The One King

I regret my lack of energy in regard to posting this week. By way of explanation, rather than excuse, I have been preparing to travel to Michigan this week, as well as signing a new contract with Virginia Beach City Public Schools.

I still want to honor the Lord with the creativity He's blessed me with, though. I've been experimenting with digital painting lately, so in lieu of a proper post this week, I'm posting a line drawing I've done that will be the basis for a work in the Lord's honor. Look for an updated version soon, Lord willing!

Senseless and Ignorant

“Your leechcraft ere long would have had me walking on all fours like a beast.” Théoden King of Rohan to Gríma Wormtongue in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien.

In Psalm 73, the psalmist considers the prosperity of the wicked. However, as God’s people we, like the psalmist, need not envy them, for they will enjoy the prosperity of this life only for a short time. They have no hope in eternal life for they have treasured the things of the world and not considered Christ.

And yet, even as believers, we often fail to consider Christ. Verses 22-24 of Psalm 73 speak to me particularly well in this regard: “22Then I was senseless and ignorant; I was like a beast before You. 23Nevertheless I am continually with You; You have taken hold of my right hand. 24With Your counsel You will guide me, And afterward receive me to glory.” Verse 22 echoes my feelings when I have sinned: I feel like “a beast,” without the ability to reason. I have acted as if Jesus had not taught me the things He has, like my own good sense to follow what has proven to be true and good has just fallen away somewhere. I feel like I deserve to be led like a beast- on a leash.

But the psalmist helps us understand that Jesus does not treat us the way we might think we should be treated. He takes us by the hand, as verse 23 reveals, and counsels us. He does not restrain us or control us; He treats us with love and mercy. He is not distant from us; we are close enough to touch Him. He takes our hand to guide us and receives us in the same gentle, loving manner, as verse 24 states. Though we might feel like beasts, unworthy of anything but restraining, in truth, Jesus deals with us in a way that frees us like our wickedness can never do.

When I am broken hearted because I have been “senseless and ignorant,” when I feel like a beast, it is Jesus that reminds me that I am still valuable to Him by treating me with care and good counsel. It is then that I consider Christ; I consider Him my treasure, worth more than the entire world and everything in it; I consider Him my salvation, freeing me from bondage from which it is impossible for me to free myself. There is nothing to envy in the way of the wicked and the prosperity they enjoy in this life; they are slaves to sin. Our treasure, our freedom and our hope is Jesus, who will be our reward in eternity.

Carefully and Prayerfully

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything new. The main reason for this is that I have been taking an online class called Teaching Critical Thinking Skills in the Classroom. Most of my reading and writing has been dedicated to that class these past three weeks.

As the class concludes, I find myself reflecting on something I read in an article that I used for one of the paper’s I was assigned to write. The article defined critical thinking as “the ability to analyze and evaluate information.” The article claimed that, among other things, the skills related to critical thinking could aid in dealing with spiritual questions. That statement bothered me at first because I thought faith was much more appropriate for dealing with spiritual questions than critical thinking.

But Christian faith is not blind faith. God has blessed us with the Bible so that we may be informed about who Jesus is. And He continued by questioning them, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter answered and said to Him, "You are the Christ." (Mark 8:29) We do not accept Christ simply for who others say He is. We accept Him because, like the disciples, we have experienced who He is. We have read the accounts of His life, death and resurrection. We persist in communication with Him through prayer. We meditate upon His word. We are extremely well-informed about who our Savior is. I think that is part of the reason why many Christians read through the Bible on a 365-day reading schedule, year after year. There’s just too much information to “analyze and evaluate” in just a few sittings or a few sermons or a few Bible studies.

I suspect many people think that critical thinking and faith are mutually exclusive. That’s why the article’s statement bothered me so much at first. I thought the author might be trying to say that digging into spiritual questions deeply enough would reveal that they are merely the failure to consider things logically and realistically. But perhaps it was me who was being short-sighted. Digging deeper and deeper into God’s Word, exposing it to analysis and evaluation, only reveals more and more truth. God has blessed us with much information about our Savior and the ability to carefully and prayerfully consider all of it. The more carefully we consider it the closer we feel to Him and I think that is His purpose.

Genealogies

The long genealogies in the Bible are often belittled because of the seemingly endless lists of ancient, difficult to pronounce names, often separated only by one or two other words. One of these words is begat in the King James Version. The term begat can mean “was the father of,” but it can also be translated as “was the ancestor of,” the difference being that one’s father directly passes his characteristics and ideas to his children whereas an ancestor passes the same things on indirectly. Thus, when the Bible presents us with these long genealogies, it is presenting us with not just a list of who fathered whom, but an account of the type of family the people in question came from. We are given a glimpse into the way God has worked through a person’s family history.

