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Started reading
May 28, 2020
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?
deserves to have something to forgive you for!’ ”2
Joy is characteristic of Christian pilgrimage. It is the second in Paul’s list of the fruits of the Spirit
Joy is not a requirement of Christian discipleship, it is a consequence. It is not what we have to acquire in order
experience life in Christ; it is what comes to us when we are walking in the way of faith and obedience.
Joy is a product of abundance;
Society is a bored, gluttonous king employing a court jester to divert it after an overindulgent meal. But that kind of joy never penetrates our lives, never changes our basic constitution. The effects are extremely temporary—a few minutes, a few hours, a few days at most.
Joy cannot be commanded, purchased or arranged. But there is something we can do.
We can decide to live in the environment of a living God and not our own dying selves.
Each act of God was an impossible miracle. There was no way it could have happened, and it did happen. “It seemed like a dream, too good to be true.”
joy. We fill our minds with the stories of God’s acts. Joy has a history. Joy is the verified, repeated experience of those involved in what God is doing.
Joy is nurtured by living in such a history, building on ...
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Just as joy builds on the past, it borrows from the future. It expects certain things to happen.
Two images fix the hope: The first is “bring rains to our drought-stricken lives.”
Our lives are like that—drought-stricken—and then, suddenly, the long years of barren waiting are interrupted by God’s invasion of grace.
The second image is “So those who planted their crops in despair will shout hurrahs at the harvest, / So those who went off with heavy hearts will come home laughing, with armloads of blessing.” The hard work of sowing seed in what looks like perfectly empty earth has, as every farmer knows, a time of harvest.
They carried the painful memory of exile in their bones and the scars of oppression on their backs.
of the most interesting and remarkable things Christians learn is that laughter does not exclude weeping.
Christian joy is not an escape from sorrow.
Laughter is a result of living in the midst of God’s great works (“when God returned Israel’s exiles we laughed, we sang”).
The joy comes because God knows how to wipe away tears, and, in his resurrection work, create the smile of new life.
Joy is what God gives, not what we work up.
The psalm does not give us this joy as a package or as a formula, but there are some things it does do.
reminds us of the accelerating costs and diminishing returns of those who pursue pleasure as a path toward joy. It introduces us to the way of discipleship,
which has consequences in joy.
absolutely refuse to “work like the devil.”
Work is a major component in most lives. It is unavoidable.
It can be either good or bad, an area where our sin is magnified or wh...
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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 t...
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The pretentious work which became Babel and its pious opposite which developed at Thessalonica are displayed today on the broad canvases of Western and Eastern cultures, respectively.
Machines become more important than the people who use them.
Thessalonian view. It manifests a deep-rooted pessimism regarding human effort. Since all work is tainted with selfishness and pride, the solution is to withdraw from all activity into pure being.
Buddha—an
an enormous fat person sitting cross-legged, looking at his own navel. Motion...
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between them. But there is another option: Psalm 127 shows a way to work that is neither sheer activity nor pure passivity.
“If GOD doesn’t build the house . . . If GOD doesn’t guard the city . . .” The condition if presupposes that God does work: he builds; he guards.
The Bible begins with the announcement “In the beginning God created”—not
He created.
The week of creation was a week ...
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Before anything else, work is an activity of God.
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.
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).
work is good.
Work has d...
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Work has p...
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the psalm praises the effortless work of making children.
The example couldn’t have been better chosen. What do we do to get sons and daughters? Very little.
The entire miracle of procreation and reproduction requires our participation, but hardly in the form of what we call our work.
The character of our work is shaped not by accomplishments or possessions but in the birth of relationships: “Children are GOD’s best gift.”
What does make a difference is the personal relationships that we create and develop.
