Jon Bloom's Blog, page 41

Live Homeless, Homesick, and Free

There is a homelessness that is distinctly Christian. Because a Christian is no longer of this world, even though he or she remains in the world (John 17:14–15).

Most of us understand this abstractly. We know that Jesus chose us out of this world (John 15:19) and that Hebrews calls us to live as “strangers and exiles on the earth” (Hebrews 11:13).

But the concrete experience of never quite fitting is hard to get used to. No matter where we are, no matter what we do, we’re always foreigners and feel somewhat out of place.

Until we really come to grips with this reality, we will repeatedly feel disoriented and disappointed. This results in plenty of “grumbling and disputing” (Philippians 2:14) until we are willing to embrace that

Our fallen, failing bodies are not our home. Someday they will be resurrected in perfection (1 Corinthians 15:42–44), and we’ll be at home in them. But right now they betray us by sin dwelling in our members (Romans 7:23) and being subject to all manner of the futility of aging, disease, and disability (Romans 8:20).

Our home is not our home. No idyllic location or home improvement project will ever make our homes the heaven we seek.

Our marriages are not our home. Marriage is a momentary parable of the permanence of Christ and the church (Ephesians 5:32). But the best earthly marriages are defective parables and most marriages are not the best. And all these earthly parables end in “till death do we part.”

Our children are not our home. Parents quickly discover childrearing to be the most difficult job in the world, all aimed at one thing: preparing our children to leave home.

Our friendships are not our home. The best friendships go through difficult, strained seasons and most friendships only last for brief seasons, and many end painfully.

Our local churches are not our home. It is true that Christians are “no longer strangers and aliens, but . . . fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” (Ephesians 2:19). However, the New Testament Gospels and Epistles make it clear that disunity in local churches is a frequent problem (1 Corinthians 1:10). Like our individual bodies, the Church will one day be a perfect, glorified Body of Christ (Romans 12:5, Ephesians 5:27). But right now sin, brokenness, failures, weaknesses, partisanship, doctrinal drift, sharp disagreements (Acts 15:39), and lukewarmness toward Christ all remind us that our local church is not yet our home.

Our denominations are not our home. Very few find their family of churches a perfect fit for them. There always seems to be some doctrinal, polity, leadership, strategic, or organizational issue(s) that we find aggravating.

Our coalitions and movements are not our home. When the Holy Spirit moves in fresh ways in the church, new coalitions and movements form to advance a Spirit-initiated mission. But it doesn’t take long before the fissures of leadership frustrations, misunderstandings, selfish ambition, doctrinal differences, strategic disagreements, and criticisms remind us that we aren’t home.

Our vocations are not our home. We often spend the first half of our lives preparing for our life’s work, and then spend the second half of our lives trying to figure out why our life’s work is not working out the way we hoped, or why it went so wrong, or why we weren’t more effective, or why it was so hard.

Our ministries are not our home. Jesus appoints us for seasons of our lives to certain responsibilities (John 3:27), and when he determines that those seasons are over he dis-appoints us. If we were too at home in those appointments, we’re left disappointed.

You Desire a Better Country

The reality we must embrace is that, like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, we are living in a land of promise as in a foreign land (Hebrews 11:11; 2 Peter 3:13). And like those patriarchs, but in a new-covenant sense, most of us — probably all of us — will die in faith, not having received the things promised (Hebrews 11:13). And we will have no regrets because what we are really looking for is not really here.

We are “seeking a homeland”; we desire “a better country” (Hebrews 11:14–16). We are strangers and exiles on earth; “here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come” (Hebrews 13:14). C.S. Lewis put it beautifully:

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. (Mere Christianity, Book III, chapter 10, “Hope”)

The reason “home” always eludes you now is that you were made for another world. No worldly experience can satisfy your inconsolable longing. No relationship, no successful achievement, no possession, no amount of public approval will ever satisfy you here. The best these can do is give you a brief copy and shadowy glimpse of your true homeland. The best they can do is make you homesick for the better country where you belong, yet have never seen.

Live Free

As a Christian, your sense of homelessness and homesickness is normal. If you’ve been fighting it, stop!

Embracing your homelessness as a disciple is to embrace freedom. If you don’t burden your worldly experiences with the expectations of making them your home, their disappointments won’t be so heavy, and you’ll be able to lay aside the weight of cynicism.

The really good news is that you are a stranger and exile. The more you realize this, the more it allows you to travel light. It’s the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches that weigh you down and choke your faith (Matthew 13:22). But remembering that you don’t have to make your home here will lighten your load and open your spiritual airways.

Don’t worry; home is up ahead. Jesus has gone ahead of you to prepare a home for you (John 14:2). And he’s made this amazing and freeing promise to you if you’re willing to live “homeless”:

Everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life. (Matthew 19:29)

Don’t waste precious time and resources trying to make earth your home. Instead, travel as light in your expectations and your possessions (material or emotional) as possible. And seek to take as many people as you can with you to your true homeland.

