why we can be very busy and very bored at the same time. Because boredom is not the opposite of busyness; it’s the opposite of interest. It’s not a “things to do” problem; it’s an interest problem. Which means it’s a joy problem.

Is “Bored” the Same as “Lazy”?

You are unlikely to find the word “bored” in your English Bible (unless it’s referring to drilling a hole in something). But you will find words like “slothful” (Proverbs 12:24; Ecclesiastes 10:18; Matthew 25:26), “sluggard” (Proverbs 6:6; 21:25), “lazy” (Titus 1:12), and “idle” (Proverbs 19:15; 2 Thessalonians 3:11), and the Bible makes it clear that these are sinful character traits.

So, is being bored the same thing as being slothful, sluggardly, lazy, or idle? Not necessarily. There are many reasons we might feel disinterest: sleep deprivation, illness malaise, depression, grief, disappointment, etc. But it might be a momentary indulgence in slothfulness, or it might even be slothfulness wearing boredom as a disguise.

The Wrong Treatment

In the common American English vernacular, “bored” is generally understood as a temporary experience of disinterest. The degree to which it’s sinful depends on what’s fueling it. But everyone experiences boredom with some regularity and, though we find it unpleasant, it doesn’t typically alarm us.

But we think of “slothful” or “lazy” as something different — persistent, habitual negative character traits, which we would not attribute to everyone and which we see as damaging, even dangerous, to the lazy person and those he affects (this is the biblical understanding too). For example, a worker might be bored (disinterested) in his work, yet still work diligently. But a worker who’s lazy will work negligently, to the detriment of everyone else.

However, diagnosing the difference can be complicated. A lazy person very rarely is honest enough to categorize himself as lazy and is more likely to refer to his experience as being “bored” (and the things he wants to avoid doing as “boring”). This shows that boredom doesn’t carry the same negative moral implications as laziness — at least in American society. But used this way, it’s laziness wearing boredom as a disguise.

The point of this dissection of boredom and laziness is essentially this: we need an accurate diagnosis in order to effectively treat a disease. Boredom and laziness are not necessarily the same problem. We need to understand what boredom is telling us so we don’t fight boredom with the wrong treatment.

What Boredom Is Telling Us

So, what is boredom telling us? When we feel bored, we are essentially asking the question, “Where’s the joy?” Boredom is what our hunger for happiness feels like when we’ve momentarily lost sight of or confidence in what will satisfy it. And as such, it is a warning and an invitation.

Think of boredom as a dashboard warning indicator that starts dinging. Something has caused your interest level to run low and it’s draining your joy. What is it? Perhaps it’s a physical or emotional health issue that needs care. Perhaps you’re being tempted to indulge laziness. Or perhaps, even more seriously, you’re indulging an idol of selfishness and you’re trying to drink from “broken cisterns that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13).

One of the great, appalling tragedies of selfishness is that the more we yield to it, the less capacity we have to enjoy anything else — anything other than what we believe caters to our narrow personal preferences, enhances our personal reputations, and advances our personal interests. Whatever is making our boredom indicator ding, it is God’s merciful warning that something important requires our attention.

But we can also think of boredom as God’s gracious invitation for us to explore and discover the spectrum of joy in the love for us that he has laced through the height and depth and length and breadth of his special and general revelation. If boredom is an expression of our happiness hunger, God extends to us this great invite:

“Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.” (Isaiah 55:1–2)

An Infinite Supply of Interesting

G.K. Chesterton said, “There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person” (Heretics, 13). When we feel disinterested, and it’s not a health issue or a more complex sin issue, we should not believe the deceptive mood that we’ve exhausted what interests us. We should assume we’re mentally and imaginatively out of shape, and we need to work out some more.

The Bible is an inexhaustible treasure trove of truth, and the world and people around you are unfathomable oceans of wonder that God has given you to explore. Let boredom tell you the same thing that getting too winded on too few stairs tells you: you need to increase your capacity. Yes, it will take some hard work. Everything that’s worth anything always does.

Listen carefully to your boredom. It’s telling you something important. It’s a hunger for happiness. Don’t just feed it the junk food of easy entertainment and stimulation or the malnourishing diet of selfish pursuits — unless slothfulness, chronic discontentment, and spiritual lukewarmness (or worse) is what you’re aiming for. If you heed boredom’s warning, it will show you your broken joy cisterns. If you accept its invitation, it will lead you to where the true fountains of joy are found.

Don’t Underestimate the Enemies of Your Soul

Spiritual warfare is not a metaphor. It would be more accurate to say that human warfare is a metaphor — and an expression — of the even more real and pervasive spiritual war being waged all around us. And unless we engage it seriously, we will not be serious players in it, and may be swept away by it.

