The Politics of Pontius Pilate

Posted on October 5, 2024 by salooper57

Politics has been described as “the ways that power is shared in an organization and the ways it is affected by personal relationships between people.”[1] It has to do with the “forms of power relations among individuals.”[2] The ways that power is shared – or, in many cases, hoarded – have not changed significantly in thousands of years.

Pontius Pilate, the infamous politician who ordered the execution of Jesus, is a case in point. If one studies the narrative accounts of Jesus’s trials, one sees a variety of dynamics that still come into play in today’s political maneuverings.

Pontius Pilate was the Roman prefect assigned to oversee the volatile Judean Province from AD 26-36. In the 130 years of Roman rule over the region, only one other governor had a longer tenure; Pilate knew how to pivot when his job was on the line. Both biblical and extra-biblical history makes it clear that Pilate did not get along well with the people he governed. For example, in none of the Gospel records do any of Israel’s rulers address Pilate as “Prefect,” “Governor,” or even “Sir.” This was a remarkable breach of etiquette. In a culture that lived by honorific titles, their absence here is striking.

Shortly after taking up his duties as Judea’s governor, Pilate brought imperial standards bearing Caesar’s image into Jerusalem, probably knowing this would create turmoil. Jews protested outside Pilate’s residence for five days. The governor set up a meeting with them, but upon arriving, they found themselves surrounded by sword-brandishing soldiers. The Jews did not back down, and Pilate eventually removed the standards. Strike One.

In yet another incident, Pilate diverted funds from the Jewish temple treasury to pay for an aqueduct project he initiated. When the governor came to Jerusalem (his year-round residence was in Caesarea), protests again broke out. This time, Pilate ordered his soldiers to beat the protestors, and many were killed. Strike Two.

Pilate also placed gold shields (probably bearing the inscription, Tiberius, Divine Augustine’s Son) on the palace of Israel’s deceased king, Herod the Great. Herod’s sons petitioned the emperor to have them removed. Emperor Tiberius sided with the Jews against Pilate, reprimanded him, and ordered him to remove the shields. Strike Three.

When the Jews brought Jesus to Pilate to be tried on charges that carried the death penalty, they knew they had the governor over a barrel. He had already been reprimanded by Rome. After three major blunders, he could not afford another run-in with the Jews, and he certainly did not want to be the subject of a follow-up petition to the emperor. The biblical narratives make it clear that Pilate thought the charges against Jesus were preposterous. According to St. Mark, Pilate saw through the Jewish leaders and understood their real motive for getting rid of Jesus.

The Jewish officials, led by the former high priest Annas, whose frontman Caiaphas was the current high priest, were playing to win. Pilate, weakened by past decisions, was just trying to survive. Realizing the walls were closing in on him, he tried to pawn off judicial responsibility on Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee, based on a technicality. Herod was too astute to let that happen. Pilate then tried to release Jesus as part of an annual prisoner release program. His opponents saw that coming and successfully parried the attempt. When he said he would release Jesus for lack of evidence, the Jewish leaders threatened him: “If you release this man [who is accused of treason against the Empire], you are not a Friend of Caesar.” “Friend of Caesar” was a technical term denoting loyalty to the emperor. The Jewish leaders were threatening Pilate with an accusation of disloyalty if he let Jesus go.

In politics, character matters. Pilate’s flawed character undermined his ability to rule effectively. Past actions matter. Pilate’s retaliation against his enemies left him weakened and vulnerable to the machinations of political antagonists. Financial integrity matters. Pilate’s misapplication of public funds for his own pet project came back to haunt him.

I wonder if, as the walls came closing in on him, Pilate finally understood that these things do matter. What he did not understand, sadly, was that Jesus matters even more. I wish that our 21st century politicians would realize the same thing.

**************

Postscript: Pilate managed to hold on to power during Jesus’s trial and execution but was recalled a couple of years later and relieved of his post. Legend has it that he suffered a mental breakdown and became a compulsive hand washer (See Matthew 27:24).

[1] Collins English Dictionary

[2] Wikipedia, Politics – Wikipedia

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The Power of Wisdom and Revelation for Believers

Posted on October 3, 2024 by salooper57

I once read about a young Irish woman who emigrated to the U.S. in the first decades of the twentieth century. She had family in New York, who wrote that she could find work there, so she saved and scraped and purchased a transatlantic fare on an ocean liner.

After setting aside money for the expenses she knew she’d incur when she got to New York, she packed a bag with food stuffs (mostly crackers) to carry her through the six-day journey. When passengers headed to the dining room for lunch and dinner, she went to her small cabin, got out her cracker ration for that meal, and ate every crumb. She did this for five days.

On her final day aboard, someone asked her why she never came to the dining room and she, embarrassed by her poverty, admitted that she couldn’t afford to purchase her fare and buy her dinner. The woman said to her: “But my dear, all your meals are included in the price of the fare.”

For five days, she went without breakfast and ate crackers and drank water for lunch and dinner, even though the delicious meals in the dining room were hers by right. They had already been paid for, but she didn’t know what she had.

The same thing can happen to us who belong to Christ. He has purchased for us (as the author of Hebrews put it), “so great a salvation,” but we may not realize what we have. Many Christians live on rations when they could be feasting.

Not St. Paul. He knew that God “has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ” (Ephesians 1:3). Those blessing include being chosen by him, made his sons and daughters, granted forgiveness, and given a role in the most important project in the history of the world: the Headship of Jesus over every person, institution, and thing on earth (Ephesians 1:10).

Grace has been freely given to us (verse 6), even lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding (verse 8). The delectable fare of the grand dining room is ours, yet some of us have shut ourselves in our tiny cabins with our crackers and water. We don’t know what is available to us.

But Paul prays that we will see it. He doesn’t want Jesus’s people eking out an existence when they could be flourishing – and they could be. The opening paragraphs of this letter are a paean of praise to the God who lavishes his people with all they need. But Paul knows that some of Jesus’s people are like that poor Irish girl on the ship. They don’t know what they have, don’t know how to access it, and are living like they’re destitute.

Let’s read our text (Ephesians 1:15-21) For this reason, because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come.

Verse 15 plays a now-familiar tune. Because Paul had heard about the Ephesians’ faith in Jesus and love for all the saints, he knew they were the real deal: a vibrant church with enormous potential and a real adversary who would try to stop them. In other words, people in need of prayer.

It should be a warning to us that this church that loved all the saints would be faulted by Jesus himself within a few decades for having “left [their] first love” (Revelation 2:4). If it could happen to that solid, exemplary church, it can happen to us too. The enemy of our souls is too clever to directly challenge our love for the God who sacrificially loves us, so instead he challenges our love for the saints who sometimes ignore us, misuse us, or take us for granted.

God’s enemy understands that love works on a circuit—and we’d better understand that too. He knows he doesn’t need to break the circuit between God and you, as long as he can break it between you and another one of God’s people. So that’s where he concentrates his efforts. When the circuit breaks between you and some other church member, it doesn’t just affect you and them. It affects you and God, and the light of the entire church is dimmed.