Related Resources

What Happens When You Die? At Home with the Lord (message)

Christ Is Our Treasure, Not Our Homes (article)

Rest in the Final Hour (article)

Jesus Will Not Leave You Alone

You and Jesus share a desire for your comfort. But you and Jesus do not always agree on what kind of comfort is best for you.

In fact, right now you might be feeling that if Jesus really cared so much for your comfort, then you would not be dealing with such pain. But that is not true. What is true is that you likely prefer the comfort that comes from the absence of discomfort, while Jesus prefers you to have the ultimate comfort of your holiness.

So while you might feel frustrated over a very uncomfortable situation you’re being forced to deal with, Jesus is actually pursuing your long-term comfort through that very situation.

It is in these seasons that Jesus’s promises to be with you always (Matthew 28:20) and to never forsake you (Hebrews 13:5) may not be so much comforting as they are bothersome or even painful. These are times you might wish that Jesus would just leave you alone.

But it is merciful that he does not, for unless you are holy as he is holy you will not have the comfort you need the most (Leviticus 11:44; 1 Peter 1:16).

Training Is Always Uncomfortable

If you’re a Christian, you are a disciple of Jesus. And by necessity, a disciple undergoes discipline. If a disciple is a student, then discipline is training. Jesus’s discipline for you, however severe (and it is severe at times), is not God’s wrath against you. If you are tempted to believe that, don’t. It’s your unbelief or the Enemy talking to you. When Jesus became sin for you (2 Corinthians 5:21), he removed all of sin’s condemnation from you (Romans 8:1).

No, discipline is training. Training in what? Training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16). The unique training course that Jesus has designed for you (he designs a unique course for each disciple) has one great aim: to teach you to trust him in everything. That’s his goal for you. Jesus wants you to learn to trust in him in all things at all times. For the more you trust Jesus, the holier you become.

Now, justification by faith alone is a glorious truth. When we first trust in Jesus’s person and work for the forgiveness of all our sins and the promise of eternal life, God credits to us the righteousness of Christ, in union with Christ by faith. We are saved from God’s wrath (Romans 5:9), and we are considered, in that moment, holy as Christ is holy — because we are in Christ. It is a moment of great comfort.

Then comes the school of sanctification. God’s ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55:8). First, he confers on us the degree, and then he sends us to school. It’s a wonderful education system, for we are guaranteed graduation (Philippians 1:6).

Nonetheless, in this school, things get very uncomfortable for us. Jesus begins to train us to live by faith in him (Galatians 2:20). He trains us to live out the righteousness we have received through faith; he means for us to grow in the experience of the holiness he has given us; he transforms us into his likeness by the renewing of our minds (Romans 8:29; 12:2).

Jesus Is a Gracious Trainer — And Relentless

Jesus is a gracious trainer, but he is also a relentless trainer. We are not nearly as eager for our growth in holiness as he is. We tend to think that our progress so far is good enough. We might even be tempted to think that Jesus is cruel because of the amount of pain he puts us through. But the truth is, we don’t really know what’s good for us.

Think of the training experiences in your life that benefitted you the most. How many of those experiences were comfortable? Zero. And the more excellence you sought (or were pushed) to achieve in a discipline, the more rigorous the training became, right?

How often did you want to give up? How often did you wonder if it was worth it? How often did you feel mad at your coach or instructor or parent or boss for pushing you beyond what you thought necessary? If you did give up, not because the training was bad for you but because you just didn’t want to work at it, how did you feel? When you look back at a coach or instructor or parent or boss who just didn’t let you give up on what was best for you, how do you feel about them now?

Jesus is a far better trainer than any of them. All our earthly trainers “disciplined us as it seemed best to them,” but Jesus disciplines us “that we might share his holiness” (Hebrews 12:10).

Jesus really does desire your comfort. He desires it more than you do. He so desires your ultimate comfort that he will make you very uncomfortable in order to give it to you.

He wants to give you the true comfort of learning to fear only God, so he will give you the discomfort of facing your false fears.

He wants to give you the true comfort of resting secure in the promises of God, so he will give you the discomfort of living with apparent uncertainty.

He wants to give you the true comfort of sharing his humility (Philippians 2:3–5), so he will give you the discomfort of opposing your pride.

He wants to give you the true comfort and joy of worshiping God alone, so he will take the painful whip of discipline into the temple of your heart to clear our the idolatrous merchants. And therefore your experience is this: “For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (Hebrews 12:11).

Jesus, Please Do Not Leave Me Alone

So, if today you’re tempted to “grow weary and fainthearted” (Hebrews 12:3) in Jesus’s training course for you, join me in this prayer:

Lord Jesus, forgive me for my short-sightedness and for how often I sinfully prefer my earthly comfort over the comfort of my holiness. Forgive me for the smallness of my faith. Despite what my flesh craves, my spirit craves your will for me more. I want to share your holiness and bear the peaceful fruit of righteousness. So do whatever it takes until you have completed your good work in me. For I want more than anything to trust in you in all things at all times. Please, Lord, whatever you do, do not leave me alone! I pray this in your name and for the sake of your glory. Amen.