Demonic powers are in no way impressed by our intellect or other abilities. What impresses them is the strength of the Spirit of God and the weapons he provides. And these have divine power to destroy the works of the devil and cause us to stand firm in the evil day (2 Corinthians 10:4; 1 John 3:8; Ephesians 6:13).

And God wants us to stand our ground and not yield an inch. More than that, God wants us to take back ground that Satan has seized and free others he has enslaved through fear (Hebrews 2:14–15).

Schemes of the Devil

The evidence that a soldier takes his battle seriously, and understands the strength of his enemy, is seen in how he arms and prepares himself. That’s why when Paul launches into the most famous spiritual-warfare exhortation in the Bible, the first thing he says is this:

Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. (Ephesians 6:10–11)

Like any other war, there will be no defeating our spiritual enemy if we do not have the right equipment. Wars waged carelessly are wars lost. Protective armor and offensive weapons matter.

And all we have to do is look at the armor that the experienced warrior lists to understand the nature of this fight: the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shoes of the gospel, the shield of faith, and the sword of the Spirit (Ephesians 6:14–17). This is a war over what is real, which means it is psychological warfare at its worst.

Look around you to see the destruction it wreaks. When humans are deluded over what’s real, they think and do terrible, unspeakable evil, individually and collectively. Look carefully, longer than you want to. See the horrors, too diverse to begin to catalog. What you are seeing are the outcomes of the devil’s schemes. This is what he wants to do to you and those you love. You know that, because you know what goes through your mind and what pulls at your depravity.

You can stand against these schemes, and more than that, you can defeat them and drive your enemy back. But you need to understand who you’re up against and take them with all seriousness.

We Do Not Wrestle Lightweights

Listen again to how Paul describes these foes:

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. (Ephesians 6:12)

Many Christians in the West respond to Paul’s description of these spiritual beings like they do to descriptions of smallpox: a terrible scourge that really doesn’t affect our lives today. They wouldn’t say this in so many words, but they live like it. Which is a massive mistake, and likely evidence that they aren’t really engaged in the war.

Try taking spiritual territory from “cosmic powers” and you know what happens? All hell begins to break loose. We are assaulted with oppressive psychological warfare, we are tempted to suspect people we love, sickness hits, relationships go sideways, churches strain at the seams, and more. If you’ve been in the battle, you know what I mean. Press against a spiritual stronghold of evil, and very quickly our flesh will scream at us to get away from there.

This is not meant to scare us away from the fight. We have a superior power and better weapons at our disposal (1 John 4:4). But we ought not underestimate our enemy.

If we are going to follow Jesus, we will confront beings far beyond our natural selves, beings who are more powerful than we thought and who attack us in ways we don’t expect, beings who will do everything they can to delude us about what is real while trying to destroy us and everything we love.

Stand Your Ground, Take Your Enemy’s

If speaking like this makes us tremble, good! Soldiers only take their armor and weapons seriously, and learn how to use them, if they believe they really need them. God wants us to know that we really need our armor and weapons.

But God also wants us to know that our armor and weapons make our enemies tremble too. They are scared to death of God. And nothing on earth is more dangerous to a demonic cosmic power than a Spirit-filled Christian who wears his armor and wields his weapons. That person is pure destruction to evil. The fiery darts of deception are ineffective against a shield of faith. And the word-sword of the Spirit hews holes in the demonic line.

Battles are intense affairs. But if we take the battle seriously, and use the divine equipment God provides us, we will “stand against the schemes of the devil . . . in the evil day” (Ephesians 6:11, 13). Do not underestimate your enemy, but do not underestimate your spiritual Ally either. We will win.

“Therefore take up the whole armor of God . . . and having done all . . . stand firm” (Ephesians 6:13). Stand your ground. Do not yield an inch. More than that, press your enemy back, and take his ground. He will fight back, and it will get ugly at times. Don’t panic. Fight. “With God we shall do valiantly; it is he who will tread down our foes” (Psalm 108:13).

Spiritual Growth Is Not an Accident

We have a small garden at our home. Usually we enjoy looking at it through our kitchen window in the summer. But we haven’t enjoyed it much lately because among the perennials and annuals we’ve planted, a fair amount of weeds are growing. Why? Because I haven’t tended the garden for a number of weeks. Why? Because I’ve been busy doing other things and neglected our garden.

Perhaps my neglect has been a dereliction of duty — putting lesser priorities ahead of our garden. Perhaps my neglect has been the result of choosing not to be derelict in more important duties. Either way, our garden is reminding me that what a gardener does or doesn’t do really matters.

Our Work Matters

If a gardener wants certain flowers or shrubs or grass or trees to grow in his garden, he must actually cultivate the ground and plant them. But that’s just the beginning. He then must persistently and diligently work to nurture and protect what he’s planted from drought, weeds, pestilence, and pesky critters (like my hole-digging dog).