Because he knew about the Ephesians’ faith and love, Paul couldn’t stop thinking about them and wouldn’t stop thanking God for them. Notice how he links thanksgiving with remembering (or, literally, making remembrance). This is verse 16: “I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers.” If we, like Paul, would take a moment to remember the people we’re praying for – what they’re like, what they’ve done, what they value, who loves them and is loved by them; in other words, if we would make remembrance of them – we would make room for the Holy Spirit to shape our prayers. Making remembrance is so much more than rattling off names on a prayer list.

Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians, like his prayers for the Philippians and Colossians, features one principal request. There is wisdom in that. I’m not saying we should make only one request per person, but that we would do well to have a principal request for each person, one the Spirit shapes as we bring that person before our mind.

After holding the Ephesian believers in his mind, Paul’s one request is that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father (literally) “of the Glory” would give them (literally) “a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him.” Yet another Pauline prayer for people to receive knowledge. We pray for peace, for provision, for healing, and for comfort – all good things to pray for – but he prayed for knowledge.

When Paul writes of “a spirit of wisdom and revelation,” he may be thinking of the Holy Spirit, who is called the Spirit of wisdom” in Isaiah. But even if he is thinking of a human spirit characterized by wisdom and revelation, the Holy Spirit will be behind it.

Wisdom has to do with knowing what you already have – those spiritual blessings cataloged in verses 3-14 – and what to do with it. Go back to our friend on the transatlantic cruise. Wisdom knows what is covered by the purchase of the fare. In our case, wisdom knows what Christ has purchased, what’s available to us, and what’s possible for us.

While wisdom takes advantage of the knowledge we already have, revelation imparts knowledge that we don’t have. Because God is infinite, revelation is, and will always be, needed. So, Paul prays for the spirit of both wisdom and revelation.

Notice it is wisdom and revelation “in the knowledge of [God].” The knowledge of God is more practical than the knowledge of economics, philosophy, mathematics, physics, mechanics, or any other body of knowledge. The knowledge of God is life-giving. (That’s John 17:3.) The knowledge of God brings grace and peace in abundance (2 Peter 1:2). Where the knowledge of God is present, men, women, and children flourish.  

The NIV, which many of us use, starts a new sentence in verse 18 by adding the words, “I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened.” But in Greek, the sentence that started back in verse 15 continues through verse 23. It is 169 words long. (Earlier in the letter, Paul wrote a 202-word sentence!) That sounds outrageous to us, who have been trained by USA Today to expect sentences to contain about 17 words, but it was perfectly acceptable in Paul’s day. It is also perfectly clear. Paul is not making a second request, this time for enlightenment; he is clarifying the previous (and only) request: since the eyes of their hearts have been enlightened, God can give them a spirit of wisdom and revelation.

What would it mean for the eyes of your heart to be enlightened? The “heart” in Scripture is the command center. The mind serves the heart by providing information and making plans; but the heart makes the decisions. To have the eyes of the heart enlightened is to have the command center fully informed.

Donald Miller, the author of Blue Like Jazz, had a bad habit: he chewed tobacco. He knew it wasn’t good for him, but he liked it, and he didn’t want to stop. He couldn’t stop. He’d been told that it causes gum disease, tooth decay, and even cancer of the mouth and throat. He knew he should stop; he just couldn’t.

Then one day he was in the car, listening to the radio, and a public service announcement came on. 30 seconds later, Donald Miller no longer chewed tobacco. In a strange, distorted voice, he heard a man warn of the dangers of chewing (which were all things Miller already knew). Then the man explained why his voice sounded like it did: he was missing his lower jaw. Cancer, caused by chewing tobacco, had eaten it away.

During that 30 second PSA, the eyes of Donald Miller’s heart – his command center – were opened. He says that as the man spoke, he could visualize his face without a lower jaw. Suddenly, what had been impossible for him – quitting tobacco – became possible, even urgent. He never chewed tobacco again.

The “mind’s eye” (which is not a biblical phrase, but you get the idea) can see things in the Bible – good things, true things, beautiful things – but seeing them may have little effect. A person might eloquently teach what he has seen to others and yet be pretty much the same as he was before. But when the heart’s eyes are enlightened, a person is transformed. He not only thinks differently, he acts differently.

That illustration might lead us to assume that whenever the eyes of a person’s heart are opened, they will see negative things, like bad habits. That certainly happens, but mostly they see good things. That is where Paul puts the emphasis. He knows there are wonderful things we will miss without the spirit of wisdom and revelation, chief among them, recognizing God in our daily lives.

Years ago, a tourist to Basel, Switzerland, climbed onto a streetcar and sat down next to the twentieth century’s most influential theologian, Karl Barth. The two started chatting and Barth asked him if he was new to the city. The tourist said he was, so Barth asked him if there was anything he was hoping to see while he was there.

The man said, “Yes, I’d love to meet the famous theologian, Karl Barth. Do you know him?” Barth answered, “Well as a matter of fact, I do. I give him a shave every morning.” The tourist was absolutely thrilled. When he got back to his hotel, he went around telling everyone, “I met Karl Barth’s barber today.”[1]

Without the spirit of wisdom and revelation, we may fail to recognize God when he speaks to us. Without the spirit of wisdom and revelation, we will remain ignorant of the things God has already made available to us. Paul mentions three of those things here. He prays that God will give the Ephesians the spirit of wisdom and revelation so that they can know: (1) the hope of his calling (we’ll look at that today); (2) the riches of his inheritance; and (3) his power that is at work on behalf of believers.

The first thing Paul prays for the Ephesians to know is “what is the hope of his calling” (that is a literal translation from verse 18). If they know – which only happens through the Spirit of wisdom and revelation – what God had in mind for them when he called them, their entire outlook on life will be transformed. If they know the hope that comes from being called by God, they will be able to come through hardship, pain, and even anguish in ways that will impress the world and glorify God.

Paul knew that hope keeps people from being blown off course by the prevailing winds of culture, or toppled by the seismic upheaval of politics. Hope enables people who are hard pressed to endure. A shared hope makes it possible for people of different races, different social classes, and different educational backgrounds to work together, play together, and be for each other.

Paul refers to this hope as the hope of his calling. Let’s not misread that, as if Paul had written, “the hope of your calling.” This calling is not full of hope because we receive it but because God issues it. It is not just a vocational calling, like a calling to be a pastor or a schoolteacher, but a calling to join Jesus’s side, his campaign, and work for him – be his special people.

In Philippians, it is referred to as the “high calling” or the “upward call” but we are liable to misunderstand that. “High calling” sounds like the vocation of a doctor rather than a ditch digger. That’s not at all what Paul means. If we translate it, which some versions do, as “the upward call,” it sounds as if we’ve been called to leave earth and take an extended – eternity-long – vacation in heaven. That’s not it either.

I was in high school during the Vietnam War, and guys would talk about their brothers getting “called up.” They were being drafted, called to active duty, called to serve. That’s more like what Paul had in mind. We’ve been called up.

In high school, getting “called up” did not sound hopeful. So, what does Paul have in mind by “the hope of” (literal translation) “his calling”? The hope of his calling is that our side (that is, Christ’s side) will be victorious. Our king will conquer the enemies of evil, suffering, and death. Heaven will come to earth and there will be peace and no more fear. As Isaiah put it: “…the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” (Isaiah 11:9).