Related Resources

Put Yourself in the Path of God’s Grace (article)

How Do I Know If I’m Being Disciplined by God? (interview)

The Painful Discipline of Our Heavenly Father (message)

Don’t Follow Your Heart

“Follow your heart” is a creed embraced by billions of people. It’s a statement of faith in one of the great pop cultural myths of the Western world; a gospel proclaimed in many of our stories, movies, and songs.

Essentially, it’s a belief that your heart is a compass inside of you that will direct you to your own true north if you just have the courage to follow it. It says that your heart is a true guide that will lead you to true happiness if you just have the courage to listen to it. The creed says that you are lost and your heart will save you.

This creed can sound so simple and beautiful and liberating. For lost people it’s a tempting gospel to believe.

Is This the Leader You Want to Follow?

Until you consider that your heart has sociopathic tendencies. Think about it for a moment. What does your heart tell you?

Please don’t answer. Your heart has likely said things today that you would not wish to repeat. I know mine has. My heart tells me that all of reality ought to serve my desires. My heart likes to think the best of me and worst of others — unless those others happen to think well of me, then they are wonderful people. But if they don’t think well of me, or even if they just disagree with me, well then, something is wrong with them. And while my heart is pondering my virtues and others’ errors, it can suddenly find some immoral or horribly angry thought very attractive.

The “follow your heart” creed certainly isn’t found in the Bible. The Bible actually thinks our hearts have a disease: “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). Jesus, the Great Physician, lists the grim symptoms of this disease: “out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander” (Matthew 15:19). This is not leadership material.

The truth is, no one lies to us more than our own hearts. No one. If our hearts are compasses, they are Jack Sparrow compasses. They don’t tell us the truth, they just tell us what we want. If our hearts are guides, they are Gothels. They are not benevolent, they are pathologically selfish. In fact, if we do what our hearts tell us to do we will pervert and impoverish every desire, every beauty, every person, every wonder, and every joy. Our hearts want to consume these things for our own self-glory and self-indulgence.

No, our hearts will not save us. We need to be saved from our hearts.

This Is the Leader You Want to Follow

Our hearts were never designed to be followed, but to be led. Our hearts were never designed to be gods in whom we believe; they were designed to believe in God.

If we make our hearts gods and ask them to lead us, they will lead us to narcissistic misery and ultimately damnation. They cannot save us, because what’s wrong with our hearts is the heart of our problem. But if our hearts believe in God, as they are designed to, then God saves us (Hebrews 7:25) and leads our hearts to exceeding joy (Psalm 43:4).

Therefore, don’t believe in your heart; direct your heart to believe in God. Don’t follow your heart; follow Jesus. Note that Jesus did not say to his disciples, “Let not your hearts be troubled, just believe in your hearts.” He said, “Let not your hearts be troubled, believe in God; believe also in me” (John 14:1).

So though your heart will try to shepherd you today, do not follow it. It is not a shepherd. It is a pompous sheep that, due to remaining sin, has some wolf-like qualities. Don’t follow it, and be careful even listening to it. Remember, your heart only tells you what you want, not where you should go. So only listen to it to note what it’s telling you about what you want, and then take your wants, both good and evil, to Jesus as requests and confessions.

Jesus is your shepherd (Psalm 23; John 10). Listen to his voice in his word and follow him (John 10:27). Let him be, in the words of a great hymn, the “heart of [your] own heart whatever befall.” He is the truth; he is the way, and he will lead you to life (John 14:6).

Related Resources

Know Your Heart and Don’t Believe It (quote)

The Importance of Knowing Our Sin (sermon)

Declare War on Sin (interview)

Can We Really Be Free from Excessive Fears?

Fear is such a powerful force in our experience.

Fear is designed by God and has a wonderful, protective benefit for us when it functions as God designed it. Instinctual fears are tremendous mercies, protecting us from danger before we even have time to think. Rational fears, the fears we have time to think about, when operating under the governance of faith, can protect us from all manner of foolish and sinful impulses and from external, deceptive evil.

But for most of us, fear often does not function as it was designed. It is not under the governance of our trust in God and therefore wields an excessive, distorting influence over our thinking and behaviors. If fear is misplaced we think and act wrongly. Misplaced fear becomes a tyrant that imposes constrictive limits and leaves us debilitated in some or much of our lives. Under its rule we don’t do what we know we should because we are afraid.

We all desire to be free of this tyrant. But is this possible? Can we really be free from excessive fears? Jesus’s answer is yes.

“Why Are You So Afraid?”

But to pursue this freedom, we must allow Jesus to ask us the question that he asked his disciples after he calmed the deadly storm: “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?” (Mark 4:40)

Why were the disciples so afraid? Had you asked them while the storm was raging and Jesus was sleeping they would have shouted, “Look around! Isn’t it obvious?” They had good earthly reason to panic. A number of them were experienced boatmen, familiar with Galilean storms. Large waves like these had quickly swamped and sunk other boats like theirs. But had you asked them after Jesus calmed the storm, they would have said, “We really didn’t believe that he had that kind of power.”