This even holds true for a Calvinist gardener. If I believe it doesn’t really matter how (or if) I do my gardener’s work — because God will make sure every garden he ordains to exist will grow and flourish — then I hold an errant understanding of how God’s sovereignty and my responsibility work.

When the apostle Paul rightly said that “God gave the growth” to the church plant in the garden at Corinth, he fully believed his work of planting, and Apollos’s work of watering, were the necessary means of that God-given growth (1 Corinthians 3:6). Paul knew he didn’t create the “seed”; he was entrusted with it. Apollos knew he didn’t create the “water”; he was entrusted with it. Both knew they didn’t create the “sun” or “soil” or other environmental factors necessary for the “plant’s” growth. And yet they both worked as though their labors were vital to the survival of the “plant,” because their labors were vital. If the seed wasn’t planted, the plant wouldn’t grow. If the plant wasn’t watered, the plant would die.

Our “gardening” labors being necessary to the germination and growth of “plants” in the gardens of God do not detract from God’s sovereign jurisdiction over all things. This is how he has sovereignly ordered our roles in the gardens he gives us to tend. He gifts us with the incredibly gracious dignity of real responsibility — meaning, what we choose to do or not do affects real outcomes in our gardens.

And yet God does not mean for us to be crushed under the weight of fear lest we fail in our responsibilities. Instead, he promises to supply us all we need to do our gardening work if we learn to live like plants.

Gardeners Like Plants

In the kingdom, just like all Christians are sheep (John 10:27) and yet some are called to the work of shepherding (1 Peter 5:2), all Christians are plants, and yet we’re also called to the work of gardening. Now as plants, this is how God intends for us to live:

Blessed is the man . . . [whose] delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. (Psalm 1:1–3)

Notice what is vital to the flourishing of the “tree”: the “tree’s” meditating frequently on God’s word to nourish faith. If that condition is not met, the tree’s roots won’t tap into the stream, and the tree should not expect to yield fruit in its season or have healthy leaves. Jesus essentially says the same thing in this text:

“Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” (John 15:4–5)

Notice what is vital to the flourishing of the “branch”: the “branch’s” continual attachment to the vine. If that condition is not met, the branch will be unable to bear fruit and will wither (John 15:6).

When it comes to us, as “plants” (trees or branches), we see the same design of our sovereign God: what we do, or don’t do, really matters. How precisely our real responsibility works with God’s ultimate sovereignty is not a mystery God means for us to solve. It’s a truth he means for us to trust. The important thing we need to know is that if we draw from the stream or from the vine, we will have all we need to tend the gardens God gives us.

How Do Your Gardens Grow?

We are all “plants,” and we are all “gardeners.” Gardening is, after all, the original job God gave to man when he “put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15). Like Adam and Eve, God has given us “gardens” to tend, and he expects us to work and keep them. And the work we do really matters to the condition of the gardens.

What gardens has he given you? And as the quite contrary Mary was asked in the nursery rhyme, “How do your gardens grow?” What have you planted? For a plant only comes forth from a planted seed. How are you nurturing what’s been planted? For gardening requires persistent, diligent work.

Do you know which are your primary gardens and which are your secondary gardens? Are your primary gardens receiving your primary attention? You likely cannot care well for every garden you wish to grow. At times, the needs of your primary gardens will require you to neglect some secondary gardens for a season, and other secondary gardens altogether. For God promises his stream-fed trees and abiding vines sufficient grace for every good gardening work he gives them to do (2 Corinthians 9:8), but not every gardening work that appeals to them or that he has assigned to someone else.

The little garden outside our kitchen window is a secondary garden currently neglected due to time-consuming needs in more important “gardens.” I hope to give it attention soon, but for now, it must wait. And while it waits, it’s reminding me that when it comes to any of my gardens, what I do and don’t do really matters.

God Doesn’t Waste Words

God doesn’t waste words, but sometimes it seems like he does. The Bible contains plenty of information that seems superfluous to us, information we tend to breeze over too quickly.

Take, for example, the fact that the apostle John tells us that the disciples caught 153 large fish the morning they encountered the resurrected Jesus (John 21:11). That’s a bit of trivia only first-century readers with knowledge of Galilean fishing would appreciate. If John had a good editor, this detail might have been cut. The precise number of fish doesn’t really add anything essential to the story.

Or does it? Actually, John 21:1–14 contains a number of odd things that leave us scratching our heads. Until it hits us. Then we see that John had a good Editor after all.

Pay attention to the odd things in the Bible — and there are a lot of them. Like we used to think of tonsils and appendices and “junk DNA,” these details might not seem at first to serve any real purpose, but this isn’t at all the case.