This hope is not just that we will escape our troubles but that we will fulfill our vocation as God’s image-bearers on earth. God intended humans to rule earth and its creatures with love and wisdom. When our ancestors rebelled, they lost that love and wisdom but kept the desire to rule. The result has been devastating. But God has not given up on the plan. His calling is still full of hope.

If you wanted to sum up that hope in one word, you could hardly to do better than the word “glory.” “We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God” (Romans 5:2). We are hoping for Jesus’s glory (2 Thessalonians 2:14b), when he is acknowledged head over all things in heaven and on earth (Ephesians 1:10). And we even hope to be part of this glory, since God called us to share in the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ (2 Thessalonians 2 again). We hope for the day when our faith will, as Peter put it, “result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed” (1 Peter 1:6); the day when, as Paul put it, “the glory … will be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18).

Our calling is to be a part of this with the rest of Jesus’s people. We share the hope “that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” (Romans 8:21). We hope to play a role in the biggest, most glorious thing in history: a role in making the world come out right, in remaking it. It seems absurd to think that people like us can have anything to do with something so grand and glorious and yet, because we’ve been called by God himself (it is amazing grace!), we are a part of it.

You’ve been called up to live for, fight for and, if necessary, die for Jesus Christ. It is a calling that is full of glory and full of hope. It portends a better world, a united human family living peacefully, joyfully, lovingly, and creatively with God in our midst. It is not a wistful hope but a living one, already substantiated by Jesus’s resurrection – “the sure and certain hope of the resurrection.”

If you think, “But I have never heard his call,” then listen and hear it now. God is calling, calling you to join his side, to join his people, to serve his kingdom. God is calling you to his glory. Can you hear him? He wants you! Don’t ignore his call.

[1] John Ross, Surrey, England, Leadership, Vol. 8, no. 4.

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Wanted: Explorers (not Talkers)

Posted on September 28, 2024 by salooper57

Wanted: Explorers, not Talkers

Imagine that you are living in New York in 1675. Since your arrival, the city has been in the hands of the Dutch (New Amsterdam), the English (New York) then briefly back under Dutch control (New Orange), and now, in 1675, it is once again under British rule. You and your Dutch neighbors have quarreled about who is the rightful head of state, though none of you even considered the Lenape who were here centuries before you arrived.

Besides arguing about who rightfully owns New York, its citizens entertain themselves with the stories of the wild places to the west. It is rumored that there are enormous lakes, rivers filled with fish, and fertile valleys that yield rich crops of wheat and barley, maize and beans. Sheep and cows graze unmolested on the rich grasslands.

You pay little attention to these stories; the people who tell them have never been ten miles west of the Hudson. One friend is forever talking about the fertile land along the Delaware River. He says that he will strike out one day soon to stake his claim in that wonderful land, and he wants you to go with him. You listen politely, but you are really not interested. It is just a fantasy.  

Then one day, a man passes through town. He is looking for passage back to England. He intends to gather up his family in Exeter and bring them to America. He has one hundred acres, deeded to him by the Lenni Lenape, along the Delaware River, where he can grow anything. The weather is moderate. The people are peaceful.

When your friend was talking about the Delaware River, you never paid much attention. But when this man, who has lived there, speaks about his experiences, you listen. He has seen it. He has touched it. He has met its people, raised its crops, and endured its winters.

First-hand testimony is convincing. One of the weaknesses in contemporary Christianity is there is too little first-hand testimony. I know a woman in her thirties who, after twenty years of Christian profession, has left the faith and declared herself an atheist. She blames the church for its failures to live the love it professes. It talks, like the imaginary neighbor in 17th century New York, but it doesn’t practice what it preaches.

But there is more to it. For twenty years, she professed to be a Christian; what experiences did she have over those decades? Did she have encounters with God in her life and world? Did she practice what she preached?

When someone starts talking about “spiritual experiences,” people get nervous. Is he suggesting that faith is unnecessary? Is experience being elevated over God’s revelation of himself in the Scriptures? Are we expected to take unverifiable reports of subjective experiences at face value?

Questions like these deserve answers, for there are spiritual charlatans out there, whose marvelous stories mesmerize the sheep while they fleece them. Even when people are sincere, there is a real danger of supplanting the authority of the word of God with the transitory experiences of human beings. An individual’s experiences, however genuine, are not authoritative, though they may be instigative. They may inspire others to seek God.

The world needs an experiential Christianity. The church needs men and women with first-hand knowledge of God’s grace and power in their lives. Explorers, and not just talkers, are needed: people who, guided by God’s word and in the company of other believers, have set out from the comfortable confines of a longwinded Christianity to search for God. 

This kind of experiential Christianity will always be characterized by prayer. And not just the prayers of individuals, but the prayers of churches that are united around Jesus as Lord. They “want to know him,” not just words about him. They are determined to experience “the power of his resurrection,” even if that should mean joining the fellowship of his sufferings.

When people live for Jesus in the Jesus way, they see answers to prayer. They have stories of God’s faithfulness. They “speak of what they know” and “testify to what [they] have seen.” They do not merely talk about the Kingdom of God; they live there.

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Desire Shapes Us. What Shapes Desire?

Posted on September 21, 2024 by salooper57

In his book, Wanting: the Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, Luke Burgis relates the story of the public relations genius Edward Bernays. In 1929, Bernays was approached by George Hill, the president of the American Tobacco Company, with a proposition: Figure out a way to induce women to smoke, and I will make you a rich man.

In 1929, hardly any women smoked. The societal taboos were too great. Bernays understood that women would only take up cigarettes if they saw smoking as a challenge to male power. In the words of A. A. Brill, a psychoanalyst who consulted with Bernays, cigarettes would need to be seen as “torches of freedom.” In the age of the nineteenth amendment, it was important to frame smoking as a woman’s right.

Bernays went to work. He planted models in New York’s Easter Day Parade, a huge event at the time (think Super Bowl halftime show), who would demonstrate that strong, attractive women – many accompanied by handsome young men – smoke. He then coaxed young, high society women to stroll down Fifth Avenue over lunch hour, smoking cigarettes, and made sure that professional photographers and journalists were there to capture the moment.

Bernays succeeded in opening an entirely new market for cigarette sales (to say nothing of the cancer treatment industry). The sales of Lucky Strikes tripled in one year. Women who had never even thought of lighting up a cigarette now wanted – and soon needed – a smoke.

The new women smokers thought that they took up smoking of their own free will. They smoked because they wanted to, which was true. What they did not realize was why they wanted to: a little Austrian-born man, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, had planted that desire in them. They wanted to smoke because other people, people they admired, wanted to smoke. Though their desire was genuine, it was not autonomous. Edward Bernays had planted it in them.

We are sometimes aware that we are imitating other people’s style and mannerisms – when we cut our hair the way that actor does, wear the same clothes the cool people do, watch the same YouTube video that 3 million other people already watched – but we are probably not aware that we mimic other people’s desires. Yet this imitation of desire is one of the driving forces in our – or in any – culture.

Desires get passed from person to person like a virus. No one thinks of a common cold as something they produced all on their own; they know they caught it from someone else. But everyone thinks that their desires are completely autonomous, all their own.

This is not true. We catch our desires, as surely as we catch our colds. They are passed onto us, wittingly and unwittingly, by parents, siblings, and friends. They are foisted on us by Madison Avenue Mad Men and Silicon Valley tech giants. I want this team to win because my dad wanted them to win. I must have the new iPhone because the beautiful people on TV love it.

