The Workout

Posted on June 17, 2020 by salooper57

When I was a kid, college students were holding sit-ins on campuses around the country to protest the Vietnam War. They would occupy a campus building, like the administration building – and sit on the floor. Students, and sometimes Profs, filled up every square foot of floor space, disrupting business and making a general nuisance of themselves. Sooner or later the police would come and break it up, maybe arrest a few kids and occasionally sit down next to them.

We even had a sit-in at my high school, though I can’t remember why exactly. I think we might have been protesting cafeteria food. (Our ideals were, I’m afraid, less altruistic than those of others.)

Salvation is not a sit-in. It’s a workout. “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in you…”

I know that some reader will get jittery, seeing the words “salvation” and “work” in the same sentence, worried that I’m espousing some kind of works salvation. But don’t forget that long before I used those two words in the same sentence, the Apostle Paul did. It was he who wrote, “Work out your salvation.” Salvation is a workout, not a sit-in. If your salvation rouses you to no effort, something is wrong.

When Paul wanted to describe our role in salvation, he chose the word the NIV translates as work out. The Greek word has the idea of working at something until it is finished. So, for example, the Bible uses this word of cultivating the ground and of building a house. The ground is cultivated with intention of planting a vineyard. The house is built with the intention of taking up residence. In both cases, the idea is of working at something so that it will be finished – the vineyard so that you can eat its grapes and drink its wine, the house so that you can move in and live in it.

When the Bible talks about planting a vineyard and building a house, it’s talking about good things, but this same word can be (and is) also used of working evil. In Romans 2:9 Paul writes about people who work – who cultivate, who build – evil. They work evil like a farmer works a field, and one day it will come ripe, and then they will be served evil on a platter. They work at it like a builder builds a house. One day it will be completed, and then they will have to live in what they’ve built.

The NIV translates the Greek of this verse as “Continue to work out your salvation…” That translation attempts to express the ongoing nature of the present tense of the verb. This work is not something you do once and are done. The salvation inside you is so big, it will take a lifetime to work out. There is so much potential in God’s salvation that you cannot unpack it in a few years or even in a lifetime – it will take an eternity.

If you are expending no energy in your salvation workout – if you never break a sweat, never feel a doubt, never strain under temptation – you’re not doing it right. It’s like spending an hour at the gym. If you never break a sweat, never strain against the weights or get your heart rate into triple digits, you’re not doing it right. Paul did not say “Talk out your salvation.” He said, “Work out” (or it could simply be translated work) your salvation.”

The Greek root in this word is erg, which means “work.” We get words like “energy” and “ergonomics” (and even “allergy”) from this root. In the church we often hear that salvation is “by grace” and “not by works,” and that is solid biblical truth. But we need to make sure we are not drawing the wrong conclusion from that truth. We can mistakenly assume that, because salvation does not result from our work, it must not necessitate our work. That is a serious error. Salvation does not result from work but it does result in work. As Philip Melancthon put it, “We are saved by faith alone, but faith that saves is never alone.” It walks in company with its dear friend “work.”

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Let’s Get Our Bearings Before We Give Directions

Posted on June 13, 2020 by salooper57

In the summer of 2016, my wife and I were on a 70,000-acre lake in Quebec that we had never been to before. On the third or fourth morning we were there, I took the boat out by myself. The sun hadn’t yet risen, but the east was already turning colors and steam was rising everywhere off the lake.

It was so gorgeous that I fumbled around for my camera and was taking pictures as I headed toward a spot we had fished the previous evening. I didn’t stop the boat to take pictures because I was hoping to reach that bay before the sun broke the horizon. So, with the outboard at full throttle, I’d take a picture, look at it in the view screen, delete it if I didn’t like it, then take another.

I had been doing this for five or ten minutes and was passing through a straight that opened up into a much larger arm of the lake. That was when I looked around and realized I didn’t know where I was. The landscape was not at all familiar. I was lost.

When you don’t know where you are, you don’t know how to get where you’re going. I immediately stopped the boat and sat still on the glassy water. I got out the rudimentary map we had been given when we arrived – it was more like a restaurant placemat than a real map – and tried to figure out where I was.

The sun would soon rise behind me, over my right shoulder. I had just passed a rocky point while veering to the right. Could I locate that point on my placemat map? What I needed was one of those maps one sees at highway rest stops, the ones with an arrow and the caption, “You Are Here.”

I think our nation could use one of those maps. Everyone is busy giving directions but does anyone really know where we are? Because when you don’t know where you are, you don’t know where you’re going.

The brutal killing of George Floyd has brought this situation into sharp relief. America has long been disoriented on race issues. We are not sure where we are but everyone is telling us where we should go: Defund and disband police departments; increase funding to police departments; heroize Black Lives Matter; demonize Black Lives Matter; “Law and Order”; “No Justice, No Peace.”

Perhaps we should stop giving directions for a moment, try to get our bearings, and find the “You Are Here” arrow. That, however, is no easy feat when society’s surveyors are producing maps that differ on important details and we are not looking at the same map.

At one time in the United States, most of our cultural maps were based on the explorations of men and women in the Jewish and Christian traditions. Most people trusted those maps and, even when they weren’t following them (which was often), they took their accuracy for granted. This is not now the case.

Perhaps the best we can do these days is to agree on the broad outlines of the map. If we no longer have a “You Are Here” arrow, perhaps we can at least draw a “You Are Around Here” circle. To do that, we need to listen to and work with people who are reading different maps.

I will nevertheless continue to trust the map compiled by ancient Jewish and Christian explorers that we know as the Bible. It has proved invaluable. But I have less confidence in the maps derived by later explorers in the tradition, though some have been extremely helpful.

Those later maps have too often been drawn on skewed cultural projections that have led society away from the destination. The mistreatment of indigenous peoples and the legally sanctioned exploitation of African Americans are examples of what happens when the map society is following is distorted.

Such distortions need to be recognized and the lines redrawn, but one will not go wrong by referring to the ancient map of the Bible. Even in today’s world, it can help us find our way to a more just and loving society.

(First published by Gatehouse Media)

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Prejudice: Going After the Root

Posted on June 6, 2020 by salooper57

When enough people care enough about prejudice, when concern reaches critical mass, action is taken. This usually means that legislation is passed or new policies enacted. The display of hatred associated with a particular prejudice – for example, race discrimination in housing – is outlawed.

Such legislation is necessary and improves conditions for many people but it does not dispel prejudice. It may remove it from sight but, until the fear and hatred which motivate it are eradicated, it will not eliminate it. Prejudice will simply mutate.

This is not to say that legislation is useless or policy changes are a waste of time. Legislation is to prejudice what quarantine orders are to Covid-19: a means of limiting its destructive impact. Limiting its impact is a worthy goal, one to which people can nobly give their lives and energies, but we must be realistic. Passing legislation, revising policies, and changing structures will not get to the root of the problem.

What is needed is a radical solution to a problem that is buried deep in the human person. Prejudice is not native to America, though it has manifested itself throughout American history. It is a human problem. One of my closest friends, a dark-skinned Bengali, born in Kolkata in the 1950s, grew up on the subcontinent where lighter skinned people received better treatment than their darker skinned neighbors.

A radical solution requires, I believe, a transformative spiritual encounter. We cannot go on as we are – with the ideas we have subconsciously imbibed since infancy channeling our thoughts – and still eliminate prejudice, even if we truly desire to do so. Laws and policies need to change but so do we.