In the case of the genealogy of Jesus, recorded for us in Matthew 1:1-17, we are witness to his ancestry for at least three different reasons. First, it proves beyond any doubt that Jesus is descended from Abraham and from David, of whom God promised to make a great nation. Secondly, it shows that Jesus was pleased to become one of us, being born of sinful man in order to do God’s work of redemption on earth. Lastly, it reveals to us how God has worked and, perhaps more importantly, through whom God has worked in order to save mankind.

Not all of the people in Jesus ancestry through whom God worked were “heroes of faith,” as my Life Application Study Bible puts it. There were plenty of heroes, but there were also plenty of individuals of questionable nature as well as many individuals of a very ordinary nature. The message we should receive from this list of individuals who begat our precious Lord Jesus—indeed which we should get from every genealogical list in the Bible—is that God works through all kinds of people to bring about His purpose of salvation. He will use anyone, regardless of their spiritual condition, to work His good work. He wants to use us, too, regardless of the fame or infamy of our ancestors, regardless of the united or broken families we come from, regardless of the pride or shame of our own actions and how they reflect on our ancestors and how they affect those that will come after us. He has chosen to save us and there is no reason for us not to receive Jesus Christ, descended from Heaven, born of sinful man, obedient to the point of death, resurrected and ascended into Heaven, seated at the right hand of the Father, as our savior.

The Way Our Prayers Should Sound

My daughter has learned the Lord’s Prayer well enough that sometimes I allow her to lead when we say our prayers before bed. Usually when we pray, I say a line of prayer and have her repeat what I say, but when she leads the Lord’s Prayer, our roles are reversed. The other night, when she stumbled over the words “…and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us…” I repeated the words as they should have sounded, but did not call attention to her mistake. I suddenly realized that what I had done for her was exactly what Jesus does for us when we pray.

How often do we sit down to pray and don’t know where to begin? How often do we become distracted as intrusive thoughts interrupt our prayers? How often do we wonder if we’re communicating ourselves well enough for God to understand? But we needn’t worry over these things. For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus… (1 Timothy 2:5) Through Christ, all that we are that is not in accordance to God’s will is made perfect and holy. That includes our prayers. When our praises lack polish and elegance, when we forget to be thankful for His faithful providence, when we ask more for ourselves than for those who are truly in need, when our words are jumbled or mumbled, we can rest knowing that through Christ everything we put into our prayers, no matter how imperfect, is glorified.

Great Reassurance

God is more concerned with our spiritual growth than our comfort. To one who loves comfort, this statement from the Sunday School curriculum I taught this year at my church might sound harsh. But it is actually greatly reassuring. It means that even if we are uncomfortable- because of physical or emotional suffering, social situations, etc. - we can rest assured that through our discomfort, God will help us to grow stronger spiritually. In fact, it means that we can be assured that the discomfort we experience is the will of God; we need not wonder if we suffer wrongly or if we are suffering for some transgression or if our suffering will eventually overwhelm us and obliterate us. We can feel confident knowing that the source of our suffering is not us but the holy will of God.

So, can we say that our discomfort is actually a good thing? We are inclined not to while we are experiencing discomfort, but how often do we look back at what we have suffered and realize that it was not so bad? When we know the outcome of our discomfort, what we have experienced doesn’t seem quite as harsh as it did while we were in the midst of it. But we don’t need “20/20 hindsight” to believe that there is a good purpose behind that which we suffer through. Instead, we have God’s promise in Jeremiah 32:40-41:

I will make an everlasting covenant with them, never to draw back from doing good to them; and I will put the fear of me in their hearts, so that they may not turn from me. I will rejoice in doing good to them, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul.

We can say our discomfort is a good thing because we have God’s promise to always do good to us. We do not have to conclude that we suffer needlessly or wrongly if the reasons for our suffering elude us. All we need to understand is that our God does not delight in tearing us down or crushing us beyond repair, but in saving us.

Memorial Day Memories

On our way to celebrate Memorial Day with some friends, my daughter and I found our usual route blocked by a parade. I backed up and took an alternate route, to which my daughter responded, “Daddy, this is not the way!” I told her she needed to trust that we would get there, even though she didn’t know where we were at the time. As soon as we had circumvented the parade and returned to our regular route, she delightedly proclaimed, “You were right, this is the way.”

I was reminded of riding in the car with my dad when I was a boy. It was a little scary to me to look out the car windows and realize that I did not know where we were. But I trusted that my dad knew where he was going and I was always relieved and delighted when I finally recognized our surroundings.

Jesus instructs us to have childlike faith and I think I was blessed to have been spoken to by the Holy Spirit that day in the car with my daughter. God has many purposes for us and we don’t always know where He is leading us or what those purposes are, but we are assured that His purposes are good. Even when the route is strange, we can trust that He has a good destination in mind for us. Great is our delight when we finally reach that destination and great is the glory God receives for leading us there.