The age of YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook is an era of pandemic desire. Foreign desires grow like invasive species of weeds. We have trouble distinguishing between the desires that are ours – desires that are deeply rooted in our humanity or planted by our upbringing – and the desires that have been planted in us by television and social media.

Psalm 37:4 makes a promise: “Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” Many people think of this as a kind of bargain: If I will delight in God, he will give me what I desire – a desire that, in all likelihood, was planted in me by someone else. That is not what the psalmist means.

When God gives us the desires of our heart, he is not giving us an object of desire; he is giving us desire itself. The desires he gives enrich our lives. Instead of bringing us into competition with others, they enhance our relationships. They deepen our passions, awaken our minds, and foster our peace. Like other desires, we “catch” them, but these we catch from God himself.

If we spend more time delighting in clever Facebook posts than in the words of the wise God, or in news media reports rather than Gospel narratives, or with clickbait advertisements instead of prayer, we will possess (or be possessed by) desires that were given by the Edward Bernays of our age and not by the everlasting God.

Desires guide and move us, but if our desires are not really ours – they have been implanted in us by peers and colleagues, television and media –where will they guide us? But when God gives us the desires of our heart, those desires guide and move us toward the richly satisfying life he intends for us, the life for which we long and for which we were made.

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Finding God’s Will through Loving Community

Posted on September 19, 2024 by salooper57

Imagine that you find yourself unable to do something you want to do, should be able to do, and have done in the past – say, eat ice cream. You go to your doctor and she does all kinds of tests and discovers that you are lacking an enzyme which is necessary for the digestion of ice cream. She then gives you the good news: your body can produce plenty of this enzyme just by eating mangos. But you dislike mangos; dislike them as much as you like ice cream. So, what do you do? Do you learn to eat mangos (ugh!) or do you give up ice cream (noo!)?

Let’s pose the same type of question, only let’s change the issue from a physical one to a spiritual one. You find yourself unable to do something you want to do and should be able to do: recognize God’s will. You go to your pastor and he runs a variety of soul tests and comes to the conclusion that you’re missing a spiritual enzyme (of sorts) that is necessary for the recognition of God’s will. That spiritual enzyme is loving relationships with other Christ-followers.

What do you do? You are an introvert. You don’t like big groups. It’s not easy for you to be with people. Taking part in a fellowship group or a Bible study is work for you; you think of it with distaste. So, do you learn to have loving relationships with other Christ-followers or do you give up on knowing God’s will?

We have a real problem in society generally and in the church in particular—and it is getting worse. We are a ferociously independent, perilously individualistic people. Ironically, the advent of personal computers and especially mobile devices – supposedly communication devices – has made meaningful relationships with others even more challenging.

A survey a few years ago revealed that millions fewer people were attending church services than they did two decades earlier, yet more people claim to pray daily than they did then. What that means is that people are trying to do the Christian life in isolation, which violates God’s design and cannot be successful.

Like the human body’s digestive system, the Body of Christ’s recognition system for God’s will requires an enzyme of sorts: loving relationships. Humans are interdependent by design. God made us in such a way that we cannot reach our potential without others. It is a paradox, but you cannot fully be yourself by yourself. And you cannot fully perceive and understand God’s will without the aid of other Christians.

In Colossians 1, we have a description of the Apostle Paul’s remarkable prayer for the Colossian Church. I have prayed it for Cal Road and for other churches many times. In it, Paul makes only one request, but it is an important one. He prays the Colossians might be filled with the knowledge (or recognition, as the word could be translated) of God’s will. Paul understood that the recognition of God’s will is vital to the church and to our lives. Let’s read our text, beginning at Colossians 1:9.

“And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God; being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy; giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” (ESV)

We’ll spend two weeks in this passage, but before we start digging into the details, we need to set the passage in context. When Paul wrote in verse 9, “And so” (NIV, “For this reason”), from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you,” we need to ask, “For what reason?” What had Paul heard about the Colossians that caused him to pray ceaselessly for them? He’d heard (verse 8) about their love in the Spirit. He mentions something similar in verses 3 and 4: “We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints…”

Paul understood what the Colossians’ love for the saints meant: their church had what it takes to recognize God’s will. They had the essential equipment for receiving messages from God.

If I’m on my way to meet you at the coffee shop but you’re trying to call me to let me know you’re running late, I will not get your message if I left my phone at home again. You can call a dozen times, but I won’t hear your voice, because I don’t have a receiver capable of accessing your message. Just so, when a church does not love each other, when they forget or, worse, show contempt for each other, they won’t have a receiver capable of hearing God’s voice, and they will not know his will.

When Paul heard that the Colossians had love for all the saints, he knew they could hear from God and recognize his will. That’s why he began praying for them to “be filled with the knowledge of God’s will,” which he knew was essential to their success. He asked God to convey that knowledge, verse 9, “through all spiritual wisdom and understanding.” If love is the receiver needed to capture the signal, wisdom and understanding are the router and the computer that process it.

Of the two words, “wisdom” is the more general. The wise person grasps God’s ways. He understands God’s values and, as such, has the framework into which God’s specific will for churches and individuals fits. The Bible regards God himself as the source of wisdom, the fear of the Lord as the beginning of wisdom, the Scriptures as a means for gaining wisdom, and humility as the condition for maintaining wisdom.[1]

The word translated as “understanding” could be, and frequently is, translated “insight.” This is the more specific of the two words. It has to do with seeing how the big truths fit into a particular situation. Note that the knowledge of God’s will is delivered through spiritual wisdom and understanding, which is to say, through wisdom and understanding that are sourced in the Holy Spirit. Without the Spirit, we will not have wisdom and understanding; and, without wisdom and understanding, we will not recognize God’s will. And if we don’t recognize God’s will, our walk, both as individuals and as a believing community, will not (v. 10) be worthy of the Lord.

Notice the little big word “all.” The knowledge (or recognition) of God’s will comes to us through all spiritual wisdom and understanding. There is a potential problem here. You have some wisdom and understanding and so do I, but neither of us has all wisdom and understanding. That leaves us in need … of each other, which is how Goddesigned it. He routinely sends the knowledge of his will to multiple people and not just one; to the Church and not just the individual. What’s more, he doesn’t usually send all of it to every person but some to one and some to another. That is why someone who separates from the church cannot expect to know very much of God’s will. And that is why humility is so important in understanding God’s will.

The way email works can serve as an illustration. Let’s say your childhood best friend is going to be in town tomorrow at noon and wants to meet you for lunch, so he sends you an email. He only has an hour, but he’d sure love to see you. When he clicks “send,” his email is broken down into packets of information, each with an IP address, which are sent separately, sometimes along different routes. When the packets arrive, they are reassembled into a meaningful message. (Well, not always, but you get the idea.)

Like email, when God reveals his will, it is often broken down into packets, sent, and then reassembled by a group of loving believers with Spirit-sourced wisdom and understanding. It’s not that God cannot send the knowledge of his will to one person, but frequently he does not. He intends us to relate to, and rely on, each other. If we insist on going it alone, we forfeit much of the wisdom and understanding we need to comprehend what God is doing in and around our lives.