Our ideas need to change at a profound and unseen level. This is known, in religious circles, as “repentance.” (The compound Greek word so translated in the Bible is comprised of a prefix suggesting “change” and a root meaning “mind.”) When ideas change, individuals change (this is known as “conversion”), and when enough individuals change, society does too.

Legislation and policy changes are not radical enough. Prejudice will “outsmart” such things by mutating. Only a profound personal transformation can eliminate prejudice by uprooting the fear and hatred growing in the depths.

This has happened in history. In a time when prejudice was rampant, ideologically supported, and structurally engrained, a group of transformed people were, in large part, freed from it. They were such a contrast to the society around them that everyone took notice.

The people who comprised this radical group came from different ethnic and national backgrounds. They didn’t dress alike, eat the same foods, keep the same schedules, or belong to the same organizations. Their lives had been as separate and unequal as possible. They were Jews and Gentiles, yet they were melded together in the nascent Church of Jesus Christ.

One of their chief spokesmen, the Apostle Paul, wrote that in the Church “there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free.” In one rhetorical swoop, he gathered the principal prejudices of the day and unmade them. This was only possible, he was careful to articulate, because Greeks and Jews and barbarians and Scythians had undergone radical, spiritual change.

In our own country, with our own structurally ensconced prejudices, this same kind of thing once happened. On an April evening in Los Angeles in 1906, a group of praying men were transformed in a spiritual encounter. One of them, a black man, the son of emancipated slaves, became the public face of what has come to be known as the Azusa Street Revival.

During one of the worst decades of racial violence in American history – a thousand black men lynched, hundreds of thousands of white people in the KKK – Latinos, whites, Asians, and blacks were meeting together, praying together, and embracing one another as brothers and sisters. They did this not because it was legislated but because they were changed.

Photo by bantersnaps on Unsplash

We who desire societal transformation should make our views known to our legislators. More importantly, we should plead with God to transform us into the kind of people who experience Jesus’s love and concern for others and reflect it to the world around us.

First published by Gatehouse Media

Posted in In the News, Lifestyle, Spiritual life, Worldview and Culture | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

The Holy Spirit: Getting the Facts, Missing the Point

Posted on June 5, 2020 by salooper57

This message from Acts 1 was preached on Pentecost Sunday, 2020. It can be read below or viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebZnMjCbpok (the sermon begins at 21:05.)

(Acts 1:1-8) In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach until the day he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen. After his suffering, he showed himself to these men and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God. On one occasion, while he was eating with them, he gave them this command: “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” So when they met together, they asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

This is Pentecost Sunday, the day the church celebrates the reality-transforming, church-birthing, human-metamorphosing outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The God who so loved that he gave his Son also so loved that he gave his Spirit … and nothing has been the same since.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost. It has been said that a person without the Spirit can never be more than a second-class Christian, but St. Paul went further than that. He said that without the Spirit, a person cannot be a Christian at all: “…if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ” (Romans 8:9).

Without the Spirit, there would be no church. A religious group can have a nave, altar, sacristy, pulpit, and steeple, but they’ll only have a church if they have the Spirit.

The Greek phrase ἐν πνεύματι (in or by the Spirit) appears 152 times in the New Testament. We are led by the Spirit, we rejoice by the Spirit, we worship the Father by the Spirit, are indwelt by the Spirit, are gifted by the Spirit, are marked as God’s people by the Spirit, love each other by the Spirit – I could go on.

With the Holy Spirit, we are connected to God’s own life. With the Spirit, we are connected to each other. With the Spirit we can confess Jesus Christ and actually know him. With the Spirit, we can live the Christian life now and expect glory in the future.

But what is the Holy Spirit—so ominously called by earlier versions the “Holy Ghost”? First, let’s get our nomenclature right. People sometimes refer to the Spirit with the impersonal pronoun “it,” as though the Spirit were something subpersonal – a force or an influence. It is more appropriate to refer to the Spirit with the personal pronoun, for the Spirit is a person who teaches, chooses, acts, reasons, and can be grieved. You wouldn’t want to be referred to as an “it” – neither does the Spirit. Now it is true that the Spirit is more than a person, as we understand personhood, but he is not less. He is “suprapersonal.”[1]

St. Luke wrote a sequel to his Gospel, known as The Acts of the Apostles (though that title is not original) which is all about the Holy Spirit. In fact, a better title would be, The Acts of the Holy Spirit or The Acts of Jesus by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is mentioned in the first sentence of this book, and then 55 more times as the story progresses.

When we read Acts, we can’t help but be impressed by the importance of the Spirit. Again and again, we see what sort of things the Spirit does but might miss why he does them.

Let me illustrate how a person can know what and yet miss why. Say someone from a church in southeastern Mali, a church with whom our church has connected, comes to Michigan to stay for six months and you open your home to him and offer your hospitality. You want to give him a distinctively American experience, so you take him to a ball game.

He has already watched a couple of games with you on TV, and you’ve explained to him that when one team is on offense the other is on defense. You’ve explained that, while on defense, a team will have 9 players on the field but on offense a team always starts with just one player. If he hits a ball and no one gets him out, the team on offense gets to add a second player to the field, and so on. He asks you what it means to “get him out,” and you explain that bases as safe zones and that on offense the goal is to go from base to bases until you reach home. He takes all that in.

With this as background, you take him to a Tiger’s game. He cheers every time someone (doesn’t matter which team he is on) hits the ball. He shouts out, “He’s safe!” “He’s out!” He knows about pitching and hitting, about outs and innings, and offense and defense. The one thing you forgot to tell him – so basic you didn’t think to mention it – is that teams keep score. So he knows lots of things about baseball and has a general framework in mind, but he doesn’t know about winning, losing, and keeping score.

That’s rather a big thing to miss, isn’t it? (Especially when the visiting team hits a grand slam in the ninth and he stands up and cheers!) When it comes to the Spirit, we can understand many individual truths but miss the big thing: what winning is. Winning in The Book of Acts and in the Bible is the victory of the kingdom of God.

The Book of Acts is about God’s kingdom. Luke lets us know that in the second sentence of the book: “[Jesus] appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God.” In the closing sentence of the book, Luke again mentions the kingdom of God. In biblical scholarship, this is known as an inclusio, the practice of setting out one’s subject or thesis by opening and closing with it.

We all understand the Bible within a particular framework, just like our Malian friend understood (or misunderstood) baseball within a particular framework. The most common framework among evangelical Christians is built with four major planks: Creation, Fall, Redemption (which is most of the Bible) and New Creation. That is a helpful way to look at the Bible, which gives us the major components but might leave us missing the point – it might not tell us what it means to win. To understand that, we need to understand kingdom.

A kingdom alteration to that framework might help: God the Artist-Creator King makes a universe and rules over it, including humans whom he made to rule the earth as his regents – as sub-kings and queens. That is Genesis 1 and 2 and parallels the creation plank. But notice the kingdom dimension.

With that kingdom dimension, we realize the next plank was not just a fall but a rebellion. The humans chose not to rule under God but to try to rule alongside him – to “be like God.” That is Genesis 3, with supporting material that follows through chapter 11. In chapters 4-11, we see everything falling apart. There really is a “fall” but it was preceded by a rebellion.

The redemption plank is not just about how humans get to heaven but about how God is restoring his own kingdom and restoring humans to the place of regents, as glorious sub-kings and queens. God chose a person Abraham (that is Genesis 12) whose family would accept his rule (that is Genesis 18) and extend it (that is Exodus 19) as a “kingdom of priests” and through whom all the peoples of the earth will be blessed.