While the storm raged the disciples believed that it was more powerful than Jesus and acted accordingly — in a panic. They did not acknowledge, because they did not believe, that Jesus ruled over this earthly danger. They didn’t trust him. In fact, they were exasperated with his apparent indifference and cried out, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” (Mark 4:38)

But it’s important to note that when Jesus rebuked the disciples, it wasn’t merely because they feared the storm. Fear of a danger stronger than we are is appropriate, right in line with God’s design. Jesus rebuked them for fearing the lesser power over the greater Power. And this gets to the nub of the issue for our fears too.

Why are you so afraid? It’s a very profound question. It drives right to the heart of the matter.

Because who or what you believe is most powerful will be master of your thoughts and actions. Which is why, if we answer the question honestly and humbly, it will point the way to our freedom.

The Secret to Freedom from Misplaced Fear

What occurred in the disciples that night in the boat was a fear transfer. After Jesus had stilled the storm and rebuked them, “they were filled with great fear and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’” (Mark 4:41)

Did you catch that? They felt “great fear.” But this fear of Jesus was very different than their fear of the storm. It wasn’t oppressive. It didn’t impose constrictive limits or leave them debilitated and cowering. This fear opened up a universe of possibilities to them! What was dawning on them in the boat was that this Person who was with them had absolute supreme power over all aspects of both nature and supernature (Mark 1:23–27, John 3:35, Philippians 2:9–11). And if the natural world and the supernatural world obeyed him, what would be impossible with him?

Answer: nothing (Mark 10:27)!

The secret to our emancipation from enslavement to our excessive fears is a fear transfer. We need to stop fearing other things more than Jesus. Those other things, whether imagined or real, may be bigger than we are and therefore frightening to us. But Jesus tells us to “not fear anything that is frightening” (1 Peter 3:6). Why? Because he rules over them. He is, as Martin Luther sung, the “Word above all earthly powers.” When we fear earthly powers more than Jesus, not only do we dishonor Jesus, but also we enslave ourselves to fearful tyrants that distort our thinking and produce unfaithful behaviors.

Do Not Fear, Only Believe

The rubber-meets-the-road question is: how do we transfer our fear from the storm to Jesus when the storm is still raging? The answer is the simplest and yet often the most difficult thing for sinners to do: believe Jesus. All God’s promises are yes to you in Jesus (2 Corinthians 1:20). It does not matter what your past was like, your family of origin, how gross your sin, how often you’ve failed, or how impossible your current situation seems. Nor do any of your weaknesses disqualify you from these promises. Nothing is too difficult for the supreme Lord of all (Jeremiah 32:27). That is what the Bible teaches: believe Jesus and obey him.

Like the disciples, Jesus is in your boat with you. And like the disciples, you take your fears to him. But unlike the disciples, don’t panic and assume that he doesn’t care. He cares far more than you know, and this storm is serving a purpose you don’t yet understand.

For the Christian, every storm serves the Lord Jesus and demonstrates some aspect of his sovereign power. And if we trust him, he will deliver us from every single storm — even the storm that kills us (2 Timothy 4:18). For Jesus, in weathering the storm of his Father’s wrath for us, has stilled even the storm of death (1 Corinthians 15:55) so that “everyone who lives and believes in [him] will never die” (John 11:26). Yes, “in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Romans 8:37).

So what fears are threatening you now? Take them to Jesus, “[cast] all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7), trust in him with all your heart to direct your path through the fearful storm (Proverbs 3:5-7), “and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your heart and your mind in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:7).

Living free from our excessive fear is not only possible for you; it’s available to you. All it requires is faith. And it doesn’t require heroic faith. It requires only a child’s faith. All you need to do, according to Jesus, is, “do not fear, only believe” (Mark 5:36).

Related Articles

Trading Fear for Fear

Three Facts for Your Fret

Don’t Worry, Be Casting

The Great Achievers Are the Great Believers

Most people want their lives to count for something. Something deep inside them wants to make some kind of difference in the world, to leave a mark, a lasting legacy. It is a longing for significance to do something “great.”

But for most people this pregnant desire miscarries because they don’t believe that what is truly great is great. They believe in the fool’s gold of false greatness achieved through personal achievements.

False Greatness

Have you noticed that in the Bible, God largely ignores all the events and people that would have garnered the headlines of the ancient world and would have had all the Sunday morning pundits of that age earnestly discussing and debating? For the most part, God ignores the “great” people. He’s just not very impressed with the empire builders, great political leaders, military geniuses, philosophers, poets, writers, artists, architects, entertainers, and other historical high-achievers. When he does mention them, frequently it’s to expose the ridiculousness of their inflated false sense of personal greatness. Pharaoh in Exodus and Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel are the poster children of false greatness. They at least get a biblical mention, though perhaps they would have preferred obscurity. God doesn’t even waste his ink on most of the rest.

When God’s eyes ran to and fro throughout the earth to give strong support to the one who was great in his eyes (2 Chronicles 16:9), the worldly greats did not capture his attention.

True Greatness

Who did capture his attention? People like Abraham.

By worldly standards, what did Abraham really achieve during his lifetime? What did he have to show for his life when he died? Not much. He had two sons (one of them estranged), owned one tiny piece of property (a grave-cave) and some wealth in livestock. And yet Abraham, by God’s standards, was one of the greatest men who ever lived.

