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January 13, 2016 - December 13, 2023
God loves you. He’s on your side. He’s coming after you. He’s relentless.
God doesn’t change: he seeks and he saves.
The essential thing “in heaven and earth” is . . . that there should be long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
It is not difficult in such a world to get a person interested in the message of the gospel; it is terrifically difficult to sustain the interest.
There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness.
pastor is not a tour guide.
A disciple is a learner, but not in the academic setting of a school-room, rather at the work site of a craftsman. We do not acquire information about God but skills in faith. Pilgrim (parepidēmos) tells us we are people who spend our lives going someplace, going to God, and whose path for getting there is the way, Jesus Christ.
Three times a year faithful Hebrews made that trip (Ex 23:14-17; 34:22-24).
Feast of Passover
Feast of Pentecost
Feast of Tabe...
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A person has to be thoroughly disgusted with the way things are to find the motivation to set out on the Christian way.
The truth about me is that God made and loves me.
The truth about those sitting beside me is that God made them and loves them, and each one is therefore my neighbor.
Psalm 120 is the decision to take one way over against the other.
The first step toward God is a step away from the lies of the world.
Paraphrased, the cry is, “I live in the midst of hoodlums and wild savages; this world is not my home and I want out.”
Repentance is not an emotion. It is not feeling sorry for your sins. It is a decision.
look up to the mountains; does my strength come from mountains? No, my strength comes from GOD, who made heaven, and earth, and mountains.
Psalm 121 is a quiet voice gently and kindly telling us that we are, perhaps, wrong in the way we are going about the Christian life, and then, very simply, showing us the right way.
For many, the first great surprise of the Christian life is in the form of troubles we meet.
As Jeremiah put it: “Truly the hills are a delusion, the orgies on the mountains” (Jer 3:23 RSV).3
The promise of the psalm—and both Hebrews and Christians have always read it this way—is not that we shall never stub our toes but that no injury, no illness, no accident, no distress will have evil power over us, that is, will be able to separate us from God’s purposes in us.
Do you think the way to tell the story of the Christian journey is to describe its trials and tribulations? It is not. It is to name and to describe God who preserves, accompanies and rules us.
The only serious mistake we can make when illness comes, when anxiety threatens, when conflict disturbs our relationships with others is to conclude that God has gotten bored looking after us and has shifted his attention to a more exciting Christian, or that God has become disgusted with our meandering obedience and decided to let us fend for ourselves for a while, or that God has gotten too busy fulfilling prophecy in the Middle East to take time now to sort out the complicated mess we have gotten ourselves into. That is the only serious mistake we can make.
Psalm 121 says that the same faith that works in the big things works in the little things.
The Christian life is not a quiet escape to a garden where we can walk and talk uninterruptedly with our Lord, not a fantasy trip to a heavenly city where we can compare our blue ribbons and gold medals with those of others who have made it to the winners’ circle.
The Christian life is going to God.
each step we walk, each breath we breathe, we know we are preserved by God, we know we are accompanied by God, we know we are ruled by God; and therefore no matter what doubts we endure or what accidents we experience, the Lord will guard us from every evil, he guards our very life.
Psalm 122 is the song of a person who decides to go to church and worship God.
shalvah, “prosperity.” It has nothing to do with insurance policies or large bank accounts or stockpiles of weapons. The root meaning is leisure—the relaxed stance of one who knows that everything is all right because God is over us, with us and for us in Jesus Christ.
It is the leisure of the person who knows that every moment of our existence is at the disposal of God, lived under the mercy of God.
the New Testament concept of Diakonos originally meant “a waiter.” [We] must wait upon the high majesty of the divine Word, which is God himself as he speaks in his action.
If God is God at all, he must know more about our needs than we do; if God is God at all, he must be more in touch with the reality of our thoughts, our emotions, our bodies than we are; if God is God at all, he must have a more comprehensive grasp of the interrelations in our families and communities and nations than we do.
The word mercy means that the upward look to God in the heavens does not expect God to stay in the heavens but to come down, to enter our condition, to accomplish the vast enterprise of redemption, to fashion in us his eternal salvation.
God doesn’t need me to defend him.
The proper work for the Christian is witness, not apology,
The psalmist is not a person talking about the good life, how God has kept him out of all difficulty. This person has gone through the worst—the dragon’s mouth, the flood’s torrent—and finds himself intact. He was not abandoned but helped. The final strength is not in the dragon or in the flood but in God who “didn’t go off and leave us.”
There is no literature in all the world that is more true to life and more honest than Psalms, for here we have warts-and-all religion. Every skeptical thought, every disappointing venture, every pain, every despair that we can face is lived through and integrated into a personal, saving relationship with God—a relationship that also has in it acts of praise, blessing, peace, security, trust and love.
What is hazardous in my life is my work as a Christian. Every day I put faith on the line. I have never seen God. In a world where nearly everything can be weighed, explained, quantified, subjected to psychological analysis and scientific control, I persist in making the center of my life a God whom no eye hath seen, nor ear heard, whose will no one can probe. That’s a risk.
It takes the majesty of the One who pulled a universe into order and beauty, and finds this same God involved in the local troubles of a quite ordinary person.
The person of faith is not a person who has been born, luckily, with a good digestion and sunny disposition. The assumption by outsiders that Christians are naive or protected is the opposite of the truth: Christians know more about the deep struggles of life than others, more about the ugliness of sin.
Living as a Christian is not walking a tightrope without a safety net high above a breathless crowd, many of whom would like nothing better than the morbid thrill of seeing you fall; it is sitting secure in a fortress.
People of faith have the same needs for protection and security as anyone else. We are no better than others in that regard. What is different is that we find that we don’t have to build our own: “God is a safe place to hide, ready to help when we need him” (Ps 46:1).
“He was entirely unselfish, and in his long life he never committed a pleasure.”
One day Luther lost patience with Melanchthon’s virtuous reserve. ‘For heaven’s sake,’ he roared, ‘why don’t you go out and sin a little? God deserves to have something to forgive you for!’
Joy is not a requirement of Christian discipleship, it is a consequence.
The center sentence in the psalm is “We are one happy people” (v. 3).
Joy has a history. Joy is the verified, repeated experience of those involved in what God is doing.
It is clear in Psalm 126 that the one who wrote it and those who sang it were no strangers to the dark side of things.