Abraham’s descendants, however, make the same mistake Adam made. They choose to rule themselves rather than have God rule them (that is 1st Samuel 8). So God gives them what they desire – a king other than himself – but he also gives them a promise: that one day he will place his own king on the throne, a king who will be his son (this is 2nd Samuel 7, Psalm 2, Psalm 110, and many other places), and will rule forever.

This was the hope of God’s people at the close of the Old Testament: God’s kingdom will come. The narrative takes a giant leap forward in the Gospels, when God incarnates himself in human flesh in Jesus Christ and bursts on the scene with the announcement: “The time has come. The kingdom of God is near” (Mark 1:15). Through Jesus the God-Man, God’s rightful place as the king of kings and humanity’s rightful place as kings under the king are restored. This is how God wins and we win with him.

Notice that when the apostles ask Jesus (verse 6): “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” he does not answer, “No, we gave up on that plan,” but rather, “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set…” (verse 7). In other words, that’s not your business, but you do have other business to attend to (this is verse 8, the key verse in The Book of Acts): “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

(I say that is the key verse because Luke organized the entire book around it. What Jesus says here launches a world-wide Kingdom of God campaign, which Luke chronicles. He pauses the story at different points to provide progress reports on the campaign. In 2:47 and 6:7, Jesus’s people are witnesses in Jerusalem. In 8:1 they are in Judea. In 9:31, Samaria has been reached. In 12:24, they have become witnesses outside of Israel’s borders. By 16:5 they have reached Asia and Galatia. In 19:20, the witnesses are set to cross into Europe. And in 28:31, the Kingdom of God has come to Rome, the heart of the Empire.)[2]

Now notice that Jesus did not say, “When the Holy Spirit comes on you, you will witness for me” (a verb) but rather “You will be my witnesses,” (a noun). That’s important. The Holy Spirit doesn’t just empower us to do things. He transforms us into a certain kind of person – a Jesus-kind of person. The presence of the Spirit in a person is a catalyst that causes the person to change / evolve / transform into a different kind of being, a metamorphosis from what St. Paul calls in Greek, “a sarkikos” (a merely biological being) into “a pneumatikos” (a spiritual being).

You’ve heard people talk about the next step in evolution? Well, this is it: not a step from a lower form of biological life to a higher, but from solely biological to a spiritual/biological hybrid, which is to say, to a genuine human being.

Jesus didn’t order his apostles to go witness but he promised them that they would become witnesses, after the Holy Spirit came on them. The presence of the Spirit and the transformation he engenders in both individuals and (even more importantly) in churches is a powerful witness for King Jesus. The church is a kingdom colony in the world. A transformed individual is a wonder. A transformed community of individuals – that is, the church – is proof that the kingdom of God has arrived.

When the Spirit was given, he was given to Jesus’s people corporately, not just to certain people individually. Peter and the Apostles were not the only recipients. This was something new and it suggests the crucial importance of the church in God’s kingdom strategy.

After Jesus was taken up before their eyes, the men just stood there, looking up into heaven. I don’t know how long they would have stood there, but something happened to move them along. (These are verses 10-11): “…suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. ‘Men of Galilee,’ they said, ‘why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.’”

“Why do you stand here looking into the sky?” say these two men (presumably angels). In other words: “Didn’t you hear what Jesus said? You don’t want him to find you staring up into the sky with your mouths open when he comes back, do you? You’ve got things to attend to. You better get busy.”

And they got busy. But notice how they got busy (v. 14): They didn’t organize a march or plan a campaign or hold a seminar. They got busy praying.

As Jim Cymbala put it, “The Christian church was born not in a clever sermon” (or, I would add, an inspiring worship service, a seminary class, or an evangelistic crusade) “but in a prayer meeting.”[3]

There is no a formula for being filled with the Spirit but notice what these believers did. They not only prayed, they obeyed. They obeyed the Scriptures (particularly Ps. 69 and 109, which, I suspect, came to their attention while they were praying the psalms in their prayer meeting.) They obeyed the Scripture as best they knew how.

That is how to wait for the Spirit: pray and obey. When we do that in the context of longing to honor Jesus, the Spirit comes. No amount of doctrinal correctness, liturgical propriety, or religious enthusiasm can take the place of a genuine desire to exalt Jesus. That is what the Spirit does. That is what he cares about. And when he finds people who also care about that, he comes.

And when he comes, people change. Churches change. Neighborhoods change. Communities change. Eventually, everything changes. You have heard the disturbing news about the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent riots in Minneapolis. You know Mr. Floyd was black but you might not know that he was our brother. The blood that flowed for him flowed for us: the blood of Jesus.

The world is talking about how this man from Houston’s Third Ward died but his friends from Houston are talking about how he lived: how he helped ministries come into the neighborhood, stood up with people at their baptisms, told young men, as a friend of his described it, “that God trumps street culture” His friend said, “he wanted to see young men put guns down and have Jesus instead.”[4]

The racial injustice, suspicion, and hatred flaring up all over our country is frightening. It is heartbreaking. It must stop – but how? Electing a black president didn’t stop it. Education hasn’t stopped it. Race and equity training hasn’t stopped it. But there was a brief time and a defined place in U.S. history when, for a while, it did stop.

It was during one of the worst decades of racial violence in America’s history. In the decade prior to 1906, lynchings of African Americans skyrocketed. Though official records were not kept, historians believe that more than a thousand blacks were lynched. And during that time, hundreds of thousands of Americans were joining the KKK.

Then in 1906, God poured out the Holy Spirit in an Acts 2 way in Los Angeles. People call it the Azusa Street Revival. One of the principal leaders was a black man, William Seymour. Tens of thousands of people – rich, poor, men, women, native-born, immigrants, blacks, whites, Asians, and Latinos – encountered the Spirit of Jesus. In this place where the Spirit controlled, whites weren’t lynching blacks, they were embracing them and being embraced by them as brothers and sisters. Frank Bartleman, who has written on the Azusa Street Revival, put it this way: “The color line is washed away by the blood of Jesus Christ!”[5]

But the Spirit does not come because we want to improve racial relations, though where he comes that happens. The Spirit comes because he sees an opportunity to honor Jesus. When that is what we want – to honor him, to be like him, to introduce people to him – the Spirit comes.

That is what happened in Acts 2. The Day of Pentecost is about Jesus because the Spirit is about Jesus. When we are about King Jesus, we will experience the presence and power of the Spirit. We will be transformed. We will be his witnesses. And our church will be a place where love and justice and peace – the hallmarks of the kingdom of God – pervade everything.

[1] Anthony Thistelton, “The Holy Spirit and the Life of the Church,” https://www.catalystresources.org/the-holy-spirit-and-the-life-of-the-church/

[2] See Keener, C. S. (1993). The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament (Ac). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

[3] Jim Cymbala, “Leadership,” Vol. 14, no. 4.

[4] https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2020/may/george-floyd-ministry-houston-third-ward-church.html

[5] Rich Nathan, Both-And (IVP Books, 2013), page 48.

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How to Handle Pressure (Part 2)

Posted on June 3, 2020 by salooper57

St. Paul knew all about stress and he knew how to handle it.

