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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.
each generation has the world to deal with in a new form.
World is an atmosphere, a mood.
There is a sense, a feeling, that things aren’t right, that the environment is not whole, but just what it is eludes analysis. We know that the spiritual atmosphere in which we live erodes faith, dissipates hope and corrupts love, but it is hard to put our finger on what is wrong.
One aspect of world that I have been able to identify as harmful to Christians is the assumption that anything worthwhile can be acquired at once.
Millions of people in our culture make decisions for Christ, but there is a dreadful attrition rate.
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.
The religious life is defined as the latest and the newest: Zen, faith healing, human potential, parapsychology, successful living, choreography in the chancel, Armageddon. We’ll try anything—until something else comes along.
Friedrich Nietzsche, who saw this area of spiritual truth at least with great clarity, wrote, “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.”
It is this “long obedience in the same direction” which the mood of the world does so much to discourage.
Disciple (mathētēs) says we are people who spend our lives apprenticed to our master, Jesus Christ.
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 getti...
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Topographically Jerusalem was the highest city in Palestine, and so all who traveled there spent much of their time ascending.
that life is an arduous and tragic struggle;
that what we call ‘sanity,’ what we mean by ‘not being schizophrenic,’ has a great deal to do with competence, earned by struggling for excellence; with compassion, hard won by confronting conflict; and with modesty and patience, acquired through silence and suffering.”
The dissatisfaction, coupled with a longing for peace and truth, can set us on a pilgrim path of wholeness in God.
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.
a journey to God that becomes a life of peace.
The distress that begins and ends the song is the painful awakening to the no-longer-avoidable reality that we have been lied to. The world, in fact, is not as it had been represented to us. Things are not all right as they are, and they are not getting any better.
We keep expecting things to get better somehow.
Rescue me from the person who tells me of life and omits Christ, who is wise in the ways of the world and ignores the movement of the Spirit.
The truth about me is that God made and
loves me.
The first step toward God is a step away from the lies of the world.
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.
Repentance is not an emotion. It is not feeling sorry for your sins. It is a decision.
Repentance is a decision to follow Jesus Christ and become his pilgrim in the path of peace.
It is the discovery that there is always a way that leads out of distress—a way that begins in repentance, or turning to God.
Repentance, the first word in Christian immigration, sets us on the way to traveling in the light. It is a rejection that is also an acceptance, a leaving that develops into an arriving, a no to the world that is a yes to God.
It is not our judgement of the situation which can show us what is wise,
but only the truth of the Word of God.
For many, the first great surprise of the Christian life is in the form of troubles we meet.
We Christians believe that life is created and shaped by God and that the life of faith is a daily exploration of the constant and countless ways in which God’s grace and love are experienced.
It is the solid, massive, secure experience of God, who keeps all evil from getting inside us, who guards our life, who guards us when we leave and when we return, who guards us now, who guards us always.
But worship is not forced.
Everyone who worships does so because he or she wants to.
Worship is the single most popular act in this
Feelings are important in many areas but completely unreliable in matters of faith. Paul
Scherer is laconic: “The Bible wastes very little time on the way we feel.”
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.
Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed...
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The biblical word judgment means “the decisive word by which God straightens things out and puts things right.”
Judgment
worship.
Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God—it whets our appetite.
Shalom, “peace,” is one of the richest words in the Bible.
releases streams of living water in us