The “Essential” Story

First, let’s look at the story in summary. Seven disciples, including Peter and John, are tired of sitting around doing nothing. Peter decides to do something productive, something he knows well: fishing. And as a first-century, Middle-Eastern commercial fisherman, he knows the time for fishing is at night, so that he can sell fresh fish at market in the morning. The other six figured they’d join him. But fishing turned out to be unproductive too. They got skunked. They caught nothing all night, except sleep deprivation.

That is, until a stranger showed up on shore at dawn. He, like most people who come upon other people fishing, asked how the fishing was going. And like most fishermen who’ve been skunked, the reply was curt. The stranger then tells the veteran fishermen to try the other side of the boat. They do, and their nets fill to bursting with fish. John then announces to the others that the stranger “is the Lord” (John 21:7). Peter dives in and swims to shore, leaving the others to drag in the motherload.

When everyone finally gathers on the beach, they find that Jesus has already prepared them a fish-and-bread breakfast. And then Jesus goes on to give Peter some instructions.

That’s the basic story, with no superfluous details.

The “Nonessential” Details

Now, let’s go back and pick up the “nonessential” pieces off the editorial cutting floor and see what we find.

The first piece is a list of names: “Simon Peter, Thomas (called the Twin), Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee [James and John], and two others of his disciples were together” (John 21:2). What’s missing in this list? Two names. John counted seven disciples, but only names five, leaving two anonymous. Why? Good question — it’s not like James, Nathanael, and Thomas are vital to this story; only Peter and John are mentioned again. Interesting.

Second, Peter’s wardrobe. Why do we need to know that when Peter realized it was Jesus on the shore, “he put on his outer garment, for he was stripped for work, and threw himself into the sea” (John 21:7)?

The third is the “fish” piece: “Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, 153 of them. And although there were so many, the net was not torn” (John 21:11). Obviously John was impressed by this number. But since almost all of the story’s readers would lack the context to find this number impressive, why would God want it included?

If we look close enough, the “nonessential” pieces are telling an important story of their own. The idiosyncratic details, like who gets named, what Peter does with his clothes, and how many fish were caught, are the idiosyncrasies of an eyewitness report — of someone who actually saw the events. Isn’t this the way we all tend to report things that really happened? We include some details and not others — often details our experiences have conditioned us to notice. These details are not nonessential. They may not directly contribute to the main point of the story, but they tell us important things about the human author of the story.

The Oddest Detail

There’s one more detail I’d like to pick up and examine. When Jesus invited the guys to breakfast, John inserted a very strange comment: “Now none of the disciples dared ask him, ‘Who are you?’ They knew it was the Lord” (John 21:12). What an odd thing to say! They didn’t recognize him?

Yes, they did, but not because of his voice or appearance. Let’s remember, these were men who had spent the better part of three years living and working with Jesus. Yet they hadn’t recognized his voice from the shore, though they had heard him preach many times. Now up close, even though they had encountered him twice before since his resurrection (John 21:14), there was something different about the way he looked and sounded. What clued them in to who this was? The fish! When John saw the nets fill with fish, it hit him: “It is the Lord!” (John 21:7).

John doesn’t elaborate at all on why Jesus was hard to recognize. So why is it important?

Let me just give one reason: the disciples’ experience of not recognizing Jesus corroborates other independent post-resurrection reports. Think of Luke’s account of Jesus’s appearance to Cleopas and another unnamed disciple on their way to Emmaus in Luke 24:13–35. Jesus walks and talks all afternoon with these two men, who also knew him well, yet they didn’t recognize his voice or appearance — not until he revealed himself in a familiar act: the breaking of bread.

Do you see the connection? What happened in John 21 is similar. The seven disciples didn’t recognize Jesus until he revealed himself in a familiar act: filling empty fishnets. They are two independent, different reports that corroborate testimonies, increasing the credibility of both reports.

Pay Attention to the Oddities

Pay attention to the oddities in the Bible — and there are a lot of them. Seemingly extraneous things are not extraneous at all. What they have to say is important because God chose to include them.

The odd details in John 21:1–14 are not the main points of the chapter. Nor are my observations the only things to see in these details. But they do illustrate that God is not sloppy in what he includes in Scripture. The details are there for a reason. Look carefully. Ask questions. See more.

Tonsils, appendices, and “junk DNA” are not anatomical nonessentials. And God doesn’t waste words.

The One Thing You Must Never Lose

God has given you a foremost responsibility, one thing above all else to carefully steward, upon which everything else in your life depends: keeping your soul.

Where do I get this? From something Moses said in his valedictory address to the people of Israel, which is the book of Deuteronomy:

“Only take care, and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life. Make them known to your children and your children’s children.” (Deuteronomy 4:9)

The people were standing on the brink of what they had dreamed about for generations. Four hundred horrible, humiliating years of slavery, and forty years of disciplinary wilderness wandering, now were behind them. Before them lay the land God had promised Abraham to give to his offspring, long before Abraham had any offspring (Genesis 12:7). Now here they were — the offspring of Abraham numbering in the millions — about to receive the promise. The moment was, in the true sense of the word, awesome.