In Corinthians 4:8, Paul describes what his stressful life could be like. He says he was “Pressed” – squeezed like grapes – on every side but not crushed.” The word crushed is interesting. It means caved in, restricted. We get our word stenosis – the narrowing, closing of an artery – from this word. Paul is the only biblical author who uses it, and the only other time he uses it is to picture one’s affection being so restricted that it no longer flows. That is the danger. When we are under pressure, the flow of affection can be shut off – to our spouses and children and friends. Paul knew that it need not be that way. “Pressed . . . but not crushed.”

Then Paul says he is perplexed. A number of other biblical writer use this word. Several times it is translated as “at a loss.” Etymologically it carries the idea of not knowing which way to go. At a loss, Paul says, but not in despair. He had been perplexed enough times to know that, though he was at a loss, he would not lose out. God would make a way; he is the way-making God. He “makes a way in the wilderness,” the prophet says, and the apostle adds that he makes a way out of every temptation (1 Corinthians 10:13). We sometimes find ourselves at a loss, at a seeming dead-in, like the fleeing Israelites when they came to the Red Sea. There is no way to go forward, and no way to go back. Paul had known that experience, and yet God always made a way. Perplexed, but not in despair.

Things got even worse. In verse 9, Paul says that he was persecuted. The word could be translated “hounded.” Everywhere he went, people were following him around, telling him how wrong he was; telling other people how wrong he was. Sometimes he just wanted to scream, “Get off my back.” He hit a low point when his trial was held in Rome and no one was there to support him. (Read 2 Timothy 4 sometime). He felt deserted. Persecuted, he says, but not abandoned. When everyone else left, his awareness that God was with him grew even stronger.

The word translated abandoned in this verse is used elsewhere in Scripture: most notably, in Matthew 27:46, when from the cross Jesus cried, “Eli, Eli! Lama sabachthani?” My God, my God! Why have you – here’s our word – forsaken me?” We know the answer to that question. He was forsaken so that we might be forgiven. “Keep your lives free from the love of money,” the author of Hebrews writes, “and be content with what you have, because God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you’” (Hebrews 13:5). Paul counted on that.

He says (still verse 9), “Struck down, but not destroyed.” We might paraphrase, “Down, but not out.” The same Greek word, interestingly, is used of laying a foundation – something that gets put down . . . and walked on! Ever feel like people are walking all over you? Paul did but he was not destroyed. (The word has the idea of coming apart at the seams). Maybe you feel as if your seams are fraying. You need to know that God is the universe’s best tailor. He can mend those seams again, stronger than before.

Paul endured relentless pressure, not for a short time but year after year and – here’s the thing – was still joyful. He was often in over his head, but he didn’t drown. What was his secret?

(Look next week for the third and final installment of  “How to Handle Pressure.”)

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While We Were Looking Elsewhere

Posted on May 30, 2020 by salooper57

In late January, the U.S. had its first confirmed coronavirus case. Though the coronavirus was in the news, it seemed far away, like the SARS outbreak in 2003 or the Ebola epidemic that began in 2013.

On February 29, the U.S. reported its first confirmed Covid-19 death. Within two weeks, President Trump had banned most visitors from Europe and declared a national emergency. Since that time, Covid-19 has dominated nearly everyone’s thinking.

I am a pastor, and pastors are always thinking about the church. What does God want us to do? How can we love people in the church at their point of need? How can we bless and help those outside the church? How can we grow in our knowledge of God and our experience of his grace?

Over the past two months, much of our thinking about the church has circled around the coronavirus. First it was: can we continue meeting together for worship services? That quickly morphed to questions about technologies: what platforms should we use for online services, staff and board meetings? How can our employees work from home? Will we be forced to lay off staff?

Every day for months, church leaders (like most Americans) have had to deal with Covid-19 decisions. Stream services? Apply for the PPP? Reopen? How will we social distance when we are back together? When should Sunday School restart? How about Family Ministries meetings? When will it be safe to resume children’s in-person programming?

Such things need to be considered, of course, but Covid-19 cannot be all that we think about. There are other things going on. Tomorrow, I will officiate a service for a family who lost their loved one. It will be the fourth such service in two weeks, including one for a good friend and co-worker. None of them had the coronavirus. Life (and death) goes on, even in a pandemic.

If the pandemic (and the politics that circle around it like turbulence around a hurricane’s eye) is all we can think about, we will miss out on life. We will miss out on the good God is always doing, even in the storm. We may also fail to avoid the bad things that happen independent of the virus.

A few years ago, some Hollywood director must have realized the impact a collision scene – particularly one viewers did not see coming – would have on an audience. Since then, one director after another has used the unforeseen T-Bone collision for its shock value. I wonder, as we stare down the road the pandemic is taking, if we are on such a collision course with the unseen.

Something like that has happened on the international scene. According to USA Today, while the U.S. was giving its attention to the pandemic, Iran was harassing our warships in the Persian Gulf. A Russian fighter harried a U.S. surveillance plane over the Mediterranean, and North Korea launched a barrage of missiles.

This kind of thing happens in ordinary people’s lives too. A lawyer fixes his eyes on the path to becoming a partner – big cases, long hours, the obligatory schmoozing – and doesn’t notice his family falling apart. Then comes the shocking collision, the broken family, the injured people.

The biblical writer tells Christians to “fix your eyes on Jesus.” The founder and perfecter of the faith is the believer’s point of reference, though “point of reference” may be misleading since it suggests something stationary. Jesus, however, is not stationary. He did not say, “Sit and watch me,” but “Come, follow me.”

Following him – which includes doing what he taught us to do in the ways he demonstrated – requires faith at all times, not just during a crisis. Believers trust him to know what potential collisions are coming and lead away from them – to lead them “not into temptation” (or “trial” as the word means). When we follow Jesus in a crisis – Covid-19 is but one example – we will not be fixated on the things everyone else is talking about. We will not be overawed by the crisis. We will deal with it appropriately, retain our emotional balance, and become a source of hope and peace to friends and family.

First published by Gatehouse Media.

Posted in In the News, Spiritual life | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

How to Handle Pressure (part 1)

Posted on May 29, 2020 by salooper57

Has the pressure has been getting to you lately? Career, financial decisions, leadership responsibilities, a spiritual life to nurture – how are you supposed to stay on top of all that? You feel like the proverbial camel with the badly strained back: one more straw and you know what is going to happen. You are in over your head, and you cannot even tread water because you are holding onto too many important things. So what can you do?

I think we can learn from Saint Paul, who should be the patron saint of the distraught, the overworked and the undervalued. The man faced more pressure per square inch than any of us are likely to, and he survived – well actually he didn’t, but that is another story, and it wasn’t the pressure that killed him. We can learn a few things about handling pressure from Paul.

Here are some of the things that Paul said about his lifestyle: “I have worked . . . harder . . . I have been constantly on the move. . . I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked. Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern”(same word translated as worry or anxiety every other time it is used in the New Testament) “for all the churches.”1 In this same letter he writes, “this body of ours had no rest, but we were harassed at every turn – conflicts on the outside, fears within.” Paul understood pressure.

It is not just when things are going wrong that we feel pressured. Sometimes the pressure is greatest when everything is going right. I once read about a bowler who rolled eleven straight strikes. He only needed one more for a perfect game. But the guy got so psyched out that he couldn’t bring himself to roll the last ball. The pressure was too great. He sat there for a long time, then finally took off his bowling shoes and went home. It was the last time he ever stepped into a bowling alley.

