A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society (The IVP Signature Collection)

by Eugene H. Peterson

Would there be a tendency among the pilgrims to congratulate one another on their successful journey, to swell with pride in their accomplishment, to trade stories of their experiences? Would there be comparisons on who made the longest pilgrimage, the fastest pilgrimage, who had brought the most neighbors, who had come the most times? Then, through the noise of the crowd, someone would strike up the tune: “If GOD doesn’t build . . . guard . . .” The pilgrimage is not at the center; the Lord is at the center. No matter how hard they had struggled to get there, no matter what they did in the way of heroics—fending off bandits, clubbing lions, crushing wolves—that is not what is to be sung. Psalm 127 insists on a perspective in which our effort is at the periphery and God’s work is at the center.

general assumption prevalent in the world that it is extremely difficult to be a Christian.

The easiest thing in the world is to be a Christian. What is hard is to be a sinner.

The Bible is one long exposition of this blessing.

Sermon on the Mount, identifies the eight key qualities in the life of a person of faith and announces each one with the word blessed. He

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 book of Revelation in which there are seven salvos of blessing

Happiness cannot be given to a person as something lying outside him . . . . The action of God does not fall outside but at the very center of the soul;

Blessing has inherent in it the power to increase.

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.”

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

Christian ble...

a realizing that “it is more blessed to give t...

As we learn to give and to share, our vitality increases, and the people around us become fruitful vines ...

no tricks involved in getting in on this life of blessing,

We acknowledge God as our maker

“Fear GOD.” Reverence might be a better word. Awe.

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:

refuse to think of him other than in images that are convenient to our lifestyle?

Not only do we let God be God as he really is, but we start doing the things for which he made us. We take a certain route; we follow certain directions; we do specified things.

Such is the conduct of those who are trying to achieve some meaning in their lives, pursuing their right to happiness, but refusing to take the well-traveled roads that lead there. They are trying to get to Mount Zion but ignore all the signposts and compass readings and stubbornly avoid the trails as they bushwhack their way through

Everyone wants to be happy, to be blessed. Too many people are willfully refusing to pay attention to the One who wills our happiness and ignorantly supposing that the Christian way is a harder way to get what they want than doing it on their own.

“Eugene, you have no stick-to-itiveness. You never finish anything.” Years later I learned that the church had a fancier word for the same thing: perseverance.

one of the marks of Christian discipleship

Do you think of Christian faith as a fragile style of life that can flourish only when weather conditions are just right, or do you see it as a tough perennial that can stick it out through storm and drought, survive the trampling of careless feet and the attacks of vandals?

The person of faith outlasts all the oppressors. Faith lasts.

Has anyone ever experienced such a relentless, merciless pounding from within and from without?

turned

turning back” (Phil 3:13-14). Stick-to-itiveness. Perseverance. Patience. The way of faith is not a fad that is taken up in one century only to be discarded in the next. It lasts. It is a way that works. It has been tested thoroughly.

“Then GOD ripped the harnesses of the evil plowmen to shreds.”

The plows of persecution aren’t working, and the oxherds haven’t even noticed! They plod back and forth, unaware that their opposition is worthless. They are wasting their time and energy.

Opposition to the people of faith is like “grass in shallow ground.”

Palestine is a rocky country; in many places there is only a thin layer of soil over bedrock. Seeds would sprout and grow from this dirt, but the grass didn’t last; the thin soil couldn’t support it.

midday the grass would wither. No harvest there. No reapers wasting their time there. No one going along the road would ever look and shout out, “Great harve...

The life of the world that is opposed or indifferent to God is barren and futile.

The way of the world is peppered with brief enthusiasms, like the grass on that half-inch of topsoil, springing up so wonderfully and without effort, but as quickly withering.

There are times in the long obedience of Christian discipleship when we get tired and fatigue draws our tempers short. At such times to see someone flitting from one sensation, one enthusiasm, to another, quitting on commitments, ducking responsibilities, provokes our anger—and sometimes piques our envy.

The person who makes excuses for hypocrites and rationalizes the excesses of the wicked, who loses a sense of opposition to sin, who obscures the difference between faith and denial, grace and selfishness—that is the person to be wary of.

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.

Our yelling (though not all of it!) means we care about something: we care about God; we care about the ways of the kingdom; we care about morality, about justice, about righteousness.

Endurance is not a desperate hanging on but a traveling from strength to strength.

But we will not learn it by swallowing our sense of outrage on the one hand or, on the

other, excusing all wickedness as a neurosis. We will do it by offering up our anger to God, who trains us in creative love.

“GOD wouldn’t put up with it, he sticks with us.” When

“Righteous is out and out a term denoting relationship,

“he sticks with us” is the reason Christians can look back over a long life crisscrossed with cruelties, unannounced tragedies, unexpected setbacks, sufferings, disappointments, depressions—look back across all that and see it as a road of blessing, and make a song out of what we see.

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.

Christian discipleship is a process of paying more and more attention to God’s righteousness and

less and less attention to our own;