But the promise came with a condition: you must keep your soul. And if they didn’t, if in their prosperity they forgot God and placed their hope and trust elsewhere (called “idolatry”), Moses warned them the consequences would be devastating:

“You will soon utterly perish from the land that you are going over the Jordan to possess. You will not live long in it, but will be utterly destroyed. And the Lord will scatter you among the peoples, and you will be left few in number among the nations where the Lord will drive you.” (Deuteronomy 4:26–27)

This warning is not merely for the ancient Israelites. It’s for us as well. We too must keep our souls.

What Exactly Is the Soul?

What exactly is our soul? Interestingly, the Bible doesn’t define it with exactness. The soul is like love, in that you think you know what it is until you try to define it. Then you realize you’re talking about something too wonderful for you to fully know.

In the Bible, sometimes the words “soul” (most commonly nephesh in Hebrew and psychē in Greek) and “spirit” (most commonly rûach in Hebrew and pneuma in Greek) refer to distinct realities. For example, in Genesis 2:7, God made Adam a “living creature” [nephesh or soul]. Here “soul” means the whole of Adam’s (and our) physical and spiritual dimensions. And in Ecclesiastes 12:7, when a person dies, “the spirit [rûach or pneuma] returns to God who gave it.” Here “spirit” means the dimension of our being distinct from our physical bodies.

But other times the Bible uses “soul” and “spirit” synonymously. For example, when Rachel was dying in childbirth, we’re told “her soul was departing” (Genesis 35:18). And when David expressed his spiritual longing for God, he described it as a soul thirst (Psalm 63:1). In the New Testament, the apostle John seems to mean the same thing when he writes that Jesus was troubled in soul (John 12:27) and troubled in spirit (John 13:21). And Jesus himself told us not to fear those who can kill the body but not the soul (Matthew 10:28). Because the Bible frequently uses “soul” and “spirit” interchangeably, most of us understand our soul to be what Paul called our esō anthrōpos — our “inner man” (Ephesians 3:16; 2 Corinthians 4:16).

The Essential You

Perhaps the simplest way to capture the biblical meaning is to say your soul is the essential you. Or as Dallas Willard writes, your soul is “the most important thing about you. It is your life” (Soul Keeping, 23). Your soul is your essential life. It’s what animates your body and continues to exist when your body dies. And it’s what will animate your resurrection body.

We have trouble defining exactly what the soul is because we — including everyone with PhDs in the life sciences — have trouble defining exactly what life is. We — including everyone with PhDs in the neurosciences — have trouble defining exactly what consciousness is. But we have no trouble grasping that when someone’s body dies, the essential him is gone. His body was a precious part of him, but not what really made him him. His soul, his spirit, his inner man is what made him him.

Our life is a mystery to us because God’s life is a mystery to us. We can’t explain what God’s life is; he simply and unfathomably is. That’s why God refers to himself simply and unfathomably as “I Am Who I Am” (Exodus 3:14). God is reality. We are real because he is real. We are because God is. Each of us “became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7 KJV) because the Life (John 14:6), the Soul — the source of all souls — breathed into us the breath of life.

You Must Keep Your Soul

This helps us understand why Moses so urgently warned the people on the brink of the Promised Land to diligently keep their souls, and why the writer to the Hebrews used the ancient Israelites’ failure as an example when issuing us a similar warning:

Let us strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience. (Hebrews 4:11)

God is life, and life comes from God. God alone is the source and sustainer of our essential lives (Deuteronomy 30:20; John 1:4; Colossians 3:4). And to define life and pursue life and live life apart from God in any form is idolatry. Idolatry is forgetting God: “lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life” (Deuteronomy 4:9). Forgetting God is sin, for it is forgetting what is real, what is true, what is life — which is why “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).

Keeping our soul is being diligent to not forget God (Deuteronomy 4:9). Or to say it positively, it is to do whatever it takes to remember God — remember Who life is and what life is all about (Philippians 1:21).

How to Keep Your Soul

Remembering God and his gospel is why he gave us the local church. When we meet regularly together (Hebrews 10:25), when we teach and sing to each other (Colossians 3:16), when we share the Lord’s Supper together (1 Corinthians 11:23–26) and pray together (Ephesians 6:18) and encourage each other to seek God daily in his word (Psalm 1:2) and in private prayer and fasting (Matthew 6:5–6, 16–18), we help each other remember God. These things are not legalistic pursuits; they are life pursuits. They are gifts of God to help us keep our souls.