St. Paul knew more about pressure than that man. He was incarcerated, beaten, and tried as a traitor to the empire. Several of his letters that appear in our Bible were written while he was in prison. When he wrote the letter to the Philippians, he was waiting to hear whether or not the court would sentence him to death. Paul knew what pressure is all about, and he learned how to handle it.

Perhaps 2 Corinthians 4 offers the most insight on handling pressure of any of Paul’s writings. Here are verses 8 and 9: “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.”

Maybe you’ve been there. Maybe you are there. “Hard pressed on every side.” The word Paul chose is used of squeezing the juice out of grapes. Perhaps you feel like your circumstances are squeezing the life out of you. Now notice the next two words: “But not.” That is the refrain that runs through these verses. Things can sometimes get very tough, but not too tough for us to handle, as long as we are receiving God’s help.  We can do this!

(Look for part 2 of How to Handle Pressure next week.)

1              See 2 Corinthians 11:23-28

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Enduring Hardship Well: 5 Things to Do and 5 Things NOT to Do

Posted on May 28, 2020 by salooper57

Read below or watch at here (Sermon begins at 25:38.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbgWg5KDg8Q

No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. (Hebrews 6:11)

Let me remind you of the danger prolonged hardship presents and the five things we need to know to endure it well. The danger in hardship is (verse 3) that “you will … grow weary and lose heart.” Another way of putting that, which is faithful to the Greek text, is: “lest you become soul-sick and fall apart.”

Falling apart is the danger. There are five things we need to know to avoid it. 1) We need to know that hardship is inescapable. We will go through it – everyone does. Even Jesus the Son of God did.

2) We need to know that, while we don’t have a choice about whether we will go through hardship, we do have a choice about how we will go through hardship. (The how is what we are looking at today.)

3) We need to know that God knows. He knows what’s out there ahead of us and he knows what’s in here inside of us. He knows what we can handle (better than we do) and will keep us from any trial that we cannot, with his help, handle.

4) God will not waste our suffering. It will only be wasted if we waste it. He will use it to change us for the better and enable us to share in his holiness. Holiness is the state in which people flourish.

5) And this is a summary of all the rest: God intends to bring good to us through hardship, whatever it may be. That does not mean that hardship is good. It means that God is. So good, in fact, that nothing can prevent him from bringing good to his people.

When we know these five things, we are ready to do the five things that keep us from falling apart and avoid doing the five things that contribute to falling apart.

The first thing to do, which comes from verse 2, is to look at Jesus. If you want to know how to do a thing, find someone who has done it. If you want to replace the O2 sensor on your Ford F-150, get on YouTube and watch the professional at 1A Auto; don’t watch me. He’s done it. He knows how. Jesus knows how to endure hardship. He’s done it. Watch him.

One way to watch him is to read the Gospel accounts of his life. You can watch Jesus endure misunderstanding and see how he handles it. You can watch Jesus deal with false accusations, manipulative people, the violation of his rights, and physical exhaustion. You can see what he does with bickering, misguided friends, and flattering, devious enemies. I spend some time each day looking at Jesus in the gospels. It is one way I “fix my eyes on Jesus.”

But don’t just watch him: think through what you see him doing. Watching him won’t help much unless you think about what you see and imitate it. That’s the second thing we can do to endure hardship in a healthy way: Consider carefully how Jesus dealt with hardship. After we have looked at him (verse 2), we “consider him” (verse 3). The word the NIV translates as “consider” is a Greek compound, comprised of a root meaning “to reason” and a prefix meaning either “up” or “again.” We say, “Lighten up,” or “Toughen up!” or “Man up!” Our author says, “Reason up!”

If we are going to get through hardship well, we are going to need to think about what to do and we will learn that by watching Jesus. He’s the master. We reason up; that is, from a higher point of view, from Jesus’s.

I mentioned that prefix can also mean “again.” If it has that sense here, then the idea is for us to go back to Jesus’s life again and again, repeatedly thinking about what he did. We think through our response to hardship in the light of Jesus’s response to it. If we don’t know how Jesus responded to being misunderstood, misjudged, demeaned, and rejected, we need to find out. It is right there in our New Testaments.

Third thing to do (this is huge): Make up your mind in advance that you will not give up but that you will endure hardship as training. Verse 1 has already spoken about perseverance (“…let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us”) and verse 7 tells us to “Endure hardship as discipline.”

Get something out of the hardship you are going through; don’t let it be for nothing. Determine not to waste it. God won’t; you mustn’t either. Use it as discipline. You are going to endure it anyway; why not turn it to your advantage?

What areas in your life need to be trained and strengthened? Perhaps your “patience muscle” is weak. You are always reacting. Or perhaps your understanding and appreciation for others is so feeble as to be missing. Perhaps you need to develop courage, compassion, or faith. Those things can be strengthened, just like your biceps, triceps, and abs. Perhaps you want to be able to forgive someone, but the spiritual muscles needed are incapable of the heavy lifting forgiveness requires.

Hardship is the gym where those spiritual muscles are developed. Since you are going to the gym anyway, why not ask God for help? He’s the Ultimate Trainer. He can help you use your current hardship as strength training so that you will be able to do things in the future that are now beyond your ability.

(By the way, the Greek word from which we get our word “gym” or “gymnasium” appears in this text. It is in verse 11, and the NIV translates it as “have been trained.” Everyone goes to the gym – experiences hardship – whether they want to or not. Why not get some good out of it?)

So, the third thing to do is to turn hardship into a gym for training yourself in Christlikeness. The Jesus-follower is not a Marvel Superhero, who is born awesome or is suddenly transformed into a powerhouse. We were not born again awesome or with superpowers already developed. We need to train. Training, as Craig Gross put it, “is boring. But …training is everything.”[1] Use hardship for training.

The fourth thing to do is: “make level paths for your feet” (12:13). I ran across a paraphrase of verses 12 and 13 that might help us wrap our minds around this: “So, look: now is the time to get tough. Straighten up! Have a workable plan and stick to it. Otherwise, when you get tired, you’ll stumble off the path, dislocate something, and need to be healed.”

“Make level paths for your feet” is a quotation from Proverbs 4. Our paraphrase puts it: “Have a workable plan and stick to it.” Don’t make following Jesus harder than it needs to be. Too many people do. They don’t make level paths. They don’t have a workable plan. Quite frankly, they don’t have any plan.

They only read the Bible when the urge hits them, which is not very often. They only pray when they need something. They have no definite plan for joining the church to worship on Sundays. If they got to bed early enough, and the kids are behaving, and the lawn is mowed, and their favorite speaker is in the pulpit, they might go. They have no plan for serving God – haven’t even thought about how their gifts fit into the work of the church.

These folks have not made level paths for themselves. When they hit the steep, rocky places in life (as they certainly will), they will lose their balance, get knocked off their feet, and end up disjointed. That is the meaning of the word translated “disabled” in verse 13 and it is a very painful condition. That’s what happens when we do not make plans for following Jesus.

One more thing we can do when things get tough, then will look at the things we must not do. The fifth thing to do in hardship is to get along with others. This is verse 14: “Make every effort” – literally, “pursue” or “hound” – “peace with all men…” When we’re going through some painful trial, particularly a prolonged, never-seeming-to-end trial, we can start taking out our frustration and hurt on others and not even realize it. Prolonged trial is a tinderbox and it only takes one spark to cause relationships to go up in smoke. During times of hardship especially, peacemaking must be a priority.

If we do these five things, we are much more likely to endure hardship well. But there are also five things we must not do. The first comes from verse 5: We must not forget God and what he has said. The Hebrews, our author asserts, “have forgotten that word of encouragement that addresses [them] as sons.”