What made Abraham great? One thing: Abraham believed God (Genesis 15:6, Galatians 3:6). He believed God with his whole being. He banked his life on the belief that God existed and rewarded those who seek him (Hebrews 11:6). He believed in God’s promises so much that he did not even have to receive what was promised in his lifetime (Hebrews 11:13). And his belief in God led him to obey God’s call on him to leave his kin and culture and go live in a foreign land as an alien and exile for the sake of God’s glory and his future purposes (Hebrews 11:8–9, 13). And Abraham’s faith-filled obedience to seek God’s kingdom first changed the course of human history — and is still changing it.

Note this: Hardly any of Abraham’s earthly contemporaries is remembered and none, except those who shared his faith in God, continue to make a difference in the world.

Give Up Pursuits of Piddly Greatness!

What great pursuit are you devoting your life to? What is it that you want to achieve? What do you really believe will make the biggest difference in the world? How you answer these questions will dictate how you will invest the one life you have to live.

Don’t believe the promises of false greatness. Nebuchadnezzar was about as high an achiever as a human can get and his greatness was piddly compared to Abraham’s. Give up the pursuit of piddly greatness! You’ll never find it in the achievements the world admires most.

The truly great people in God’s eyes are not the great achievers but the great believers. They really believe God and therefore seek his kingdom first (Matthew 6:33). They know that they have no greatness of their own — all greatness is God’s — so they are free to be the servants of all (Mark 9:35). Because they know that here they “have no lasting city” (Hebrews 13:14) their eyes are set on the city with everlasting foundations (Hebrews 11:10). That’s where they lay up their treasures (Matthew 6:20), and so they are happy to forego them here as God calls. And the great believers are willing to go into foreign lands and live on the promises of God for the sake of God’s purposes to bless all the families of the earth (Genesis 28:14, Matthew 28:19–20).

The true greatness of the glory of God and his global purposes is the burden and call of this book: Cross: Unrivaled Christ, Unstoppable Gospel, Unreached Peoples, Unending Joy. It is a call for us to give up pursuits of piddly, ephemeral delusions of greatness and to live the truly great life of radical faith in God, following him as he leads into all the world in order that the gospel will be preached to and believed by every people group on the face of the planet. This is what God is up to in the world. All the events that capture today’s headlines will one day look like historical footnotes in comparison.

In the end, the great believers are the truly great achievers. They build the house that God is building and therefore the greatest house and only house that will last (Psalm 127:1). What they have to show of their lives when they die may not look like much. But what they have built will go on growing forever. It will make an eternal difference; it will leave an eternal mark, the longest-lasting legacy.

Don’t let your desire for greatness miscarry. Make your life count for the one thing that really matters. And let this book (for purchase or free PDF) help guide you towards true greatness.

Related Resources

Without Faith It Is Impossible to Please God (sermon)

The Thrilling “Now” of Christian Mission (article)

What to Do When Faith Dies (article)

Why Things Often Don’t Make Sense

We humans have an irrepressible need to make sense of the world and our experience in it.

Meaninglessness Is an Illusion

Darwinian naturalists believe that we adapted this need for meaning in order to secure food and pass along our genes. Nonsense. Such a belief implies that the kind of meaning that means the most to us is an illusion. And the ironic result, if we really embrace the belief that there is no meaning beyond calories and copulation, is that we neither want to eat nor pass along our genes. Meaninglessness robs us of our appetites. It makes us hate the life that our genes allegedly want above all to preserve (Ecclesiastes 2:17).

No, we hunger for meaning because meaning exists, just like we hunger for food because food exists. Meaning is not the illusion; meaninglessness is the illusion.

The Dispelling of the Illusion

However, it is a powerful illusion. The world and our experience in it frequently do not make sense to us. Events unfold in ways that often look wrong to us and feel confusing. They can appear random. They can appear contrary to God’s character and promises and more like the grinding gears of an indifferent cosmos. And not being able to make sense of them is very hard for us to bear and tempts us toward cynical unbelief.

But the Bible is given to us for the express purpose of dispelling this illusion. In it God reveals the great meaning that is infused into all things (Colossians 1:16), the meaning that our souls hunger for and need in order to live, just like our bodies need food to live. For we do “not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). Meaning comes from God and we receive it through his word.

The Most Meaningful Story

What the Bible reveals to us is that we all have the incredible privilege (what superlative can suffice?) of being chosen to play a role in the greatest epic story ever conceived by the greatest Author that exists. It is the story of the glory of God (Romans 11:36). And it is being told on such a grand scale that God must give us strength to comprehend it (Ephesians 3:18). Everything in the material universe, from the most massive galaxy to the tiniest molecular particle is involved and is itself telling a part of the story (Psalm 19:1). And there are worlds unseen to us and dimensions unknown to us that are part of this story (Colossians 1:16). Every immaterial thought we have is part of the story (2 Corinthians 10:5).