But “while the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us fear lest any of [us] should seem to have failed to reach it” (Hebrews 4:1). The promise to us also comes with a condition: we too must diligently keep our souls (2 Peter 1:10) or face the dire consequences of not doing so (Hebrews 6:7–8).

Your soul, the essential you, is a priceless gift from God. Jesus, the great Soul, the very source of your life, died to pay your sin-wages of death so your soul might be saved and live forever (Romans 6:23). Your soul is the only way you will ever receive and enjoy the greatest of all gifts: God himself.

And therefore, your foremost responsibility, the one thing above all else you must carefully steward, upon which everything else in your life depends, is to keep your soul.

God’s Unexpected Answer to Our Prayers for Revival

Doesn’t your heart burn when you read about the early days of the Christian church? “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. . . .” (Acts 2:42–47).

That young seedling of a church burst out of holy ground in the garden of God with joyful, beautiful vibrancy as the young Christians met, worshiped, prayed, witnessed, and cared for one another. Don’t you long for that experience? I do, every time I read it. I pray for it often, and I expect I will continue to pray for it during my earthly sojourn.

One Essential Factor

We often attempt to capture this kind of experience by trying various ways of “doing church” together. And I think this is a healthy, Spirit-inspired longing and pursuit (keeping in mind that no methodology has the power to produce what only the Holy Spirit can do). But there was a factor at play in the early church’s vital life that we tend to overlook.

It’s a factor we might not think to pray for, but one that helped provide the fertile environment in which the first-generation church flourished. That factor was a hostile culture and the desperate situations of many saints. When we pray for revival and robust churches, we may expect God to give us answers that look like Acts 2:42–47. But we become discouraged when we experience hostile rejection and desperation, not recognizing these as important parts of a spiritually fertile environment.

What We Often Overlook

When we take a careful look at Luke’s account of these seemingly idyllic early church days, a more complex picture emerges. We begin to see it in this description of generosity we love so much:

And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. (Acts 2:44–25)

What was happening that prompted this outbreak of possession-sharing? A significant number of Christians were experiencing significant material needs. Why? Because not everybody was having favor on them.

Luke reports that these Christians had “favor with all the people” (Acts 2:47). But let’s remember that this “favor” was fickle, was by no means universal (the Jewish leaders, for example), and did not last long. There was a brief window of favor with a critical mass of Jerusalem’s hoi polloi — the same people who had also favored the miracle-working Jesus, until he said hard things, or was arrested, condemned, and executed. They likely favored the church in large measure due to the apostles’ awe-inspiring miracles (Acts 2:43). But we see this favor-window close as soon as we get to Acts 4 — when the persecution really begins.

Revival Doesn’t Happen in a Vacuum

The remarkable generosity of Christians was drawn out because of necessity. It’s likely that most, if not all, of the new converts, were being kicked out of their synagogues — the hub of spiritual and social life in Jewish communities — for becoming followers of Jesus. This was already taking place during Jesus’s lifetime (John 9:22). Surely it was happening in the months after Jesus’s resurrection, when the religious leaders were doing their best to snuff out this new sect.

And that being the case, it’s also likely many new Christians were being disowned and disinherited by their families. It’s easy to have uninvested favor toward a group until your child or your sibling or your spouse joins, and the familial, social, religious, and economic costs become personal. Then painful disruptions begin. And these disruptions would have created immediate housing needs and resulted in many Christians suddenly finding themselves unemployed, since so many businesses were family-based.

In other words, the wonderful generosity did not happen in a vacuum. It was a response to sudden, painful, and desperate needs. Christians possessing this world’s goods saw their brothers and sisters in need and could not close their hearts against them because they were filled with God’s love (1 John 3:17). Their desperate need and acute suffering contributed to the remarkable fellowship the believers experienced.

Where Glad and Generous Hearts Grow

Think of the times you’ve experienced the most intense and wonderful fellowship with others. How many of those occurred in difficult, perhaps even dangerous, times in your or someone else’s life?

Yes, the Spirit was moving powerfully in the early church. But like the Spirit often does, he was moving in response to people’s faith, which was heightened because of the overwhelming needs and adversity they were facing. Again, when have you experienced the Spirit most powerfully in your life? I imagine it’s typically happened when desperation drove you to need and seek him.

We should not romanticize persecution or affliction. They are evils. However, throughout biblical and church history, we find a consistent pattern: “glad and generous hearts” (Acts 2:46) tend to grow best when adversity, often in the forms of persecution and affliction, is part of the church’s life. Persecution and affliction provide the gracious and sanctifying opportunities for Christians to experience the love of Christ in very personal ways, as we extend it to and receive it from one another — the opportunities to demonstrate the gospel visibly to a watching world.

The gospel becomes more real to us the more we feel our need of it.