When hardship has stressed us out, we are more likely to forget what we ought to remember and to remember what we ought to forget. We remember our rights but forget our responsibilities. We remember other people’s sins but forget our own. Worst of all, we forget about God. The Bible is stuffed full of appeals for us to remember God and warnings about what will happen if we don’t.

Think back to the last time you were in a really hard place (unrelenting temptation, relational upheaval, physical illness, or emotional distress). How long did it take you to remember God and his word? The better we get at going through hardship, the more quickly we remember God. Or you could say, the more quickly we remember God, the better we get at going through hardship.

The Greek word translated “forgotten” in verse 5 is used only here in the entire Bible. The lexicon defines it as “to forget completely” or “to not remember at all.” The recipients of this letter had known – probably memorized – this word of encouragement. But the stress of the in-your-face trial they were going through had driven it from the minds. That is a precarious place to be in. We must not forget what God has said to us.

A second thing we must not do (in that same word of encouragement from Proverbs) is to “make light of the Lord’s discipline” (Hebrews 12:5). Now what does that mean? How do people make light of the Lord’s discipline?

We make light of the Lord’s discipline when we ignore our conscience. After a shocking fall from grace, a prominent national figure admitted: “God sent me 1,000 hints that he didn’t want me to keep doing what I was doing. But I didn’t listen…”[2] That’s making light of the Lord’s discipline.

We also make light of the Lord’s training when we blame others for our troubles. If, instead of saying to our Trainer, “Help me use this pain to share in Christ’s sufferings and in the power of his resurrection,” we say, “It’s not my fault. It’s his fault. It’s not fair,” we will miss the opportunity to train. We will make light of the Lord’s discipline.

Another way we do that is by sidestepping the Lord’s discipline theologically. This is what happens when we excuse sin by saying: “Salvation is by grace, not works. It’s not what I do, it what Christ did, that matters!” Of course! But if we are using the doctrine of grace as an excuse to continue sinning we are committing the worst kind of heresy. St. Paul himself bristled at the suggestion. It is theological malpractice to use the justification Christ won for us by his perfect obedience to justify our ongoing disobedience.

One more way we make light of the Lord’s discipline. In this case, we don’t ignore it. We acknowledge God in the trial and promise to obey him. But when the difficulty is resolved, our promise is dissolved, and we go right back to thinking and acting in the same old ways.

We must not make light of the Lord’s discipline. That is the second thing not to do. The third thing (also in verse 5) is, in some respects, the opposite of making light of the Lord’s discipline. We must not lose heart at his rebuke. Remember what we learned last week. To lose heart is to come apart at the seams. We must not fall apart when God reveals sin in our lives or calls us to change. Some people do just that. They tell themselves, “I can do it. I’m no good at this. I’m such a failure. It’s just impossible.”

Jesus’s people must avoid both errors. We mustn’t fall apart, as if God despises us (he does not). Nor must we belittle his discipline, as though we despise him (we dare not). Instead, we need to remind ourselves that God disciplines those he loves because he loves them and wants them to be glorious.

A fourth thing we must not do (verse 15) is miss the grace of God. In Christ there is grace for every insult, misunderstanding, and difference of opinion; for every illness, financial setback, and loss. We mustn’t miss that grace for ourselves and we must help others obtain it for themselves.

There is a promise implicit in this instruction – a promise that God’s grace will be there when we need it. Has someone taken advantage of you? God is offering you his grace to deal with it. Has someone insulted, ignored, or manipulated you? You can handle it with the grace God is offering right now. Is uncertainty stressing you out? God’s grace is sufficient, and it is yours to receive.

The danger here is that we will so focus on the injustice done that we will miss the grace extended. We take offence because we’ve been slighted, then turn around and slight God who is offering us his grace! If we ignore that offer, there will be a price to pay; there will be hell to pay. A bitter root, planted and fertilized in the soil of hell, will grow up and it will “cause trouble and defile many.”

The “trouble” of verse 15 is the opposite of the peace of verse 14. If we miss the grace of God, trouble will roll through our families and churches and defile many. That is the opposite of the holiness of verse 10. People will be polluted – that’s what that word means. Entire families can become toxic. If heaven had a Toxic Substances and Disease Registry like the U.S. government does, some families and even churches would be on it. It is our responsibility not to miss the grace of God. If we do, people will be contaminated and bitterness will become epidemic.

The fifth and final thing we must not (verse 16) do: we must not be godless. This might need some clarification. A godless person can be friendly, fun, witty, even cultured. We can enjoy thoroughly enjoy his company. But, like Esau, he will make choices without regard for God or for spiritual consequences. God is simply absent from his mind. That pretty much describes how our society operates.

But remember! “Godless” does not mean “worthless.” Godless people are not God-forsaken people. He loves and values them and we can too, but we dare not imitate them.

I have met – this may sound like an oxymoron – more than a few godless Christians. Though they would never admit it, they have taken on the mindset of the culture around them, which operates on the assumption that God is alright, as long as he does not get in the way of some pleasure or pursuit. Our attitude should be precisely the opposite: this pleasure or pursuit is alright, as long as it does not get in the way of my love for God and my obedience to him.

We’ve been talking about what needs to be done and what, most assuredly, needs not to be done, but I want to close with what we will be like if we follow these biblical instructions. When hardship comes, we will hurt like everyone else, but we will heal and bring healing like Jesus. That is because we have used the hardship to enter the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings, been made conformable to his death, and have experienced the power of his resurrection.

You might not recognize the name Brian Doerkson but you’ve likely sung his worship songs. Brian is a well-known songwriter and worship leader. We’ve sung his songs at Lockwood. When he and his wife learned that their son would be physically, intellectually, and emotionally stunted by a genetic disorder, the news hit them like a truck. They nearly lost heart.

Brian said to God, “I quit.” He didn’t think he could go on leading people in worship. But when his soul got quiet enough to hear God, he heard God say to him: “Will you trust me? Will you go even with your broken heart?”

Because Brian said yes, he learned that people are not helped by our triumphs nearly as much as they are by our tragedies – when we use those tragedies to enter into the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings, are made like him in his death, and experience his resurrection power in our lives.

Brian learned that “People are just longing to hear [others] speak of how they have walked through the deepest valleys.” Through people like Brian – people like us, if we will endure hardship well – God heals the world in small ways just as, through his suffering Son, he will heal the world completely.

[1] Craig Gross, Go Small (Thomas Nelson, 2014), pp. 6-9

[2] Jack Abramoff in Time Magazine, “Notebook,” (2-6-06)

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AKA Jane Roe: The Norma McCorvey Story

Posted on May 23, 2020 by salooper57

FX Networks (a Walt Disney Company) is about to release the documentary AKA Jane Roe, the story of Norma McCorvey, the woman whose challenge of Texas law led to the 1973 U.S. Court ruling that struck down many state and federal abortion laws.

Ms. McCorvey was 21, unmarried, and pregnant for the third time when she was referred to lawyers Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, who were looking for a way to challenge and overturn Texas’s abortion laws. That was in 1969. Long before the case reached the Supreme Court, McCorvey’s baby had been born and given up for adoption.

In the mid-1990s, McCorvey made a very public conversion to Christianity, was baptized in a nationally televised event, left her job at an abortion clinic, and became a very public anti-abortion advocate. She published a book in 1998, recounting her conversion, and continued protesting abortion for more than two decades.

