A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

by Eugene H. Peterson

But the people I was around didn’t pray the Psalms. That puzzled me; Christians have always prayed the Psalms; why didn’t my friends and neighbors? Then I realized that it was because the language, cadenced and beautiful and harmonious, seemed remote from their jerky and messy and discordant everyday lives.

Singing the fifteen psalms is a way both to express the amazing grace and to quiet the anxious fears.

Before a man can do things there must be things he will not do. MENCIUS

A person has to get fed up with the ways of the world before he, before she, acquires an appetite for the world of grace.

How we can keep on believing this after so many centuries of evidence to the contrary is difficult to comprehend,

but nothing we do and nothing anyone else does to us seems to disenchant us from the spell of the lie. We keep expecting things to get better somehow. And when they don’t, we whine like spoiled children who don’t get their way. We accumulate resentment that stores up in anger and erupts in violence.

The truth about what is wrong with the world is that I and the neighbor sitting beside me have sinned in refusing to let God be for us, over us and in us.

The usual biblical word describing the no we say to the world’s lies and the yes we say to God’s truth is repentance.

Mesopotamian power and Egyptian wisdom were strength and intelligence divorced from God, put to the wrong ends and producing all the wrong results.

We know that Israel, in saying that no, did not miraculously return to Eden and live in primitive innocence, or mystically inhabit a heavenly city and live in supernatural ecstasy. They worked and played, suffered and sinned in the world as everyone else did, and as Christians still do. But they were now going someplace—they were going to God.

inspiring than a ridge of mountains silhouetted against the sky? Does any part of this earth promise more in terms of majesty and strength, of firmness and solidity, than the mountains? But a Hebrew would see something else. During the time this psalm was written and sung, Palestine was overrun with popular pagan worship. Much of this religion was practiced on hilltops. Shrines were set up, groves of trees were planted, sacred prostitutes both male and female were provided; persons were lured to the shrines to engage in acts of worship that would enhance the fertility of the land, would make you feel good, would protect you from evil.

Three times in Psalm 121 God is referred to by the personal name Yahweh, translated as GOD. Eight times he is described as the guardian, or as the one who guards. He is not an impersonal executive giving orders from on high; he is present help every step of the way we travel.

All the water in all the oceans cannot sink a ship unless it gets inside. Nor can all the trouble in the world harm us unless it gets within us.

And though this world, with devils filled Should threaten to undo us, We will not fear, for God hath willed His truth to triumph through us. The prince of darkness grim, We tremble not for him; His rage we can endure, For lo! his doom is sure; One little word shall fell him.

She said, “Pastor, while waiting for you to come I realized what’s wrong with me—I don’t have a frame. My feelings, my thoughts, my activities—everything is loose and sloppy. There is no border to my life. I never know where I am. I need a frame for my life like this one I have for my embroidery.” How do we get that framework, that sense of solid structure so that we know where we stand and are therefore able to do our work easily and without anxiety?

We live in what one writer has called the “age of sensation.”2 We think that if we don’t feel something there can be no authenticity in doing it. But the wisdom of God says something different: that we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much quicker than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting.

If we stay at home by ourselves and read the Bible, we are going to miss a lot, for our reading will be unconsciously conditioned by our culture, limited by our ignorance, distorted by unnoticed prejudices. In worship we are part of “the large congregation” where all the writers of Scripture address us, where hymn writers use music to express truths that touch us not only in our heads but in our hearts, where the preacher who has just lived through six days of doubt, hurt, faith and blessing with the worshipers speaks the truth of Scripture in the language of the congregation’s present experience. We want to hear what God says and what he says to us: worship is the place where our attention is centered on these personal and decisive words of God.

we are provided promises that tell us to go ahead: Ask and you’ll get; Seek and you’ll find; Knock and the door will open. (Lk 11:9)

Freedom is announced and celebrated. But not many feel or act free. Evidence? We live in a nation of complainers and a society of addicts.

The best New Testament commentary on this psalm is in the final section of Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapters 12—16.

A servant Christian is the freest person on earth.

Still, despite my ignorance and surrounded by tinny optimists and cowardly pessimists, I say that God will accomplish his will, and I cheerfully persist in living in the hope that nothing will separate me from Christ’s love.

To be a futurist based on this...

We don’t always have to keep our eyes on our footsteps lest we slip, inadvertently, on a temptation. God is at our side. He is, as another psalmist put it, “behind and before” (see 139:5). And when it comes down to it, do we need anything more than our Lord’s prayer for us: “Holy Father, guard them. . . . I’m not asking that you take them out of the world / But that you guard them from the Evil One” (Jn 17:11, 15)? With a prayer like that offered to the Father on our behalf, are we not secure?

Three times in his great Sermon, Jesus, knowing how easily we imagine the worst, repeats the reassuring command “Do not be anxious” (Mt 6:25, 31, 34 RSV). Our life with God is a sure thing.

The enormous entertainment industry in America is a sign of the depletion of joy in our culture.

