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September 29 - November 3, 2017
We can decide to live in response to the abundance of God and not under the dictatorship of our own poor needs. We can decide to live in the environment of a living God and not our own dying selves. We can decide to center ourselves in the God who generously gives and not in our own egos which greedily grab.
Present gladness has past and future.
“Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak softly and tenderly to Jerusalem, but also firmly and boldly, that she has served her sentence, that her sin is taken care of—forgiven!” (Is 40:1-2).
“When you’re in over your head, I’ll be there with you. . . . Don’t be afraid, I’m with you” (Is 43:2-5).
Joy has a history. Joy is the verified, repeated experience of those involved in what God is doing.
Joy is nurtured by living in such a history, building on such a foundation.
What we have known of him, we will know of him.
Just as joy builds on the past, it borrows from the future. It expects certain things to happen.
All suffering, all pain, all emptiness, all disappointment is seed: sow it in God and he will, finally, bring a crop of joy from it.
They knew the deserts of the heart and the nights of weeping.
Laughter is a result of living in the midst of God’s great works
Enjoyment is not an escape from boredom but a plunge by faith into God’s work
Joy is what God gives, not what we work up.
The joy that develops in the Christian way of discipleship is an overflow of spirits that comes from feeling good not about yourself but about God.
Christian joy is actual in the midst of pain, suffering, loneliness and misfortune. St. Paul is our most convincing witness to this.
“We continue to shout our praise even when we’re hemmed in with troubles, because we know how troubles can develop passionate patience in us, and how that patience in turn forges the tempered steel of virtue, keeping us alert for whatever God will do next. . . . We sing and shout our praises to God through Jesus, the Messiah!” (Rom 5:3-5, 11).
“Celebrate God all day, every day. I mean, revel in him! Make it as clear as you can to all you meet that you’re on their side, working with them and not against them. Help them see that the Master is about to arrive. He could show up any minute!” (Phil 4:4-5).
The psalm does not give us this joy as a package or as a formula, but there are some things it does do.
It reminds us of the accelerating costs and diminishing returns of those who pursue pleasure as a path toward joy.
It announces the existence of a people who assemble to worship God and disperse to live to God’s glory, whose lives are bordered on one side by a memory of God’s acts and the other by hope in God’s promises, and who along with whatever else is happening are able to say, at the center, “We are one happy people.”
The first great fact which emerges from our civilization is that today everything has become “means.” There is no longer an “end”; we do not know whither we are going. We have forgotten our collective ends, and we possess great means: we set huge machines in motion in order to arrive nowhere.
Work is a major component in most lives. It is unavoidable. It can be either good or bad, an area where our sin is magnified or where our faith matures.
the nature of sin to take good things and twist them, ever so slightly, so that they miss the target to which they were aimed, the target of God.
The pretentious work which became Babel and its pious opposite which developed at Thessalonica are displayed today on the broad canvases of Western and Eastern cultures, respectively.
The premise of the psalm for all work is that God works:
The main difference between Christians and others is that we take God seriously and they do not. We really do believe that he is the central reality of all existence.
Genesis 1 is a journal of work.
The work of God is defined and described in the pages of Scripture. We have models of creation, acts of redemption, examples of help and compassion, paradigms of comfort and salvation.
find out just how God works in Jesus Christ so that we can work in the name of Jesus Christ.
Hilary of Poitiers taught that every Christian must be constantly vigilant against what he called “irreligiosa solicitudo pro Deo”—a blasphemous anxiety to do God’s work for him.1
goes 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).
Work has dignity: there can be nothing degrading about work if God works. Work has purpose: there can be nothing futile about work if God works.
The entire miracle of procreation and reproduction requires our participation, but hardly in the form of what we call our work.
We participated in an act of love that was provided for us in the structure of God’s creation.
By joining Jesus and the psalm we learn a way of work that does not acquire things or amass possessions but responds to God and develops relationships.
It makes little difference how our culture values and rewards our work . . . if God doesn’t.
Psalm 127 insists on a perspective in which our effort is at the periphery and God’s work is at the center.
Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. G. K. CHESTERTON
The easiest thing in the world is to be a Christian. What is hard is to be a sinner.
The history we walk in has been repeatedly entered by God, most notably in Jesus Christ, first to show us and then to help us live full of faith and exuberant with purpose.
without Christ we were doing it the hard way and that with Christ we are doing it the easy way.
Blessing has inherent in it the power to increase.
“Life consists in the constant meeting of souls, which must share their contents with each other. The blessed gives to the others, because the strength instinctively pours from him and up around him. . . . The characteristic of blessing is to multiply.”4
Too much of the world’s happiness depends on taking from one to satisfy another.
Everyone wants to be happy, to be blessed. Too many people are willfully refusing to pay attention to the One who wills our happiness
How would I persist against positive eroding forces if I were not drawing on invisible forces?
The people of God are tough. For long centuries those who belong to the world have waged war against the way of faith, and they have yet to win.
Do you think of Christian faith as a fragile style of life that can flourish only when weather conditions are just right, or do you see it as a tough perennial that can stick it out through storm and drought, survive the trampling of careless feet and the attacks of vandals?
The person of faith outlasts all the oppressors. Faith lasts.
offering up our anger to God, who trains us in creative love.