A few years ago, I heard Phil Vischer, the creator of VeggieTales, share his story. Phil was on top of the world, wildly successful and full of big ideas for the future. In fact, he named his production company Big Ideas Productions. Because things were going so well, he concluded that God wanted to grow Big Ideas into a much larger company, so he spent millions of dollars, hired all kinds of staff, and got himself upside down financially. His cash flow couldn’t handle the skyrocketing bills, Big Ideas went bankrupt, and Phil was forced to sell all VeggieTales copyrights to another company. In a short time, his company and his life had fallen apart.

Phil looks back and says, “When things were doing so well, I thought that was God wanting us to expand, so we grew like crazy. Now I think it was more me having all these great ideas in my head and being so excited that I wanted to do them all at once.” He admits that he wasn’t humble. His wisdom wasn’t sourced in God and his word. He was charting a course without counsel and flying solo. That is a recipe for misunderstanding God’s will.

How important is it for you and me and for our church to receive the knowledge of God’s will? Well, how important is it for a military unit to know whether Central Command is ordering them to attack or defend, to advance or retreat? It is vital. Look at verse 10: “…so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him.” There is a reason behind Paul’s prayer: being filled with the knowledge of God’s will is not an end in itself. Such knowledge will help us do two things: live a life worthy of the Lord; and please him in every way.

The word translated “worthy” is derived from a Greek word meaning, “to have the weight of another thing.” The terminology developed around the use of ancient scales. Say you went to the market to buy five pounds of wheat flour. The merchant would place weighing stones on one side of the scale then fill the other side with wheat until the scale balanced or, as they might say, “achieved worthiness.”

Some merchants used inaccurate weighing stones or rigged the scale to their advantage, which is why Proverbs 11:1 says “A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is his delight.”

To walk worthy of the Lord is to go through your day in a way that balances your lifestyle with your calling as a servant of the king and savior of the world. Without the knowledge of God’s will, that is not going to happen. And it can’t happen if we are using inaccurate weights – that is, ones that are calibrated for the non-Christian. If we try to balance our lives using the scale weights everyone else uses – career, house-size, body mass index, social media footprint – we’ll never balance out in a way that is worthy of the Lord.

Instead of using such things to measure ourselves, let’s weight the scale with: Jesus’s trust in, and obedience to, his Father (how do we measure up to that?); his sacrifice for his friends; his love for his enemies. Place on the scale the Lord’s patience, his care for the needy, his openness to strangers. Set our lives against those weights.

We will of course be light in such virtues, but we can at least use the right scale. And we don’t need to worry: God isn’t waiting for us to be just like Jesus in all these things before he’ll be pleased with us. The desire to be like Jesus already pleases him, as does every effort we make toward that end.

That brings us to the second reason Paul prays for these Colossian Christians to be filled with the knowledge of God’s will: so that they can please the Lord in every way. We can please the Lord. The Lord can say of you, “Isn’t he something special!” Or, “I just love her; she’s such a delight.”

We may think it is impossible for someone like us – with all our problems and shortcomings – to please God. We cannot even please people; how on earth can we please God?

If that is what we think, our thinking is precisely backwards. It is impossible to please some people; no matter what we do, they will never be pleased. If you grew up with a mom or dad like that, you know what I mean. But did you know it is also impossible to please ourselves—at least for any length of time? Humans don’t stay pleased.

But it is not impossible to please God. He loves to see his children succeed. He delights in them. He sings over them. He is easy to please – but hard to satisfy. He is delighted by every honest effort his children make, but he always wants more. Not because he is a slave driver but because he knows what we can be and longs for us to experience it. He made us for glory, for perfection, for all joy, and, for our sakes, he will not be satisfied with less.

When our grandson Phinehas was five-years-old, he colored a picture for me and then, in his just-learning-to-make-letters handwriting, signed his name: PHIN (all caps). I was pleased with the picture but even more with the signature. I assume that, when he is older, his handwriting will be firmer, clearer, and flow more easily. I want and expect that for him, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t thoroughly pleased with what he’d done.

So, it is with God. He isn’t hard to please. We, with all our problems and shortcomings, can be a real source of pleasure to God, a joy within the fountain of joy. He even tells us, through the apostle, what pleases him. That is what we’ll see next week, when we will look at four things that bring pleasure to God our Father.

In closing, I remind you that bringing pleasure to God and walking worthy of the Lord Christ happens to people and churches who are filled with the knowledge of his will. And that knowledge comes to us like email: in packets (if you will), which often follow different routes and must be put together. This means you need other people in the church, and they need you. I repeat what was said earlier: You cannot fully be yourself by yourself. And you cannot fully perceive and understand God’s will when you don’t have the kind of relationship with others that God intends.

So, ask God to lead you into healthy relationships with others and to heal those that are unhealthy. Don’t be a loner.

One of my favorite authors, Wendell Berry, was walking with his friend Wes Jackson past a plot of Maximilian Sunflowers, which can grow to nearly ten feet. Jackson pointed to a plant that stood alone, disconnected from the rest.

Wendell Berry saw that this plant was taller than most and had bigger flowers. But it wasn’t healthy. Its blossoms were so heavy that the branches were starting to break under their weight. In one sense, the plant had “succeeded”: it was unusually tall and its flowers were impressive. It stood out from the crowd. But Maximilian Sunflowers can only thrive in community, not in isolation.[2]

That’s true of people too, especially of the followers of Jesus. Take steps to enter into the life of the church. Be involved with Jesus’s people. Find a ministry to be involved in. Join us on Thursdays at 4:30 for the next 9 weeks to pray for our church. Come to next week’s church family picnic. Don’t stand alone.

Blessing/Sending (Hebrews 12): In view of God’s mercy, offer yourselves as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. Do not be conformed to this world, but rather, be transformed by the renewal of your mind. Then you will be able to discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.

[1] Prov. 9:10; Eccl. 2:26 and Daniel 2:20; 2 Tim. 3:15; James 3:13

[2] Matt Woodley, managing editor, PreachingToday.com; source: Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace (Counterpoint, 2002), pp. 139-143

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The Quiet Lives of Ordinary People

Posted on September 14, 2024 by salooper57

The Spanish author and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo coined the term “intrahistoria.” The term does not refer to “the history populated by kings and generals,” which is taught in our schools, but to “the quiet and unrecorded lives of ordinary people who are born, who work, who breed, and who die leaving scarcely a trace of their existence behind.”

The quiet lives of ordinary people move humanity to a degree that the noisy lives of kings and generals cannot compare. They are to history what a southerly current is to the Mississippi. Winds may blow from other directions and roil the waters. Kings and generals may sweep across the world like storms on the surface of history, but the current of all things will continue to move towards its goal.

In the coming age, the lives of many kings and generals, tyrants and heroes, will be forgotten like a December snowfall is by June, while the quiet lives of ordinary people will be a cause for joy and celebration. Names that never appeared on the A-list (or even B- or C-list) of celebrities will be written in the Book of Life.

One such name is Kenneth West. I first met “Brother West” when I was in my early twenties and he was in his seventies. My wife and I were on a trajectory toward overseas service with our denomination. We expected to work among the poor in Latin America, but before we could do so we needed to put in two years of “home service” in the U.S. I was placed as a pastor in a small church in a rustbelt city in northeastern Ohio.

