be holy: make a fist, and fight

The Word for today:
Psalm 95, 96

mark this: Psalm 95:7-9 --
Give to the Lord, O families of the peoples, Give to the Lord glory and strength.
Give to the Lord the glory due His name; Bring an offering, and come into His courts.
Oh, worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness!

I inherited my suspicion of doctors and hospitals from my mother. When she retired, she was head nurse at Lockport (N.Y.) Memorial Hospital. She knew the good, the bad, and the indifferent. She inculcated our family with a healthy skepticism towards medical institutions.

I also inherited her high blood pressure.

I know that because she warned us to watch for it. So when I worked as a teacher, every year I'd ask the school nurse to take a reading. Later on, when I worked as a social worker, I'd go to the public health nurse and get my once-a-year blood pressure check.

Those yearly moments were the only "doctor's appointments" I made for nearly thirty years. Over that time I watched my blood pressure slowly rise into the danger zone.

Shelley, who runs the universe whenever Jesus is on vacation, put her foot down the other day and told me that I'm going to the doctor and I'm going to take medicine if the doctor says so.

All of this talk of checkups got me wondering why we don't get a spiritual checkup every year like many of us get (or should get!) a medical checkup.

When was the last time you had a spiritual checkup? What would such a checkup even look like?

There's a word in the Bible which is an overall measure of spiritual health. The word is "holy."

It is the Bible's most all-encompassing description of God's nature. God is not only holy, he is "Holy, holy, holy" (1)--which is exponential holiness, raised to the nth power.

But God doesn't reserve the word for just himself. Listen to this: "Be holy, because I am holy." (2)

What does that mean?

First, here's what it does not mean: the cartoon image of the man atop a mountain thinking deep thoughts is about as far from the biblical definition of holy as one can get. Because the word 'holy' is a call to action. It implies that something or someone is set apart to serve. The man on the mountain is just apart. He isn't serving. And he wasn't even set there. God doesn't set anybody on a mountain to serve.

"Be holy, because I am holy" can sound intimidating, unattainable. But God doesn't set the unattainable before us. Here's the same command, expressed in terms we can grasp:
Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children. (3)

And here's a picture of the one we're trying to imitate:
Let us lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. (4)

Holiness, the all-encompassing word for the nature and character of God, is meant to be an all-encompassing word for us as well. It's meant to be an indicator of our overall spiritual condition.

What spiritual shape are you in to run the race, to join the battle set before you? That is how holy you are.

Let's go back to the man on the mountain. He probably prays. (What else is there to do up there all day?) He probably is strong in scripture study, at least in an academic sense. But he's not in the race. He's not using the gifts God gave to serve and strengthen others. He might love God up there, but he isn't loving his neighbor as himself. (Primarily due to the fact that he has no neighbors!)

He is in poor spiritual shape. He's nowhere close to holy.

***

Every now and than, I urge the Bible classes I teach to utilize a device--a handy holiness barometer--which can help us make an effective spiritual checkup. This device, if you were to hold up your hand, is right in front of your face!

So open your best hand, palm up:

• If you are in a whole-Bible study program (like Stand in the Rain) then curl your index finger toward your open palm.
• If you take time each day to pray, curl your next finger toward your palm.
• If you serve other people, using the gift God gave you (teaching, compassion, music, administration, helpfulness, you name it...) then curl your third finger inward.
• If you give to the local church your cold hard ca$h--to some sacrificial degree--then curl your little finger inward.
• And if you love the LORD your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; and your neighbor as yourself (5); then bring your thumb down over your clenched fingers. (Notice that this one covers all the others, just as Jesus said it does.)

If you can clench each finger and cover them with your thumb, you are in good spiritual shape. Now you are ready to fight, to race, to endure, to win.

Holiness is about the daily disciplines of spiritual training. It is more about dirt, sweat, and deprivation than it is about thinking fond thoughts in the rarefied air.

Holiness is about joining the battle, and fighting to win. Even when--especially when--the victory is achieved at great cost.

So go, be holy:  make a fist, and fight.

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(1) Isaiah 6:3; Revelation 4:8; (2) Leviticus 11:45; 1 Peter 1:16; (3) Ephesians 5:1 (4) Hebrews 12:1-2; (5) Matthew 22:36-40

If not for you ____________________.