And this is the most real story that exists, for this story is reality. All the characters involved are real. All the tragedies and comedies are real. The cosmic war is as real as it gets. The stakes are real, the risks are real, the dangers are real, the punishments are real and the rewards are real. The story is so creative that it is by definition creation; it is so imaginative that its images are real. All our stories, all our artistic endeavors are merely copies and shadows, pointers to or distortions of the Great Story, the Great Composition.

Why Things Appear Senseless

Is it then any wonder why things we see or experience don’t make sense to us? At any given time we are only seeing a tiny, tiny fraction of the story. And the truth is, our sinful pride often leads us to a selfish myopic reading of it. We end up foolishly putting more faith in the tiny bit that we see rather than the immense things God, the Author, says.

But doesn’t the Bible give us example after example after example of saints whose experience for a while — perhaps much or even all of their lives — looked wrong and yet turned out to be part of a story far larger and more meaningful than they previously imagined?

Didn’t infertility look wrong to Abraham and Sarah for decades?

Don’t you think that to Moses, whose life began with so much promise and apparent significance, shepherding another man’s livestock for 40 years in the Midian wilderness must have felt like a wasted life?

Didn’t Elimelech’s and Mahlon’s and Chilion’s deaths in Moab look horrible and hopeless to Naomi (Ruth 1)?

Didn’t it look, both to himself and to everyone else, like the man born blind in John 9 had been cursed by God?

Didn’t Mary grieve over Jesus’s apparent unresponsiveness to Lazarus’s life-threatening illness?

There are dozens and dozens of such accounts in the Bible. And they all testify to this: How things appear to us as characters in the story is an unreliable conveyor of meaning; we must trust the Author’s perspective.

Trust the Author

The Author is telling the story and the Author gives each of us characters and each event more meaning than we could have imagined. What might make no sense to us today is in fact so shot through with meaning that we would be struck speechless in worshipful awe if we knew all that God was doing. And someday we will know and will worship.

The naturalistic prophets are telling you a story of meaningless despair. Do not believe their nonsense. That’s what it is. You have a need for meaning because meaning exists. Meaninglessness is an illusion; it’s a deception.

Therefore do not give in to the temptation to cynicism because you cannot yet make sense of events occurring in the world or in your own life. That is the common experience of a character in a larger story. Trust the Author with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. If in all your ways you acknowledge him, he will direct you in living out most fully and fruitfully the amazing role he has given you to in this most real of all stories (Proverbs 3:5–6). And someday the Author will tell you the Story in full. You will be blown away.

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When Your Faith for Fishing Is Small

How is your faith for evangelism? Too frequently mine is too small. I hate that sin of unbelief and having just spent a few days with some joyful, bold, fruitful evangelists, I am freshly encouraged to fight it.

A reluctance to fish for men, whether from fear, selfishness, weariness, or skepticism that it will actually work exposes that I trust my own perceptions and not Jesus. And the story of Peter and Jesus and empty nets filled is strengthening my faith to “fish.” It may strengthen yours too.

The Most Important Lesson on Fishing

Peter knew Jesus was extraordinary before Jesus filled Peter’s fishing nets to the breaking point in Luke 5:1–11. He had already been introduced to Jesus through his brother Andrew and received his new name (John 1:40–42). Jesus had already been in Peter’s home and healed his mother-in-law (Luke 4:38–39).

So in Luke 5, Peter was already grappling with Jesus’s call on his life. Jesus had become the most famous preacher in Israel. He was performing incredible signs and wonders. Crowds followed him wherever he went. Peter must have felt profoundly unqualified to be Jesus’s disciple, having no formal theological training.

The one thing Peter knew how to do was fish. Or so he thought. Actually, Jesus was about to teach Peter the most important fishing lesson of Peter’s life.

That morning after Jesus had man-fished from Peter’s boat, he instructed Peter, “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch” (Luke 5:4). Peter’s faith may not have even been mustard-seedish. He had fished all night and the sea might as well have been a desert.

However, Peter didn’t refuse. He replied, “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets” (Luke 5:5). His expectations may have been very low, but he was at least willing to obey. He and his partners dropped the nets.

Then unexpectedly the nets became heavy! Really heavy. It took everything Peter and Andrew had not to drop the bursting nets in the sea as they waited for John and James to come help. Somehow they managed to heave up the nets and fish filled both boats.

Peter, overwhelmed with conviction, said to Jesus, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord” (Luke 5:8). His sin of unbelief was exposed. He knew that it was not his expertise, experience, work-hard ethic, or his puny faith that had brought in the fish. All he did was net them. Jesus brought the fish in — something only God could do. And now he had a new fear and a new faith.

And that was precisely the result Jesus was after. A Peter who now thought much less of himself and much more of Jesus was ready for real fishing. And so Jesus said to him, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men” (Luke 5:10).

Three Encouragements for Reluctant Fishers of Men

If our faith for “fishing” is small, this story as at least three encouragements:

1. Jesus calls us in our weakness.

Jesus determined that the best time to call Peter as an evangelist was when he was at his weakest. Having done his human best at the thing he was best at, Peter’s nets were empty. Plus, he was exhausted, having worked all night. Why was this the best time? Peter needed his pride, unbelief, and weakness exposed. He needed to see himself as someone who, apart from Jesus, could do nothing (John 15:5). He needed to know who rules the fish and who fills the nets. Then he would be able to fish in faith.

