More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
July 1 - August 3, 2023
beauty. Psalm 124 is an instance of a person who digs deeply into the trouble and finds there the presence of the God who is on our side.
Faith develops out of the most difficult aspects of our existence, not the easiest.
Christians know more about the deep struggles of life than others, more about the ugliness of sin.
We are traveling in the light, toward God who is rich in mercy and strong
to save. It is Christ, not culture, that defines our lives. It is the help we experience, not the hazards we risk, that shapes our days.
Danger and oppression are never too much for faith.
Evil is always temporary. “The worst does not last.”2 Nothing counter to God’s justice has any eternity to it.
The general truth under which the Christian lives in this regard is “once saved always saved.”
However true that is generally, and I think it is, there are exceptions. It would seem that if God will not force us to faith in the first place, he will not keep us against our will finally. Falling away is possible.
The way of discipleship gets difficult; they see an opening through the trees that promises a softer, easier path. Distracted and diverted, they slip off and never return.
Joy is not a requirement of Christian discipleship, it is a consequence. It is not what we have to acquire in order to experience life in Christ; it is what comes to us when we are walking in the way of faith and obedience.
Society is a bored, gluttonous king employing a court jester to divert it after an overindulgent meal.
Joy cannot be commanded, purchased or arranged.
The gratitude and gladness build and soar. There is a sea-change into joy.
Each act of God was an impossible miracle. There was no way it could have happened, and it did happen.
Joy has a history.
Joy is nurtured by anticipation.
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.
remarkable things Christians learn is that laughter does not exclude weeping.
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 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.
It shows up the tinniness of the world’s joy and affirms the solidity of God’s joy.
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.”
For it is 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.
Structures become more important than the people who live in them.
Machines become more important than the people who use them. We care more for our possessions with which we hope to make our way in the world than with our thoughts and dreams which tell us who we are in the world.
All trouble comes from doing too much; therefore do nothing. Step out of the rat race. The world of motion is evil, so quit doing everything.
The main difference between Christians and others is that we take God seriously and they do not.
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. The week of creation was a week of work. The days are described not by their weather conditions and not by their horoscope readings:
Genesis 1 is a journal of work.
In every letter St. Paul wrote, he demonstrated that a Christian’s work is a natural, inevitable and faithful development out of God’s work.
The curse of some people’s lives is not work, as such, but senseless work, vain work, futile work, work that takes place apart from God, work that ignores the if. Christian discipleship, by orienting us in God’s work and setting us in the mainstream
of what God is already doing, frees us from the compulsiveness of work. 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
It 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).
For it makes very little difference how much money Christians carry in their wallets or purses. It makes little difference how our culture values and rewards our work . . . if God doesn’t. For our work creates neither life nor righteousness. Relentless, compulsive work habits (“work your worried fingers to the bone”) which our society rewards and admires are seen by the psalmist as a sign of weak faith and assertive pride, as if God could not be trusted to accomplish his will, as if we could rearrange the universe by our own effort.
What does make a difference is the personal relationships that we create and develop. We learn a name; we start a friendship; we follow up on a smile—or maybe even on a grimace. Nature is profligate with its seeds, scattering them everywhere; a few of them sprout. Out of numerous handshakes and greetings, some germinate and grow into a friendship in Christ. Christian worship gathers the energy and focuses the motivation that transform us from consumers who use work to get things into people who are intimate and in whom work is a way of being in creative relationship with another. Such work can
...more
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
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. The conclusion of the Bible is that great, thunderous
As we read this story of blessing and familiarize ourselves with the men and women who are experiencing God’s blessing, we realize that it is not something external
ephemeral. Not a matter of having a good day, not an occasional run of luck. It is an
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, which makes a happy life to consist in “ease, honours, and great wealth.”
To increase my standard of living, people in another part of the world must lower theirs.
But we have a greed problem: if I don’t grab mine while I can, I might not be happy. The hunger problem is not going to be solved by
government or by industry but in church, among Christians who learn a different way to pursue happiness.
It is not a way of boredom or despair or confusion. It is not a miserable groping but a way of blessing.
We simply become Christians and begin the life of faith. We acknowledge God as our maker and lover and accept Christ as the means by which we can be in living relationship with God.
Reverence might be a better word. Awe.
Because of the ambiguities of the world we live in and the defects in our own wills, we will not do any of this perfectly and without fault. But that isn’t the point. The way is plain—walk in it. Keeping the rules and obeying the commands is only common sense. People who are forever breaking the rules, trying other roads, attempting to create their own system of values and truth from scratch, spend most of their time calling up someone to get them out of trouble and help repair the damage, and then ask the silly question “What went wrong?” As H. H. Farmer said, “If you go against the grain of
...more