So let’s keep praying for revival, and keep longing to be like that radically loving, generously giving, passionately praying, boldly witnessing community of first-generation saints. But let’s remember the hostile, painful, desperate context in which the church was born. And as we pray, let’s “not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon [us] to test [us], as though something strange were happening to [us]” (1 Peter 4:12). It is altogether likely we are experiencing God’s unexpected answers to our prayers.

What Are You Waiting For?

God’s children are always waiting on him for something.

We wait for God to fulfill particular promises (Hebrews 6:15), deliver us from our enemies (Psalm 27:11, 14), provide our material needs (Philippians 4:19), rescue us when we’re in trouble (Psalm 40:1), deliver us from all kinds of fears (Psalm 34:4), renew our spiritual strength when we’re weary (Isaiah 40:31), deliver us from depression and despondency (Psalm 88:1, 6), bring about righteousness and justice when wickedness and injustice surge (Isaiah 26:8), redeem our broken, failing bodies (Romans 8:23), and finally grant Jesus’s return (Titus 2:13).

Learning to wait on God is a crucial faith-development exercise and faith-displaying showcase. That’s why we experience it frequently. But because the things we’re waiting on God for are often things we deeply desire, we can become so preoccupied with them that we neglect things God has given us to do now.

So, what are you waiting for?

Keep Things in Perspective

Psalm 37 is a song of soul-counsel for waiting saints. It was composed by King David, an experienced wait-er. In it, he describes the potentially debilitating anxiety and confusion we experience while waiting on God.

The context of the psalm is the perplexing experience of the “righteous” (those who love, fear, and trust God) who linger, or languish, in some experience of deprivation, or injustice, waiting for God to act. Meanwhile, the “wicked” (those who do not love, fear, and trust God) are prospering. But we don’t always merely envy the prosperous wicked; we also can envy the prosperous righteous. So, the psalm can be applied anywhere we are tempted to be sinfully anxious or envious in our waiting.

The first thing David says is this: “Fret not yourself because of evildoers; be not envious of wrongdoers! For they will soon fade like the grass and wither like the green herb” (Psalm 37:1–2). Variations on this point repeat throughout the psalm. David’s point is keep things in eternal perspective.

Life will be over quickly — for the righteous, as well as for the wicked. Soon all the things we’ve waited for here will be in the past. “The wicked will be no more” and “the righteous shall inherit the land . . . forever” (Psalm 37:10, 29). Fretting and frustration “tends only to evil” (Psalm 37:8) — evil envying of the wicked whose prosperity will vanish like smoke (Psalm 37:20) or evil, “unspiritual” and “demonic” envying of other Christians (James 3:14–15).

The truth is, most of our lives are actually spent attending to lots and lots of things God wants us to do while we’re waiting on him for a few significant somethings. We don’t have much time in life. We don’t want to waste any of it being unnecessarily anxious and preoccupied with what we do not have or have not done.

Call to Trust

When it comes to waiting, here is what God wants us to do:

Wait for the Lord and keep his way, and he will exalt you to inherit the land; you will look on when the wicked are cut off. (Psalm 37:34)

The New Testament equivalent says it this way:

Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you. (1 Peter 5:6–7)

Humble waiting looks like this: “Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him” (Psalm 37:7). And, yes, this can be difficult. God knows this. That’s why the Bible is chock-full of examples of what difficult waiting looks like. God wants us to know that he understands, and he wants us to believe that “all things are possible for one who believes” (Mark 9:23). It is possible to wait in the patient peace of faith.

Trust God, Do Good

But God has much more for us than merely waiting for him. He has a lot for us to do right now, right where we are:

Trust in the Lord, and do good; dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness. (Psalm 37:3)

Trusting the Lord — casting, not carrying, our anxieties — frees us to dwell contentedly, whatever our situation (Philippians 4:11–13), and faithfully “do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith” (Galatians 6:10). When we take our eyes off what we’re waiting for and look around, we’ll discover more opportunities to do good — right now, where we are — than we could possibly do!

There are God’s own words to store up in our hearts (Psalm 119:11), overwhelming needs around us to pray for (Ephesians 6:18), afflicted and grieving saints to comfort (2 Corinthians 1:4), discouraged saints to encourage (1 Thessalonians 5:14), a local church’s mission to embrace (1 Peter 4:10), neighbors to love enough to pursue with goodness and mercy (Galatians 5:14), the poor not to forget (Galatians 2:10), and missionaries to support (2 Corinthians 9:10–12).

It might feel to us like the things we’re waiting on God for are the main things. But someday we might discover that the most important fruit ever produced in our lives came from faithfully doing good while we waited.

Delight Yourself in the Lord

So what are you waiting for? And how are you waiting?

These are good questions to ask ourselves. Where God has called us to wait for him, are we waiting in the patient peace of faith, or with a sinful anxiety that’s eating up time and energy God wants us to spend elsewhere? If the latter is our experience, David gives us the antidote, “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4).