“Brother West” was one of the first people I met. He was hard to miss. He was about 6’5” and weighed over 200 pounds. He smiled often, though he was missing some teeth, following a surgery on his jaw that had severed a nerve. He wore simple, dark clothes, but there was a light in his eyes.

As I got to know him, I learned that he had lived an unusual life. He had owned a farm that bordered a lake in Idaho during the forties, where he lived alone and raised his own food and milled his own wheat. He had previously worked in a mine in the Pacific Northwest and had spent time in rural Alaska. At age thirty-five, he came to faith in Jesus Christ, which changed the direction of his life.

He ended up in northeastern Ohio, where he pastored a small holiness congregation. When I met him, he had retired from pastoral work and had moved to our small church. He taught Sunday School and played the piano when needed. He also played a guitar that he had made himself.

I can’t remember how it happened, but I began to meet with Ken West on Thursday afternoons. He would stop at church on his way home from work. (Though he was well into his seventies and didn’t, I think, need to work, he was employed as a custodian for a local business.) He and I would pray together and spend an hour or so talking. I learned from him that a man with an ardent spirit could also have a sharp mind, wide-ranging interests, and an openness to new opportunities.

For some people, pastoral ministry is not an aid but an obstacle to spiritual formation. Scripture becomes a source for sermonizing rather than a guide to living. Busyness militates against prayer and thoughtfulness. Instead of enhancing friendships, church board meetings often make them more difficult. But in Ken West I found a man who had years of experience as a pastor and still had a fire in his belly to know God and love in his heart for people.

Ordinary people may leave no trace in the writings of academic historians, but in the chronicle that God is recording, people like Ken West figure prominently. They are not a momentary squall sweeping across the surface of history. They are the current on which all things move to their glorious fulfillment when everything has been brought together under the authority of Christ.

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Temptation Will Beat You, Unless…

Posted on September 10, 2024 by salooper57

Viewing time: 23:44. Subject: Role of prayer in facing trials and temptations.

This sermon follows Jesus into the Garden of Gethsemane. It unpacks his instruction to “Watch and pray, lest you fall into temptation.” But the thrust of the sermon is the worthiness of Jesus to receive our worship and adoration. (Text below.)

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And they went to a place called Gethsemane. And he said to his disciples, “Sit here while I pray.” And he took with him Peter and James and John, and began to be greatly distressed and troubled. And he said to them, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death. Remain here and watch.” And going a little farther, he fell on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. And he said, “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” And he came and found them sleeping, and he said to Peter, “Simon, are you asleep? Could you not watch one hour? Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” And again he went away and prayed, saying the same words. And again he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were very heavy, and they did not know what to answer him. And he came the third time and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? It is enough; the hour has come. The Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Rise, let us be going; see, my betrayer is at hand.” (Mark 14:32-42)

I am about to violate a sacrosanct law from the secret rulebook every preacher follows: I am going to make the application before I preach the sermon. But I’m doing it for a reason: On this Communion Sunday, I don’t want to close with the application for us but with the adoration of our Lord Jesus.

So, here is the application. You will soon be hearing about a weekly prayer opportunity at Cal Road. For about eight weeks, we will meet to pray for our church using the Scriptures as our prayer guide. We will be asking for the very things that God desires to give. And we will watch and celebrate when he answers our prayers. I urge you to come to these prayer meetings. If they are not at a time you can attend, start your own prayer meeting and invite some friends to join you. It is not enough for us to learn about prayer. What matters is that we pray. That is the application. Pray! Pray with one another.

Now to our text. Just prior to the events we just read about, Jesus was celebrating Passover with his disciples in the large, upstairs room of a home in Jerusalem’s temple district. He had taken extraordinary precautions to keep the location of his Passover meal secret—even from the disciples. Towards the end of the meal, Jesus looked at Judas and said, “What you do, do quickly.” Judas had been frantically looking for an excuse to leave so that he could alert the authorities to Jesus’ whereabouts. Jesus gave it to him. He got up and went out into the night.

It would not have taken long for Judas to reach the High Priest’s residence and to set things in motion. A posse (for lack of a better word) would need to be assembled. It would take time, perhaps a few hours, before they were outfitted and ready. After receiving their orders, they would be sent out under the command of the High Priest’s personal assistant. A few minutes after that, the house with the upstairs guestroom would be surrounded. Then a lead team would burst through the door and find it … empty.

When the intelligence Judas provided proved unreliable, he was in trouble. According to Matthew’s Gospel, Judas had already taken the authorities’ money, and he had failed to produce results. I suppose he did some fast talking, all the while wracking his brains, trying to think of where Jesus was likely to go.

In Luke’s account we learn that after Judas left the upper room, Jesus instituted the “Lord’s Supper,” and then gave his disciples some final instructions. Before Judas had time to return with the posse, Jesus wrapped up what he was saying, sang a Passover hymn with his disciples (probably the Great Hallel, comprising Psalms 113-118), and left. Just think of Jesus singing these words on the eve of his crucifixion: “The LORD is on my side; I will not fear. What can man do to me? … The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This is the LORD’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes. … O LORD, save us; O LORD, grant us success … The hymn ends with these words: “Oh give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever!” (Psalm 118:29)

They left the city, crossed the Kidron, and started up the Mount of Olives. Verse 32 tells us that they stopped at a place called Gethsemane, which is Hebrew for “Olive Press.” John refers to the place as a grove or a garden. A municipal statute barred people from keeping gardens in Jerusalem – fertilizer was banned in the Holy City – and so rich people kept gardens just outside the city gates. One of those rich people seems to have been a friend of Jesus, for this was one of his favorite places to go.

Jesus knew that when Judas found the upper room deserted, this would be one of the places he would think to look. The disciples entered the Garden and Jesus told them to sit and wait – probably near the entrance – while he went on to pray. Then he signaled to Peter, James, and John to follow him, and they walked together into darkness.

Peter, James, and John. They had been among Jesus’s earliest disciples. They were the only disciples with Jesus when he raised the synagogue ruler’s daughter back to life. They were alone with Jesus the Mount of Transfiguration. They had seen his glory in a way no one else had.

Perhaps they thought that this life they were embarking on was all about glory. James and John, expecting the revolution to begin any day, had tried to maneuver their way into the highest cabinet positions in Jesus’s government. Their eyes were set on glory.

And Peter. Peter was always telling Jesus what to do. When Jesus told him to row his boat out into deep water and let down the nets, Peter said, “But Master, we’ve been fishing all night and haven’t caught a thing!” After the miraculous catch of fish, he said to Jesus, “Go away from me, Lord, I am a sinful man.” Much later, when Jesus first told the disciples that he would suffer and be killed, Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. Suffering was not on Peter’s agenda.

Only an hour or two earlier, Peter had contradicted Jesus yet again. When the Lord told the disciples, “You will all forsake me,” Peter insisted that, although those guys might forsake him, he never would. When Jesus countered, “Peter, before the night is through you will have denied me three times,” Peter gainsaid him: “I will never deny you. I will never forsake you. I will die with you first.” There was in Peter a pride, a willfulness that had to be broken before he could become the Rock Jesus had named him. After this night, it would be broken.

