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July 3 - July 10, 2024
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.
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.
Everyone who travels the road of faith requires assistance from time to time. We need cheering up when spirits flag; we need direction when the way is unclear.
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.
Psalm 122 is third in the sequence of the Songs of Ascents. Psalm 120 is the psalm of repentance—the one that gets us out of an environment of deceit and hostility and sets us on our way to God. Psalm 121 is the psalm of trust—a demonstration of how faith resists patent-medicine remedies to trials and tribulations and determinedly trusts God to work out his will and “guard you from every evil” in the midst of difficulty. Psalm 122 is the psalm of worship—a demonstration of what people of faith everywhere and always do: gather to an assigned place and worship their God.
God made us, redeems us, provides for us. The natural, honest, healthy, logical response to that is praise to God. When we praise we are functioning at the center, we are in touch with the basic, core reality of our being.
Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God—it whets our appetite. Our need for God is not taken care of by engaging in worship—it deepens. It overflows the hour and permeates the week. The need is expressed in a desire for peace and security. Our everyday needs are changed by the act of worship.
Shalom, “peace,” is one of the richest words in the Bible.
It gathers all aspects of wholeness that result from God’s will being completed in us. It is the work of God that, when complete, releases streams of living water in us and pulsates with eternal life.
The reason many of us do not ardently believe in the gospel is that we have never given it a rigorous testing, thrown our hard questions at it, faced it with our most prickly doubts.
And yet I decide, every day, to set aside what I can do best and attempt what I do very clumsily—open myself to the frustrations and failures of loving, daring to believe that failing in love is better than succeeding in pride.
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. In the details of the conflict, in the minuteness of a personal history, the majestic greatness of God becomes revealed. Faith develops out of the most difficult aspects of our existence, not the easiest.
Discipleship is a decision to live by what I know about God, not by what I feel about him or myself or my neighbors.
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.
One of the most interesting and remarkable things Christians learn is that laughter does not exclude weeping. Christian joy is not an escape from sorrow. Pain and hardship still come, but they are unable to drive out the happiness of the redeemed.
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. We find that his ways are dependable, his promises sure.
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.
Our work goes wrong when we lose touch with the God who works “his salvation in the midst of the earth.” 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). The foundational truth is that work is good. If God does it, it must be all right. 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 character of our work is shaped not by accomplishments or possessions but in the birth of relationships: “Children are GOD’s best gift.” We invest our energy in people. Among those around us we develop sons and daughters, sisters and brothers even as our Lord did with us:
Blessing has inherent in it the power to increase. It functions by sharing and delight in life.
The Bible isn’t interested in whether we believe in God or not. It assumes that everyone more or less does. What it is interested in is the response we have to him: Will we let God be as he is, majestic and holy, vast and wondrous, or will we always be
trying to whittle him down to the size of our small minds, insist on confining him within the boundaries we are comfortable with, refuse to think of him other than in images that are convenient to our lifestyle?
Perseverance does not mean “perfection.” It means that we keep going. We do not quit when we find that we are not yet mature and there is a long journey still before us.
God sticks to his relationship. He establishes a personal relationship with us and stays with it. The central reality for Christians is the personal, unalterable, persevering commitment God makes to us. Perseverance is not the result of our determination, it is the result of God’s faithfulness.
suffering is held up and proclaimed—and prayed.
Hoping does not mean doing nothing. It is not fatalistic resignation. It means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions.
We see that whatever or whoever got us in trouble cannot separate us from God, for “forgiveness is your habit.” We are persuaded that God’s way with us is redemption and that the redemption, not the suffering, is ultimate.
The two things that Psalm 131 prunes away are unruly ambition and infantile dependency, what we might call getting too big for our britches and refusing to cut the apron strings.
the virtue of aspiration—an impatience with mediocrity and a dissatisfaction with all things created until we are at home with the Creator, the hopeful striving for the best God has for us—the kind of thing Paul expressed: “I’ve got my eye on the goal, where God is beckoning us onward—to Jesus. I’m off and running, and I’m not turning back” (Phil 3:14). But 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.
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.
Memory is a databank we use to evaluate our position and make decisions. With a biblical memory we have two thousand years of experience from which to make the off-the-cuff responses that are required each day in the life of faith. If we are going to live adequately and maturely as the people of God, we need more data to work from than our own experience can give us.
Psalm 132 activates faith’s memory so that obedience will be sane.
Psalm 132 cultivates a hope that gives wings to obedience, a hope that is consistent with the reality of what God has done in the past but is not confined to it.
Our membership in the church is a corollary of our faith in Christ. We can no more be a Christian
and have nothing to do with the church than we can be a person and not be in a family.
Where relationships are warm and expectancies fresh, we are already beginning to enjoy the life together that will be completed in our life everlasting. Which means that heaven is like nothing quite so much as a good party.
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. It is what Psalm 1 announces and what Psalm 128 describes. It is what we experience when God blesses us. The word in Hebrew “is used only of men, never of God, [and] in the NT there are only two instances in which it is used of God (makarios in 1 Tim 1:11; 6:15).”3 The other word is bĕrakah. It describes what God does to us and among us: he enters into covenant with us, he pours out
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Find the right things to do, practice the actions, and other things will follow. “Lift up your praising hands to the Holy Place, and bless GOD.” Act your gratitude; pantomime your thanks; you will become that which you do.
Blessing is at the end of the road. And that which is at the end of the road influences everything that takes place along the road. The end shapes the means. As Catherine of Siena said, “All the way to heaven is heaven.” A joyful end requires a joyful means. Bless the Lord.
“The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Or, in the vocabulary of Psalm 134, “Bless GOD.”
“Charis always demands the answer eucharistia (that is, grace always demands the answer of gratitude).
All the movements of discipleship arrive at a place where joy is experienced. Every step of assent toward God develops the capacity to enjoy. Not only is there, increasingly, more to be enjoyed, there is steadily the acquired ability to enjoy it.