A common but futile strategy for achieving joy is trying to eliminate things that hurt: get rid of pain by numbing the nerve ends, get rid of insecurity by eliminating risks, get rid of disappointment by depersonalizing your relationships. And then try to lighten the boredom of such a life by buying joy in the form of vacations and entertainment. There isn’t a hint of that in Psalm 126.

The Bible begins with the announcement “In the beginning God created”—not “sat majestic in the heavens,” not “was filled with beauty and love.” He created. He did something. He made something. He fashioned heaven and earth.

wrong both when we work anxiously and when we don’t work at all, when we become frantic and compulsive in our work (Babel) and when we become indolent and lethargic in our work (Thessalonica). The foundational truth is that work is good.

Jesus, in his introduction to his Sermon on the Mount, identifies the eight key qualities in the life of a person of faith and announces each one with the word blessed. He makes it clear that the way of discipleship is not a reduction of what we already are, not an attenuation of our lives, not a subtraction from what we are used to. Rather, he will expand our capacities and fill us up with life so that we overflow with joy.

John Calvin, preaching to his congregation in Geneva, Switzerland, pointed out that we must develop better and deeper concepts of happiness than those held by the world,

Too much of the world’s happiness depends on taking from one to satisfy another. To increase my standard of living, people in another part of the world must lower theirs.

Will we let God be as he is, majestic and holy, vast and wondrous, or will

we always be trying to whittle him down to the size of our small minds, insist on confining him within the boundaries we are comfortable with, refuse to think of him other than in images that are convenient to our lifestyle?

Others will only be puzzled by how anyone could sing such a cheerful song in such a messed-up world.

Years later I learned that the church had a fancier word for the same thing: perseverance. I have also found that it is one of the marks of Christian discipleship and have learned to admire those who exemplify it. Along

The psalmist lived among prophets and priests who dealt with his vindictive spirit and nurtured him toward a better way of treating the wicked than calling down curses on them, learning what Charles Williams once described as the “passion of patience.” We are in a similar apprenticeship. But we will not learn it by swallowing our sense of outrage on the one hand or, on the other, excusing all wickedness as a neurosis. We will do it by offering up our anger to God, who trains us in creative love.

A Christian is a person who decides to face and live through suffering. If we do not make that decision, we are endangered on every side. A man or woman of faith who fails to acknowledge and deal with suffering becomes, at last, either a cynic or a melancholic or a suicide.

By setting the anguish out in the open and voicing it as a prayer, the psalm gives dignity to our suffering.

Neither prophets nor priests nor psalmists offer quick cures for the suffering: we don’t find any of them telling us to take a vacation, use this drug, get a hobby. Nor do they ever engage in publicity cover-ups, the plastic-smile propaganda campaigns that hide trouble behind a billboard of positive thinking. None of that: the suffering is held up and proclaimed—and prayed.

There is meaning to our lives and there is salvation for our lives, a truth summed up by Forsyth when he said, “Our very pain is a sign of God’s remembrance of us, for it would be much worse if we were left in ghastly isolation.”6

If God were different than he is, not one of us would have a leg to stand on: “If you, GOD, kept records on wrongdoings, who would stand a chance? As it turns out, forgiveness is your habit, and that’s why you’re worshiped.” Because of the forgiveness we have a place to stand. We stand in confident awe before God, not in terrorized despair.

Our culture encourages and rewards ambition without qualification. We are surrounded by a way of life in which betterment is understood as expansion, as acquisition, as fame. Everyone wants to get more. To be on top, no matter what it is the top of, is admired. There is nothing recent about the temptation. It is the oldest sin in the book, the one that got Adam thrown out of the garden and Lucifer tossed out of heaven. What is fairly new about it is the general admiration and approval that it receives.

Ambition is aspiration gone crazy.

Calvin comments, “Those who yield themselves up to the influence of ambition will

soon lose themselves in a labyrinth of perplexity.”2

Our Lord gave us the picture of the child as a model for Christian faith (Mk 10:14-16) not because of the child’s helplessness but because of the child’s willingness to be led, to be taught, to be blessed.

It is a blessed mark of growth out of spiritual infancy when we can forgo the joys which once appeared to be essential, and can find our solace in him who denies them to us.”4

You are much more likely to find passionate prayer in a foxhole than in a church pew; and you will certainly find more otherworldly visions and supernatural voices in a mental hospital than you will in a church.

The second half of Psalm 132 takes seriously what God said to David and how David responded (matters that are remembered in the ark narrative) and uses them to make a vision of the reality that is in the future of faith: “I’ll shower blessings on the pilgrims who come here, and give supper to those who arrive hungry; I’ll dress my priests in salvation clothes; the holy people will sing their hearts out! Oh, I’ll make the place radiant for David! I’ll fill it with light for my anointed! I’ll dress his enemies in dirty rags, but I’ll make his crown sparkle with splendor.” All the verb tenses are future. Obedience is fulfilled by hope.

We need roots in the past to give obedience ballast and breadth; we need a vision of the future to give obedience direction and goal. And they must be connected. There must be an organic unity between them.