2. It really doesn’t take great faith to drop the nets.

Even though Peter was skeptical that anything was going to come from the Master’s fishing trip, he still responded, “at your word I will let down the nets” (Luke 5:5). Peter was willing to it for Jesus’s sake. He trusted Jesus’s word more than his perceptions. It wasn’t a bold faith, it wasn’t a lot of faith, it even appears a reluctant faith, but nonetheless it was faith willing enough to obey. Peter did what Jesus said and Jesus honored it.

3. Jesus provides the fish.

When Peter and his partners dropped the nets, Jesus filled them. It was a powerful, ministry-shaping moment. Jesus rules fish and will fill nets with many or few according to his choosing. Our job as evangelists is to listen to Jesus and prayerfully, faithfully drop the nets — whatever nets the Lord has provided us — and let him fill them.

When Jesus tells us to “fish,” we must not place our faith in our expertise (or lack thereof), experience, or the current level of our faith. At his word let’s just faithfully go out and let down our nets. Let’s trust him to fill them (or not). The fish are his. We may just find that he will give us more than we can handle.

Lord, fill our nets!

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God’s Glory in Your Extraordinary Story

Statistically speaking, you should not exist.

Think about it for a moment. How unlikely was it that your parents ever met? And even when they came together, you were just a bad mood or argument or headache or television show or phone call away from never being conceived.

Take a generational step back, and ponder your grandparents’ stories. What were the twists and turns and near misses in their experiences and relationships — any of which, had there been even a minor change, would have resulted in your non-being?

Then keep going back further and further into your ancestral history, and consider the millions and millions of converging conversations and glances and illnesses and unexpected vocational changes and books and storms and dreams and religious choices and travels and schools and wars and ambitions and sorrows over the centuries that, had they been altered just slightly, would not only have resulted in your not being born, but in the world’s population being very different.

The more you think about your unlikely existence and what had to take place in order for you to be sitting here reading these words, the more you’ll realize that your story is wilder than anything humans have imagined. It adds a whole new level of breathless awe to the thought that God “commanded and they were created” (Psalm 148:5). The reality behind that simple statement is incomprehensibly complex.

Nothing Truly Ordinary Ever Happens

What this means is that nothing that happens to you today is, in fact, ordinary or insignificant. Every small and great thing you encounter or do has millions of stories behind its existence or occurrence, and if you could trace them back they would keep you enthralled for weeks.

And your extraordinary life is continually shaping, and being shaped by, many other lives, human and non-human, as you move through time. In ways both witting and unwitting, your words and actions are influencing the course of other lives. Your choice of a parking spot or your seat on a plane could have a life-altering affect on someone else. Your choice of church, school, and workplace certainly will.

The Glorious Reality of Divine Selection

Do not let a belief in the sovereignty of God dull your amazement over this — as if everything just happens like a machine. Let his sovereignty multiply, not subtract from, your wonder. Just think of how God designed his creation to occur!

Fifteen million birch tree seeds in a season might produce a tree or two. A few hundred ova and a few billion sperm might produce a few children over the course of a marriage. Some 200 billion galaxies and more than 70 sextillion stars might produce a planet that sustains life, not to mention incomprehensively complex, marvelous, conscious beings who can contemplate the glory of such improbabilities.

Some look at such phenomena in creation and see meaningless randomness and natural selection. What do you see? Do you see the staggering glory of divine selection (election) out of all the contingencies and possibilities? This is the world that the God who spoke all things into existence brought into being when he said, “Let there be . . .” And all that glory before we even get to the most glorious story: Christ’s redemption of sinners. The height and depth and length and breadth of the wonder infinitely expands.

Think Long Enough to Savor the Glory

You are a tiny but extraordinary creature living in a universe that is filled with trillions, septillions, bazillions of creations, some incomprehensibly huge and others inconceivably small. And the existence of each one, just like you, so unlikely, so improbable as to be miracles, is meant to cause each of us to exclaim in worship,

“Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.” (Revelation 4:11)

You only need to stop long enough to think. There is so much divine glory to see in your truly extraordinary story.

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The Hopelessness and Hope of the Greatest Commandments

There are no commandments in the Bible more devastating than the two that Jesus said are the greatest:

And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. (Matthew 22:37–-39)

If I ever thought I was a pretty good person, these commandments destroy that delusion.

Condemning Commandments

I have never once kept even the first clause of the foremost commandment: “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart.” At the very best moments of my life, when my affections for God have been the highest and my devotion the strongest, my heart has been polluted with the indwelling sin of selfishness. And I am rarely at my highest and strongest.

When added to all my heart is all my soul (everything that animates my physical and emotional being) and all my mind (every thought and intellectual desire), I am thrice condemned. Heart, soul, and mind overlap to cover my entire self. I have never, ever loved God entirely.