But I think there was another reason the Lord took these three men. They were dear to him, and he wanted someone to be with him when he faced the hour of his trial. He didn’t want them to fix things for him; he wasn’t looking for answers. He just wanted them to be there.

Sometimes when our friends are in trouble, when they are going through a divorce or diagnosed with a terminal illness, we are afraid to be with them. We think, “I don’t know what to say. I don’t have any answers.” But people aren’t usually looking for answers at such a time; they are looking for love. Jesus didn’t want his friends’ answers; he wanted them.

As they walked further into the Garden, he began, verse 33, “to be greatly distressed and troubled.” The verb translated “greatly distressed” is common in the gospels. It is the word that is used of the shepherds in the fields around Bethlehem when the angels appeared to them (the word the King James translated, “sore afraid”). It is frequently used in the gospels to describe people’s response to Jesus’ miracles. It means to be astounded or confused. The Greek scholar Gerhard Kittle says that the main idea is one of perplexity. Now think of that: the Lord of glory perplexed! That is a word that is never used of him, except here. There is dreadful darkness in the Garden.

That adjective “troubled” is a strong word. The King James translates, “very heavy.” It has the idea of bearing an overwhelming weight of sorrow, of staggering under intense emotional pain. Jesus tells the Three Friends, “My soul is overwhelmed to the point of death.”

They had seen him endure misunderstanding, persecution, bodily assault, political scheming, and physical exhaustion. They watched as he stood peacefully before a gale, calmly awaited the onslaught of a screaming demoniac, and walked confidently through the midst of a bloodthirsty crowd. But they had never seen him like this: deeply distressed and troubled. Overwhelmed with sorrow. As terrible as what followed on Calvary would be, we have the distinct impression that it was here in the garden that the battle was decided. Later that night, in the halls of Caiphas, he would again be Master of the situation. Before the Roman procurator, he stood with incomparable dignity. Nailed to a cross, he responded with grace and forgiveness. It was here – in the Garden – that the attack, the onslaught – came with overwhelming force.

“And going a little farther,” vs. 35, “he fell on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him.” The normal posture for prayer was standing, with hands raised to heaven. But Jesus fell to the ground in an agony of soul that we cannot conceive. He had lived his entire life to do the Father’s will. When he was twelve years old, he answered his mother, “Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” (Luke 2:49, ESV marginal reading). “For I have come down from heaven,” he said on another occasion, “not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me.”  “‘My food,’ he told his disciples, ‘is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work’.”  The constant temptation he faced was to circumvent the Father’s will. Each of the temptations in the wilderness revolves around this idea: You can save the world, you can convince them you are their Messiah, you can have authority over all the kingdoms of the earth, without becoming obedient unto death.

In the wilderness, empowered by prayer and fasting, and full of the Holy Spirit, Jesus vanquished that temptation. But the devil did not give up: Luke says that he left Jesus until “an opportune time.” This is that time. Jesus came to the Garden to implore heaven, but at his feet the very gates of hell opened before him. He prayed, “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me.” The cup from which he shrank was not merely death, but the bearing of humanity’s sin, and the separation from his Father that would entail.

We cannot know the extent of his suffering. We have not, as the author of Hebrews wrote, “resisted temptation to the shedding of blood.” We cannot know what he knew, nor feel what he felt, for we are sinful and our ability to know and to feel has been significantly degraded. Our estrangement from God has deadened powers that were innate to us. Our capacity for both anger and joy has been dulled. Even our capacity for sorrow– by the mercy of God – has been blunted. But Jesus was sinless. He had a larger capacity for feeling than do we. He knew greater joy and – as here – deeper sorrow than we are currently capable of experiencing.

Three times he prayed. A man whose wife was dying once told me that he prayed for her once and never did so again. To keep praying, he said, would demonstrate a lack of trust. But our Lord asked three times. Who could accuse him of lacking trust? The apostle Paul, too; he wrote, “Three times I asked the Lord to take this from me.” It seems that the biblical approach is to keep praying until God answers.

You may think, “But God did not answer. Jesus went to the cross despite his prayers.” But he was answered. Listen to what the author of Hebrews wrote about this scene: “During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission.”

Did you catch that? He was heard. But the author of Hebrews goes right on to say, “Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.”  He was heard, but still he suffered. He was answered, but the answer was … no.

We somehow get the idea that prayer is only answered when we get what we want, when we escape hard times. But God heard Jesus, and he didn’t escape. Luke writes that an angel came to him and comforted – or, better, strengthened – him. God’s answer was strength to do the Father’s will. When Jesus rose from the ground that third time, peace had been restored. He was in control once more. Calm, strong, ready, not because he would escape suffering, but because he had won through temptation and would submit to his Father’s will.

Look back to verse 37. After his first struggle in prayer, Jesus returned to find his friends sleeping. He said to Simon, verse 38, “Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Watching and praying are not a last resort for those who have already fallen into temptation, but a protective measure to keep them from falling.

If we are to win through our trials, we must pray before the crisis arrives, as it surely will. Before the crisis arrived, Jesus prayed. We find the same thing in the wilderness. We read that he fasted and prayed for forty days and was then tempted by the devil. We get the wrong idea and think the devil took advantage of Jesus after he had fasted for forty days because he was vulnerable. On the contrary, he was fit, equipped, and mighty in Spirit because he had prayed. In the prayer he taught us to pray, we say, “Lead us not into temptation,” but if we wait to pray until temptation is upon us, we will be saying, “Lead us out of temptation” (or worse, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”)

Jesus’ trial did not wait for him to come to it; it came to him. Verse 42: “Rise! Let us go! Here comes my betrayer.” Just so, your trials will find you. If they find you tomorrow, will they find you prepared? Will you, in the words of an older generation of preachers, be “prayed up?” Jesus had long before faced the issue of whose will he would obey. The author of Hebrews tells us that he came into the world saying, “I have come to do your will, O God.”

If you wait until you are already in the fires of trial to pray, it will be too late. To complain that God didn’t help you after you have already fallen into temptation is like complaining your seatbelt didn’t work, even though you waited until after the accident to put it on. Don’t wait to settle the issue of obedience until after the trial has arrived.

Jesus warned Peter that he would fall into temptation if he remained prayer-less. But Jesus, though tempted with a force we cannot comprehend, did not fall into temptation. He entered it on his guard and triumphed over it because he prayed; his entire life was an ongoing conversation with his Father.

St. Paul says, “No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man.” This is true because the essence of temptation is not tied to some particular sin – lust or stealing or blasphemy or coveting. Temptation comes in a myriad of forms but, whatever its form, its essential nature is to try to satisfy our deep needs and real desires in ways that are inconsistent with God’s character and will. The very heart of temptation – from Eve until today – is always, “God’s will, or mine?” For Jesus in the garden, the temptation was not, “Man’s salvation or my comfort.” The question was not, “Can not he for whom all things are possible do this some other way?” The question was “Will I do it God’s way?” He conquered the quintessential temptation with the prayer, “Father, not my will, but your will be done.” It is a terrible thing – I hope it is not true of any of us – to be in the habit of saying to God, “Not your will, but my will be done.”

You have already heard the application: pray! If our Lord triumphed through prayer, can we triumph without it? I will give no further application, but rather an invitation to join me in adoring the Son of God.