A few months before her death, however, she made another highly publicized, filmed for television “deathbed confession,” as she called it, saying that her anti-abortion advocacy was all an act. She said she was paid handsomely (FX puts is around $500,000) to say the things she had said and claimed it made no difference to her whether “a young woman wants to have an abortion.”

Ms. McCorvey went on to say proudly that she was “a good actress,” then added, “Of course, I am not acting now.” But who knows? She had played the actress so frequently in her life, it is possible she could no longer tell whether she was acting or not.

Before being referred to the lawyers who took her case to the Supreme Court, McCorvey tried to get a legal abortion by claiming she had been gang raped by a group of black men. The investigation, however, was dropped for lack of evidence, and McCorvey later admitted it was all an act.

It would be easy to attack Ms. McCorvey’s character, but that would be a mistake. She was a person, created and loved by God, who had been subjected to abuse and manipulation throughout her life. Her mother was an alcoholic, reputed to be violent. Her father abandoned the family. She was made a ward of the state at age 11 and was repeatedly institutionalized.

McCorvey was misused again and again. Her mother tricked her into giving up her daughter for adoption. Her attorneys took her case because they saw her as a tool for overturning abortion laws. The evangelical Christians she met in the mid-nineties saw her as a tool for reversing Roe v. Wade. Did the executives at Disney see her as a tool for bolstering ratings?

Mercenary TV executives and lawyers are so common as to be cliché. It is the religious people in this story who sadden and repulse me. Somehow, they thought it was morally acceptable to manipulate a woman who had been manipulated her entire life. They thought they could somehow exploit a human being in the name of Jesus.

What they did was outrageous. It was sinful. The Reverend Rob Schenck, who has himself made a very public about-face on abortion, was one of those involved. He now says: “I knew what we were doing … and I wondered: ‘Is she playing us?’ What I didn’t have the guts to say was: ‘Because I know … we’re playing her.’”

I oppose abortion and expect that future Americans (including the irreligious) will too. They will look on this period in our history with bewilderment and think it barbaric: the bad old days of racial hatred, wars, and millions upon millions of elective abortions.

Abortion stains our history. Nevertheless, if it took but a single lie or act of exploitation to end abortion, it would be wrong to do so. Jesus himself would not do it. Abortion will never be legislated out of existence, though legislation is needed. It will never be shamed out of existence – that has already been tried. It will only be loved out of existence and that is the work of the church.

I wonder: What would Norman McCorvey’s life have been like had she been loved at age 11 rather than institutionalized? No one knows but, perhaps, things would have been different.

First published by Gatehouse Media

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How to Get Through Tough Times: 5 Things You Need to Know

Posted on May 20, 2020 by salooper57

Read below or watch at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xdXhPaQSFk. (Sermon begins at 24:42.)

A farmer once told me he doesn’t like to get much rain in the weeks after planting because the corn won’t need to send its roots deep to get nourishment. If there is enough moisture near the surface, the plants will root near the surface. Later, when the hot days of July and August dry out the ground, there won’t be enough moisture for the plants to flourish, and yield will be down.

People are like that. It may seem counter-intuitive, but no one flourishes without a fight. That is true both of families and individuals. Flourishing doesn’t happen in the absence of sustained effort; it happens because of it – if people go through it well.

Individuals and families that don’t endure difficulty in healthy ways don’t flourish. They may look impressive on the outside, like a nine-foot cornstalk but, like that cornstalk, they will bring little good into God’s world.

Parents want their kids’ lives to flourish but they also want their kids’ lives to be easy; want success to be right at the surface. They want their kids to have sports’ triumphs, academic honors, and scores of friends. But if life is always easy, those kids won’t root deeply and they won’t flourish.

But when is life easy – either for adults or for kids? Financial uncertainty, sickness, loneliness – sounds like Covid-19, doesn’t it? But there needn’t be a pandemic to experience hardship. Long ago, the author of Hebrews wrote a brilliant letter to help people who were going through a tough time. They were harassed and mocked, refused jobs—and some even lost their homes and were incarcerated.

Our situation is different, but our need is the same. Life was hard for them. It is hard for us. They were tired. We are tired. Some of them were ready to give up. Perhaps some of us are ready to give up.

The Book of Hebrews urges readers not to give up, explains why giving up would be a mistake, and tells people what they can do to avoid giving up. The letter comes to its climax in chapter 12, which we will look at today and again next week. Today we will discover five things we need to know in difficult times. Next week will look at four things we need to do in difficult times and three things we need at all costs not to do.

Let’s read a part of our text, Hebrews 12:4-11: In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And you have forgotten that word of encouragement that addresses you as sons: “My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son.” Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live! Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.

I started reading at verse 4 but in verse 3 the author sets the stage by naming the very real danger his readers faced, which we also face: the danger that we might “grow weary and lose heart.” A literal translation of that Greek phrase goes: “lest you weary your souls and come loose.”

How often we have heard about some pastor or Christian leader who has been caught up in scandal. Many of these people are, to all appearances, genuine followers of Jesus who have been a real blessing to the church and the world. So, what happened? How did they get caught up in sexual sins, or gambling addictions, or episodes of rage?

I’m sure there are many reasons but one, I think, is that they were soul-weary and lacked the strength to resist temptation. The word translated “weary” here is frequently used of someone who is ill. It is the same word St. James used when he wrote: “Is any sick (that’s it) among you? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him…” (James 5:13). Whenever we are going through prolonged difficulty, we are at risk of contracting soul-sickness.

The Greek word the NIV translates as “lose heart” means something like, “come loose” or “come untied.” It pictures a person who is coming apart at the seams. What keeps the seams from unraveling is a person’s soul. The soul integrates thoughts, feelings, will, and body into one whole person. But if the soul gets sick, that integration begins to fail. The body won’t be able to carry out the heart’s decisions and the heart’s decisions will be made over the mind’s objections. When the mind and heart and body are out of sync, life falls apart. Soul-sickness is always a possibility, but especially in extended times of difficulty – like right now.

Our author wants his readers to understand the dynamics of prolonged hardship and the dangers that accompany it, so he lays out some things people need to know to successfully navigate hard times. We’ll look at those from Hebrews 12 and add one from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians.

It will help you, whenever you encounter hardship – whether sudden trial or prolonged difficulty – to know the five truths we are about to look at. But knowing them in the abstract will not be enough. You actually need to remember them and think about how they apply. Otherwise, you will be less likely to do the things that help people endure hardship but more likely to do the things that cause people to come apart at the seams.

The first thing you need to know is that trials will come and they will hurt. A lot. Somehow, we have got the idea that hardship is an outlier and pain an aberration while ease is normal and comfort is our right. Some people (like Buddhists and Christian Scientists) teach that suffering is an illusion while others (like the prosperity gospelers) teach that suffering, though real, is shameful and unnecessary.

That is not what Jesus, his apostles, the prophets, or the evangelists taught. St. Peter, for example, wrote: “…do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you.” (1 Peter 4:12). When his friends in Thessalonica were going through distress, St. Paul sent his surrogate Timothy “so that no one would be unsettled by these trials.” Then he added: “You know quite well that we were destined for them.” (1 Thess. 3:3). Among the sure promises of Jesus is one we don’t like: “In this world you will have trouble” (John 16:33). He said similar things time and time again. Suffering is woven into the fabric of a world that is out of sync with its Creator.