And then, if one impossible command wasn’t enough, Jesus adds to Deuteronomy 6:5 the impossible command of Leviticus 19:18: “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” I have never once loved my neighbor as myself. The pathological selfishness resident in me makes loving even those I love the most impossible to love as myself. I have to repent daily for some way I sinfully put myself before around me.

When held to the standard of these commandments, I see that

“I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:22–24)

A Hope Almost too Good to Be True

Who will deliver me from my wretchedness? The answer is almost too good to be true:

“Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:25)

God himself saves me — and you — from the condemnation of the two greatest commandments that he himself commanded! For,

“God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” (Romans 8:3–4)

Jesus loved the Father with all his heart, all his soul, and all his mind on our behalf. And he loved us, his neighbors, even while we were still sinful enemies (Romans 5:8), as he loved himself — truly as he loved himself. He became sin for us that we might become his righteousness (2 Corinthians 5:21). This made us no longer just neighbors, but actually part of himself — his body (1 Corinthians 12:27).

Outside of Christ, we are only wretched. The two greatest commandments reveal just how wretched we are. But in Christ, united to him, we are completely forgiven of our constant failure to keep them and his constant and perfect keeping of them is credited to us.

And one day, “when freed from sinning,” we too will have the joy of keeping them constantly and perfectly just as Christ does. One day we will know the thrill of loving God with our entire being and the delightful, pure freedom of loving others as ourselves.

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What Is Your Doing Saying?

Your actions speak. Your works are words. The question is what are they saying?

Actions Speak

The old adage, “actions speak louder than words,” is true because, as another adage says, “words are cheap.” So, when it comes to our faith, if our words and actions are saying different things we must look to our actions for the truth.

That’s what the apostle James tells us in James 2:18, and what the apostle John essentially tells us in 1 John 3:18. And Jesus also says this in John chapter 10, where once again Jesus has proclaimed himself to be God (John 10:27–30) and once again the Jews have picked up stones (John 10:31).

But before the stones start flying, Jesus asks them a revealing question:

“I have shown you many good works from the Father; for which of them are you going to stone me?” (John 10:32)

The Jews respond that they don’t want to stone him for his works but for his words (v. 33). So Jesus replies,

“If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me [i.e. my words]; but if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.” (John 10:37–38)

What Jesus is saying is that his works are also words. In fact, he had said this explicitly a few minutes earlier in the conversation:

“[The] Jews gathered around him and said to him, ‘How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.’ Jesus answered them, ‘I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name bear witness about me.’” (John 10:24–25)

Jesus’s actions spoke plain and clear, but the Jews were not listening.

Faith Works

Jesus, the God-man, lived his earthly life in perfect integrity. His words and works were always saying the same thing. He was the incarnate Word of God (John 1:1, 14) who always did what was pleasing to the Father (John 8:29). Being “the founder and perfecter of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2), he showed us how faith works. Jesus’s trust in the Father was constantly being proclaimed through the things he did.

Faith, by its very nature, produces action. It’s intrinsic. Each of us is wired to feel and act in accordance to what we believe to be true. We cannot help it.

And this is a universal human phenomenon. Every human being lives by faith. The atheist who says he doesn’t go for that faith nonsense because he believes in science has a category confusion. What he really means is that he puts his faith in hypotheses advanced by non-religious scientists with regard to the origin of the universe and questions of ultimate meaning. Since these are things he cannot scientifically verify, and which he largely learned from others who he considers authoritative, he too has a “conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).

None of us can help working out his faith. We cannot help doing what we believe. That’s why Jesus said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15). That’s why Paul defined his mission as bringing about “the obedience of faith” among the Gentiles (Romans 1:5). And it’s why Hebrews 11 was written, so we could have a catalog of examples of how faith works.

What Are Your Actions Saying?

So if we want to know what we really believe, we must look at our actions. For sinful humans whose selfish pride so frequently grabs for control of our tongue, the words of our mouth can be unreliable. But the words of our works speak with a powerful, and sometimes painful, eloquence about what we believe.

What are your actions saying? What do you do when you are alone, or when your plans are interrupted, or you are disappointed, or your weakness is exposed, or you’re tempted to fear, or someone else prospers or excels you, or you’re called on to help meet someone else’s financial need? How much of a priority do you make your local church? How willing are you to serve obscurely? When those who are closest to you are honest, those who observe you in your unguarded, uncalculated moments, what do they hear from your actions?

These are exposing and convicting questions. Jesus had perfect consistency between his words and works. None of the rest of us has this yet.

But since on the Great Day there will be a separation between the sheep and goats based on what their works said about their faith (Matthew 25:31–46), and since, even among the sheep there will be a distinction between those who built with gold, silver, and precious stones (more faithful) and those who built with wood, hay, and straw (less faithful) (1 Corinthians 3:12–15), we must “look carefully how [we] walk, not as unwise but as wise” (Ephesians 5:15). And the wise repent wherever they see unbelief and then “[forget] what lies behind and [strain] forward to what lies ahead [and] press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13–14).

There is no conflict between faith and works. Our works reveal where our faith is. Jesus told us that a “tree is known by its fruit” (Matthew 12:33). The wise seek to make the tree good.

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