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

by Eugene H. Peterson

The Christian faith is the discovery of that center in the God who sticks with us, the righteous God. Christian discipleship is a decision to walk in his ways, steadily and firmly, and then finding that the way integrates all our interests, passions and gifts, our human needs and our eternal aspirations.

“Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.”

Suffering is a characteristic of the personal.

Animals can be hurt, but they do...

Man and woman, alone in the creat...

For suffering is pain plus: physical or emotional pain plus the awareness that our own worth as people is threatened, that our own value as creatures made in the dignity of God is called into question,...

Christian is a person who decides to face and live through suffering.

the psalm gives dignity to our suffering.

It does not look on suffering as something slightly embarrassing that must be hushed up and locked in a closet (where it finally becomes a skeleton) because this sort of thing shouldn’t happen to a real person of faith.

Suffering is set squarely, openly, passionately before God.

We live in a time when everyone’s goal is to be perpetually healthy and constantly happy. If any one of us fails to live up to the standards that are advertised as normative, we are labeled as a problem to be solved, and a host of well-intentioned people rush to try out various cures on us.

The worst thing that can happen to a man is to have no God to cry to out of the depth.2

Not that Christians celebrate suffering—we don’t make a religion out of it.

Many people suffer because of the false supposition on which they have based their lives.

The second important thing Psalm 130 does is to immerse the suffering in God—all

the suffering is spoken in the form of prayer, which means that God is taken seriously as a personal and concerned being.

Eight times the name of God is used in the psalm. We

observe how God is addressed, that he is understood as One who forgives sin, who comes to those who wait and hope for him, who is characterized by steadfast love and plenteous redemption, and who will redeem Israel. God makes a difference. God acts positively toward his people. God is not indifferent.

God seeks the hurt, maimed, wandering and lost. God woos the rebellious and confused. If God were different than he is, not one of us would have a leg to stand on: “If you, GOD, kept records on wrongdoings, who would stand a chance?

Wait and watch add up to hope.

watchman is an important person, but he doesn’t do very much.

He does nothing to influence or control such things: he is a watchman. He knows the dawn is coming; there are no doubts concerning that. Meanwhile he is alert to dangers; he comforts restless children or animals until it is time to work or play again in the light of day.

The psalmist’s and the Christian’s waiting and watching—that is, hoping—is based on the conviction that God is actively involved in his creation and vigorously at work in redemption.

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.

It is a willingness to let God do it his way and in his time. It is the opposite of making plans that we demand that God put into effect, telling him both how and when to do it.

We need an eye specialist rather, than, say, a painter. A painter tries to convey to us with the aid of his brush and palette a picture of the world as he sees it;

ophthalmologist tries to enable us to see the world as it really is.

The psalm does not exhort us to put up with suffering; it does not explain it or explain it away. It is, rather, a powerful demonstration that our place in the depths is not out of bounds from God.

We see that whatever or whoever got us in trouble cannot separate us from God,

Psalm 131 is a maintenance psalm.

It is functional to the person of faith as pruning is functional to the gardener:

The two things that Psalm 131 prunes away are unruly ambition and infantile dependency,

One temptation that has received this treatment in Western civilization, with some special flourishes in America, is ambition.

Everyone wants to get more.

improve yourself by whatever means you are able; get ahead regardless of the price, take care of me first. For a limited time it works. But at the end the devil has his due. There is damnation.

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. Robert Browning’s fine line on aspiration, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”

Ambition is aspiration gone crazy. Aspiration is the channeled, creative energy that moves us to growth in Christ, shaping goals in the Spirit.

Ambition takes these same energies for growth and development and uses them to make something tawdry and cheap, sweatily knocking together a Babel wh...

I will not strut about demanding that I be treated as the center of my family or my neighborhood or my work, but seek to discover where I fit and do what I am good at.

The soul, clamoring for attention and arrogantly parading its importance, is calmed and quieted so that it can be itself, truly.

Christian faith is not neurotic dependency but childlike trust. We do not have a God who forever indulges our whims but a God whom we trust with our destinies.

And just as the child gradually breaks off the habit of regarding his mother only as a means of satisfying his own desires and learns to love her for her own sake, so the worshipper after a struggle has reached an attitude of mind in which he desires God for himself and not as a means of fulfillment of his own wishes. His life’s centre of gravity has shifted. He now rests no longer in himself but in God.3

It is a blessed mark of growth out of spiritual infancy when we can forgo the joys which once appeared to be essential, and can find our solace in him who denies them to us.”4

noisy and marked by misunderstandings: I no longer feel like I did when I was first a Christian. Does that mean I am no longer a Christian? Has God abandoned me? Have I done something terribly wrong?

The answer is, neither. God hasn’t abandoned you and you haven’t done anything wrong. You are being weaned.

When Charles Spurgeon preached this psalm, he said it “is one of the shortest Psalms to read, but one of the longest to learn.”