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if we take the energies that make for aspiration and remove God from the picture, replacing him with our own crudely sketched self-portrait, we end up with ugly arrogance.
Ambition is aspiration gone crazy. Aspiration is the channeled, creative energy that moves us to growth in Christ, shaping goals in the Spirit. Ambition takes these same energies for growth and development and uses them to make something tawdry and cheap, sweatily knocking together a Babel when we could be vacationing in Eden.
Our lives are lived well only when they are lived on the terms of their creation, with God loving and us being loved, with God making and us being made, with God revealing and us understanding, with God commanding and us responding. Being a Christian means accepting the
terms of creation, accepting God as our maker and redeemer, and growing day by day into an increasingly glorious creature in Christ, developing joy, experiencing love, maturing in peace.
If we reject this way, the only alternative is to attempt the hopelessly fourth-rate, embarrassingly awkward imitation of God made i...
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The Christian is not a naive, innocent infant who has no identity apart from a feeling of being comforted and protected and catered to but a person who has discovered an identity given by God which can be enjoyed best and fully in a voluntary trust in God.
We do not cling to God desperately out of fear and the panic of insecurity; we come to him freely in faith and love.
God does not want us neurotically dependent on him but willingly trustful in him. And so he weans us.
The answer is, neither. God hasn’t abandoned you and you haven’t done anything wrong. You are being weaned.
We want a Christian faith that has stability but is not petrified, that has vision but is not hallucinatory.
The psalm shows obedience as a lively, adventurous response of faith that is rooted in historical fact and reaches into a promised hope.
But we need other experiences, the community of experience of brothers and sisters in the church, the centuries of experience provided by our biblical ancestors.
Biblical history is a good memory for what doesn’t work. It is also a good memory for what does work—like remembering what you put in the soup that made it taste so good so you can repeat and enjoy the recipe on another day, or remembering the shortcut through the city to the ocean that saved you from being tied up in traffic and got you to the beach two hours earlier.
For obedience is not a stodgy plodding in the ruts of religion, it is a hopeful race toward God’s promises.
The past is not, for the person of faith, a restored historical site that we tour when we are on vacation; it is a field that we plow and harrow and plant and fertilize and work for a harvest.
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.
mature obedience.
What we require is obedience—the strength to stand and the willingness to leap, and the sense to know when to do which.
Which is exactly what we get when an accurate memory of God’s ways is combined with a lively hope in his promises.
Membership in the church is a basic spiritual fact for those who confess Christ as Lord. It is not an option for those Christians who happen by nature to be more gregarious than others. It is part of the fabric of redemption.
For God never makes private, secret salvation deals with people. His relationships with us are personal, true; intimate, yes; but private, no.
represent to one another the address of God. We are priests who speak God’s Word and share Christ’s sacrifice. The Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged, for by himself he cannot help himself without belying the truth. He needs his brother man as a bearer and proclaimer of the divine word of salvation. He needs his brother solely because of Jesus Christ. The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure.5
A community of faith flourishes when we view each other with this expectancy, wondering what God will do today in this one, in that one. When we are in a community with those Christ loves and redeems, we are constantly finding out new things about them.
There are two words which are translated “blessed” in our Bibles. One is ’ashre, which describes the having-it-all-together sense of well-being that comes when we are living in tune with creation and redemption.
The other word is bĕrakah. It describes what God does to us and among us: he enters into covenant with us, he pours out his own life for us, he shares the goodness of his Spirit, the vitality of his creation, the joys of his redemption.
God gets down on his knees among us, gets on our level and shares himself with us. He does not reside afar off and send us diplomatic messages; he kneels among us.
That posture is characteristic of God.
The discovery and realization of this is what defines what we know of God as good news—God shares hims...
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That summarizes the posture of blessing: God stands—he is foundational and dependable; God stoops—he kneels to our level and meets us where we are; God stays—he sticks with us through hard times and good, sharing his life with us in grace and peace.
Our stories may be interesting, but they are not the point. Our achievements may be marvelous, but they are not germane. Our curiosity may be understandable, but it is not relevant. Bless the Lord. “When the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled” (1 Cor 13:10). Bless God.
Feelings don’t run the show. There is a reality deeper than our feelings. Live by that. Eric Routley thinks that, colloquially, to bless means to “speak well of.”9 The Lord has spoken well of you; now you speak well of him.
“All the way to heaven is heaven.” A joyful end requires a joyful means. Bless the Lord.
Delight in what God is doing is essential in our work.”
The first question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism is “What is the chief end of man?”
“To glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
Glorify. Enjoy.
The main thing is not work for the Lord; it is not suffering in the name of the Lord; it is not witnessing to the Lord; it is not teaching Sunday school for the Lord; it is not being responsible for the sake of the Lord in the community;
it is not keeping the Ten Commandments; not loving your neighbor; not observing the golden rule. “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Or, in the vocabulary of Psalm 134, “Bless GOD.”
God is personal reality to be enjoyed. We are so created and so redeemed that we are capable of enjoying him. All the movements of discipleship arrive at a place where joy is experienced. Every step of assent toward God develops the capacity to enjoy.
first comes diligence, then comes resignation. May