Our Master stood the test. He did not fail. For us and for our salvation, he endured the anguish and remained faithful. Temptation that would have swept us away like a flood, could not move him. The tidal wave of temptation struck the Rock of ages and he disappeared beneath it. But when it receded three days later, he rose from the wreck and ruin unbroken and unbreakable. The Captain of our salvation has triumphed! He is the holy one and true, the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, the faithful and true witness. He is the Lion of Judah and the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. The man of sorrows has become the joy of all the earth. Fix your gaze on the author and perfecter of our faith who for us and our salvation came down from heaven … to be lifted up on a cross. Worship and adore our great God and savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

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Doubt Wisely

Posted on September 7, 2024 by salooper57

A young friend called me one day in a panic. He was overwhelmed with doubts about the Christian faith, he told me, and he did not know what to do. I asked about the content of his doubts. He replied that he was doubting everything, including the existence of God, the nature of Jesus, and the reliability of the biblical text.

I asked my young friend, who had recently been leading a ministry to twenty-somethings in our community, how long he had been having these doubts. He had been dealing with them for some time. I asked him what he had done about his doubts, and learned that he had been watching YouTube videos, mostly by atheists, who addressed the very issues he was facing.

I discovered that my friend was excited by his doubts. He felt like he was living dangerously. He was ready to separate from his parent’s religion and to escape its moral code.

His doubts began over the appropriateness of same-sex sexual relationships, spread to the six-day creation teaching his parents espoused, stumbled into politics, and then overflowed into everything else he thought he knew about Christianity. He began to deconstruct the faith he had been taught. He ended by denouncing it.

I don’t think the trailhead leading to my friend’s atheism started with his doubts; it started with unhealthy and largely unrecognized desires, like the desire to outshine others. The seeds of doubt would not have been harmful had they been planted in healthier soil. Everyone doubts, but some people doubt wisely while others doubt foolishly.

I owe the phrase, “Doubt wisely,” to the English Romantic poet John Donne. Besides being one of England’s greatest poets, Donne was also a member of Parliament and, later, Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. This famous preacher and church leader believed that doubt plays an important role in the human search for truth.

Photo by Tobias Aeppli on Pexels.com

According to Donne, truth, like a craggy mountain peak, is difficult to attain. Those who reach her “about must and about must go.” There is no straight path up the mountain of truth for us. It is rather a switchback on which one must inevitably confront doubts. Doubts, like great boulders on the path, may safely be encountered when one is searching for the truth. But they will crush the person who is avoiding, or trying to manage, the truth.

My friend did not doubt wisely. He did not attempt to research the things he had been taught, to find out if they were sourced in the biblical writings, or if they were add-ons supplied by society. For example, instead of rejecting his parent’s faith because it was associated in his mind with the acceptance of a political party’s candidate, he could have discovered what the Bible actually teaches about leaders. Instead of listening to what YouTubers say about a six-day creation, he could have read what the Bible says, and learned how reputable scholars have explicated its key passages.

Instead, he listened to what aggressive atheists claimed the Bible says—people whose education was practically devoid of biblical scholarship. My friend was not wrong to doubt, but he failed to doubt wisely.

He assumed that his Christian parents were naïve. Whether he was right or wrong about that, I don’t know. But he was wrong to think that all Christians are naïve, while other people – including those he watched on YouTube – are clearheaded, logical thinkers.

The great English man of letters Malcolm Muggeridge was right when he claimed that we are living in one of the most gullible ages ever. But Muggeridge went further than that. He claimed that the serious believer is less likely to be gullible than the worldly person. True believers can carefully examine their doubts since they know they are standing on solid ground. The worldly person, carried on the shifting currents of contemporary thought, must cling to the flotsam of today’s transitory ideology.

To “doubt wisely” one must first believe wisely. People, standing on God’s revelation, aided by the eyewitness testimony of the apostles, to which they have added their own experiential proofs, have a body of evidence that helps them believe wisely and, paradoxically, doubt wisely.

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Proud of Jesus?

Posted on September 1, 2024 by salooper57

I posted an article yesterday (https://shaynelooper.com/?p=4314) about my journey from embarrassment to pride over Jesus. I’d love to hear if other people have been on this journey. Are you proud of Jesus? Do you want others to know that you are connected to him? Share your thoughts in the Comment Section.

We’ve had a gay pride now for a few decades. It’s high time for Jesus Pride. It’s time for Jesus’s people to stand up and stand out. We have so many reasons to be proud of our Leader.

Be proud of Jesus. He is the greatest person to ever walk this earth, and you (by grace alone) have a share in him!

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From Shame to Pride: A Journey of Faith

Posted on August 31, 2024 by salooper57

I was navigating this world as a newly converted Christian. One of the guys who sat across the table from me in study hall – there were so many of us that study halls took place in the cafeteria and the performing arts center – had learned I was “religious” and had taken to calling me, “The Preacher.” But I didn’t preach. I was silent about my faith.

One Sunday at church, I heard something that worried me. Jesus said, “If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.” It was as if he was speaking directly to me, for I was ashamed of Jesus.

The biblical writers and the early Christians they wrote about did not have that problem. They boasted about Jesus. They said things like, “We cannot help but speak about what we have seen and heard.”

I am no longer ashamed of Jesus. I am, in fact, proud of him. Some people are proud of their favorite college football team, some are proud of the presidential candidate they support, while others are proud of their accomplishments and possessions. I am proud of Jesus.

We will not be proud – or ashamed either, for that matter – of someone unless we have some kind of connection to him or her. I greatly admire Albert Einstein for his remarkable mind and his transformative work in physics, but I am not proud of Einstein. Why would I be? Other than having visited the town where he lived, I have no connection to him, no share in Einstein.

But I do have a connection to Jesus. I cannot take credit for that. He initiated it; I merely responded. But I’ve thrown in my lot with him. I am one of his people; I have a share in Jesus.

There are so many reasons to be proud of him. Long before the suffrage movement and women’s liberation, Jesus promoted the importance and worth of women. Unlike other rabbis, he taught women and included them among his disciples. It was to a woman that he first announced that he was the Messiah. After the resurrection, he first revealed himself to a woman.

Jesus stood with the poor and the marginalized. He recognized and proclaimed their value in a religious culture that despised them. He not only offered the poor his charity, which was common enough; he offered them his friendship, which was exceedingly rare. And he assured the poor that they were special to God, regardless of what the religious professionals said and did.

Jesus was remarkably brave. When a screaming demoniac rushed him, Jesus fearlessly stood to await his arrival. In the midst of a sudden and brutal storm at sea, when commercial fisherman were losing their heads and giving themselves up for dead, Jesus remained perfectly calm. When the authorities came to arrest him, he offered himself up so that his friends could escape.

Jesus was absolutely brilliant. His teachings are incomparable. No other person, no school of thought, no intellectual movement in the history of the world has impacted humanity so greatly as Jesus.

Jesus gave up everything to help people who did not even acknowledge him. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris seek power so that they can help people. Jesus gave up power so that he could help us. St. Paul says, “Though he was rich, for your sake he became poor.” Though he was just, he was willing to suffer injustice. Though he was blameless, he died for our sins.

Let other people boast about presidential candidates and football heroes, I’ll boast about Jesus. As people once said about him, “He has done everything well.” And he is everything I aspire to be.

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