The staff at the Bridger Wilderness Area in Wyoming posted some of the comment cards they have received. Here is a sampling: “Trails need to be reconstructed. Please avoid building trails that go uphill.” (Bridger is in the heart of the Teton mountains.) “Too many bugs and spiderwebs. Please spray the wilderness. . .” “Escalators would help on steep uphill sections.” “Too many rocks in the mountains.” “The coyotes made too much noise last night … Please eradicate these animals.” And finally, “A MacDonald’s would be nice at the trailhead.” Those people don’t seem to understand what a wilderness is. Bugs, rocks, coyotes, and steep climbs come with the territory. The author of Hebrews is telling us that suffering comes with the territory, and people are not exempt, just because they follow Jesus Christ.

Trials will come and they will hurt. A lot. In Hebrews 12:4, the author writes: “In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.” They hadn’t but they might, and many people do (as the previous chapter made abundantly clear). In verse 2 of this chapter, we are reminded that even the author and perfecter of the faith himself, the Man of Sorrows, endured suffering and shame.

It would be a mistake to think that pain was unavoidable in the past but we’ve moved beyond that now. In our day, people around the world are enduring hardship just like they did when this letter was written. Last December the British Foreign Secretary reported that in parts of the world, the persecution of Christians is at near “genocide” (his word) levels.[1] No one said this was a picnic.

Life is hard and it always has been. Isaac Watts, the Chris Tomlin of his day, a guy who wrote something like 750 hymns, was born into a time of political turmoil. England had just come through civil war and was about to go through a second revolution and begin two generations of a divided kingdom. There were flagrant injustices. Watts himself was not permitted to attend England’s top tier universities simply because he wasn’t an Anglican.

In 1721, a year of instability and intrigues, Watts wrote this hymn: “Am I a soldier of the cross, a follower of the Lamb, and shall I fear to own His cause, or blush to speak His name? Must I be carried to the skies on flow’ry beds of ease, while others fought to win the prize, and sailed through bloody seas?”

Isaac Watts knew better. So did the author of Hebrews. He wrote in verse 8: “Everyone undergoes discipline.” Not some people: everyone. No one is exempted.

The first thing to know and to remember in hardship is that trials will come and they will hurt. A lot.

The second thing to know is that we can choose how we will go through hardship. (This is from verse 7.) We’ll go into this in more detail next week, when we look at what to do and what not to do in hardship, but for now it is enough to know we have a choice in the matter. We have no choice about whether we will endure hardship but we do have a choice about how we will endure it—a choice that makes a real difference.

Next thing we need to know: God knows. He knows the course marked out for us (that was verse 1). He knows where the obstacles are and he knows how to get through them.

God not only knows the course marked out for us (what lies before us), he knows us (what lies within us). He knows what we can handle and what we cannot and he will not allow us to undergo trials that are too much for us.

Over the last few years, our church has seen a number of young people join the Marine Corps. When they got to Parris Island, they met their Drill Instructor, who is called that because he drills recruits on proper social etiquette, how to enunciate clearly, how to fold a napkin properly, how to extend the pinky finger when drinking tea.

No, that’s not what they found. The D.I. was merciless. The drills unbearable. They and their fellow-recruits were pushed to their limits. Why? Because those Drill Instructors had come home from Iraq and Afghanistan and they knew it might take everything these young men and women had – and more – to survive and keep their fellow Marine alive. They knew what their recruits could handle even before the recruits themselves knew it.

God knows what’s coming, knows what you can handle and, as St. Paul put it in 1 Corinthians, he “is faithful; he will not let you be tempted” (or tried) “beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it” (1 Cor. 10:13). If we don’t know this, we will not trust God when hardship comes, and trust is the only vaccine that can immunize against the soul-sickness that causes people to come apart at the seams. Hardship will not make you fall apart unless there is a comorbidity; that is, unless you are soul-sick. Trust in God is the only antidote.

Another truth we need to know: Our Father God allows suffering because it performs an important function for which there exists no easier means. Suffering is a road no one wants to take, but it leads to a place no other road can go: to holiness. That is verse 10: “God disciplines us … that we may share in his holiness.”

If you say, “I don’t care about holiness—I’m no monk or priest. I just want to be happy,” then you don’t understand holiness. Holiness is the state where joy and peace are located. Holiness is like clean air after smog, like light after dark. God wants us to share in his holiness; in fact, he insists on it, in part, because our happiness depends on it. “Without holiness,” verse 14, “no one will see the Lord.” Holiness is the state of healthiness and flourishing.

Holiness is so important that God will use insecurity, grief, and pain to produce it in us. It’s not that he inflicts such things on us – he’s not like that. But, when such things come, he will not hesitate to use them for our great and lasting good. The real question is whether we will use them for our good.

A fifth thing, which is itself a summary of all the others, is found in verse 10: “Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God” – our Father in heaven – “disciplines us for our good.” Included among the goods produced by God’s discipline are the priceless treasures of verse 11: a harvest of righteousness (that is, right relationships with God and people) and the blessing of peace.

Now, a word about that word “discipline.” In the home in which I grew up, discipline meant one thing: the belt. I got “disciplined” when I did something selfish or malicious or willfully disobedient. “Discipline” was to be avoided by any means – including hiding, evading, and lying.

The word translated “discipline” in verse 10 and elsewhere in this passage doesn’t mean that. It means training, not whipping. This is the word that would be used of training a child to tie his shoes or a young man to tie a tie. It is a word that would fit spring training in baseball, or a training regimen in the gym. Training always has a purpose. People who undergo it and make use of it can do more after being trained than they could before. Training can help us achieve when trying – even earnest, strenuous trying – fails.

Listen and do not forget: our good is never out of God’s mind. Never. But we will think it is when we go through hard times, if we think our good is our ease or the preservation of our routine, or our so-called possessions.

We are like a tourist at Bridger Wilderness Area for whom a cell signal is the only good he cares about because he wants to play Fortnite with his friends. He misses the awe-inspiring Grand Tetons, the turquoise lakes, the singing of the mountain streams, the moose, and the grizzly. He thinks his good depends entirely on a connection to a cellular network.

We’re not so different. We think our good depends entirely on keeping a connection to our money, our health, or our reputation. We so lack imagination. The good we can envision, to which we cling like a selfish child, is a trinket compared to the awful good, the glorious good, the thrilling good God has planned for us.

The promises of the Bible regarding us are breathtaking. The earth we live in will be transformed; a metamorphosis; an eco-resurrection. No more decay, no more death, no more Second Law of Thermodynamics. The most out-there science fiction plot you’ve ever read doesn’t even come close to the biblical promises.

We will be changed. Fear will be gone. Can you imagine – no fear? Joy will be full and overflowing. We will be immortals – glorious, shining like the sun in the kingdom of our Father. The Genesis 1 work of subduing and ruling the earth, which we have bungled so completely, was, I expect, just a training exercise for subduing and ruling the universe … in love.

I appreciate Dallas Willard’s shorthand for what awaits us: we will belong – what a beautiful word – we will belong to (here’s Willard) “A community of unspeakably magnificent personal beings of boundless love, knowledge and power.” That is, we will share in the joyful life of the Trinity itself.

Two notes. One: this is only possible because of the love of God and the sacrifice of Christ. We didn’t make this happen and we cannot earn it. It is all grace. And two: we must not give in or give up on so great a future because of current hardships, whatever they are. How to avoid giving in is the subject of next week’s message from Hebrews 12.

[1] Reported by the BBC, 5/3/2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-48146305

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