Delight in God delivers us from anxiety-filled anticipation because it shifts our focus from what we’re waiting for, to whom we’re waiting for (Psalm 39:7). “O Lord, we wait for you; your name and remembrance are the desire of our soul” (Isaiah 26:8). When God is the desire of our hearts, we can be sure God will give us the desires of our hearts.

Waiting on God is a part of the Christian life — a constant part. We want to learn how to wait well. And part of waiting well is not allowing our waiting for God to distract us from the good God wants us to do while we wait.

My Marriage Will End When Life Begins

My wife and I recently celebrated our thirtieth wedding anniversary. We took the day off and spent it together taking long walks, sharing long talks and leisurely meals. But do you know where we spent our most memorable and meaningful moments? In a graveyard. And that graveyard, surprisingly, prepared us for another major life event three days later.

Would you celebrate an anniversary with a visit to a graveyard? I highly recommend it. To be honest, we didn’t plan it — God did. We actually were headed to the coffee shop where our son works. But as we drove past Lakewood Cemetery, my wife suggested we stop so she could show me the beautiful little chapel on its grounds. The chapel appeared occupied, so we decided first to visit Joseph’s grave.

Thousands of Stories in Stones

Joe was a dear friend of ours who died twenty years ago. Twenty years. How can so much time have passed so quickly? I can see him vividly in my memory. I can hear his endearing sarcastic jabs and favorite jokes. I can hear his powerful, beautiful singing voice booming several blocks away as he walked to our house. I remember his infectious faith, his worshipful heart, his desire to see others freed by Jesus as he had been. I remember our long, meaningful talks. He bestowed on me the honor of best man when he married Nancy. He was only 37 when he died. Now he’s been gone for a generation.

My wife and I wandered for a while in that quiet green field with thousands of stones inscribed with names and dates. Each one memorializing someone, like Joe, once full of life. Each person a real story that had once been told in real time — beautiful, painful, sinful, incomprehensibly complex, and eternally significant. Each a very personal, living story that was woven with other living stories for better or for worse until death tore the earthly living fabric. And now quiet stones mark the stories’ earthly endings. We thought of our own intertwined story and noted how many stones bore the names of husbands and wives.

Lyrics in a Graveyard

When we returned to the now-empty chapel, I sang my wife the song I wrote her for our wedding, which included these lines:

Arise, my Lover, and walk beside me.

For winter is past and the rain is gone,

Flowers appear and vines are in blossom.

Arise, my Lover, and come along.

And we will not dwell on or ponder the past

For behold our God is doing something new.

After thirty years of being woven together into a living story and taking time to ponder our earthly end, these lyrics carried a deeper meaning than they did when I first sang them. We keenly felt the momentary nature of our marriage. As beautiful as it is, it’s a parable of something far more permanent, far more beautiful: our long-awaited union with our Bridegroom. And we strained our heart-eyes to see it again.

When we left the cemetery, hand in hand and teary-eyed, the truth of this verse was coursing through us:

It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart. (Ecclesiastes 7:2)

Prepared for the House of Feasting

The best things are planned by God. And his purpose for our graveyard visit was about more than our wedding anniversary. Three days later, our first grandchild was born, and we walked into the house of feasting.

God, speaking through the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, is in no way saying the house of feasting is evil or foolish. No, “for everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1). “He has made everything beautiful in its time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). There is “a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance” (Ecclesiastes 3:4).

But there is a reason why God lists weeping before laughing and mourning before dancing. Why? Because “sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad” (Ecclesiastes 7:3).

Tearstained Gladness

In the cemetery, my wife and I experienced advanced mourning as we contemplated the earthly ending of something precious to us beyond words. But it was hope-filled mourning (1 Thessalonians 4:13). While still living, we laid to heart our end and looked beyond our end to our real beginning. With grieving tears streaming down our cheeks, we felt the gladness of the living hope we share in Christ (1 Peter 1:3).

And this uniquely and unexpectedly prepared us to receive into our arms our beautiful granddaughter, who looks so much like her mother did as a newborn. Fresh from weeping, we could laugh from a deeper well of joy; fresh from mourning, we could dance in hope of something far more solid than the mist of earthly life (James 4:14). With the end in view, we could understand the significance of this beautiful, wonderful beginning.

“The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth” (Ecclesiastes 7:4). Why? Because the wise do not build their house on sand, but on the rock (Matthew 7:24–27). Mirth uninformed by or ignoring mourning leads to houses built on sand, destined to be swept away. The wise perceive their end and therefore build on the eternally enduring rock of the Redeemer’s word.

Only when seasoned by mourning are we ready to receive a wonderful earthly joy that God makes beautiful in its time.