The Word for today:
Psalm 94

I'm going to propose a prayer assignment. The assignment will not be handed in or graded, and there's no definite due date. It's completely voluntary. But I hope you take some time and pray this prayer:

If not for you_____________________________________.

If not for you_____________________________________.

If not for you_____________________________________.

The blank parts are where you fill in some particulars. And please, don't get all pious and prettified when you pray this prayer.

Here, I'll go first. Often, sitting in church on a Sunday morning, at precisely 11:45 I'll think this prayer:

"If not for you I'd be sitting in Mr. Ed's right now and by 2:00 I'd be drunk."

Enter the unadorned world of my prayers. They tend not to be real flowery, as you can see. I used to run on Sunday mornings--every Sunday morning at 11:00. Then, at about 11:45, I'd go into a bar called Mr. Ed's with my running friends and get drunk. I've now been going to church every Sunday for 10 years, and it will take me ten more years before the number of Sundays in the church pew equals the number of Sundays on the bar stool. There are other parts of that prayer I'll not delve into right now. Suffice it to say that God has heard me fill in a longer blank about those Sundays than the one I filled in above.

Now if you want to get more properly prayer-like (in the eyes of man, that is) here's an example of a prayer I've been praying lately. I pray this prayer because I'm 57 now and I'm looking back at my Dad's life when he was 57. Comparing and contrasting my life with his at the very same age, I see the tangible qualitative difference that a moment-by-moment relationship with Jesus Christ has caused. So here's the prayer I find myself praying:

"If not for you I'd be living a life of quiet desperation."

***

I'm going to quote some Psalm 94 to help get you started, and then I'm going to slip out the back of your monitor so you can begin our prayer assignment.

Here's some if-not-for-you's from Psalm 94:

If the LORD had not been my help, my soul would soon have lived in the land of silence.

When I thought, "My foot slips," your steadfast love, O LORD, held me up.

When the cares of my heart are many, your consolations cheer my soul. (v. 17-19)

Now it's your turn. Go ahead, tell him the difference he's made. And when you do, don't pretty up your past too much.  God might start to wonder just who it is that he's hearing from.

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"To infinity and beyond!"

The Word for today:
Psalm 92, 93

mark this: Psalm 93:2
Your throne is established from of old; you are from everlasting.

What is time?

Time is too big a concept for us to get hold of. The only way for me to begin to understand something that big is to shrink it.

The only way to shrink time is to contrast it to something bigger. The only thing bigger is God.

God is bigger than time. He is not constrained by time. He created time and he exists outside of time. Because he contains time, he knows the future and is able to reveal it in prophecy.

God utilizes time. It's like a chemical catalyst which brings on a desired effect. This is not hard to understand when we think of time's effects on our own actions. When a deadline looms, we get things in gear. If this blog did not have to be on your monitor tomorrow, I would not be writing it today.

Jesus told us to shrink time into manageable pieces: "Take no thought for tomorrow, for tomorrow will take thought for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." (1)

So lately I've made an uneasy peace with time. I now count it as just one of the things--just one out of all things--that God utilizes to work out his good intentions for us (2). Seeing it that way, I've come to conclude that time is on my side.

Time has even stretched my mind. I could never understand how God could exist eternally into the past, until I started to think that past and future to God are the same as left and right are to us: if he can live eternally into the future, then why not eternally into the past? I mean, if he can go right he can go left! If he can go up he can go down. From his perspective, there is no essential difference.

Time has helped me understand space. God contains--encompasses--time, so why not space as well? Which means that Jesus is bigger than space! The Bible says so:
Do I not fill heaven and earth? declares the LORD. (Jeremiah 23:24)
Christ...who fills all in all. (Ephesians 1:20-23)
In him all things hold together. (Colossians 1:17)

And since the universe is expanding, he's getting ever bigger!

Ever bigger. That's a phrase where time and space and Jesus coincide. Because Jesus is--in size, in grace, in love, in power--as Buzz Lightyear says, "To infinity and beyond!"

Time and space can be hard to understand. The only way to understand them is to shrink them. The only way to shrink them is to put them next to Jesus. Relative to Jesus, they're not big at all.

You don't have to be Einstein to understand relativity. A true comprehension of time, space, and relativity will revolve, as all things do, around Jesus. Without him, there's no there there and no then then.

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(1) Matthew 6:34; (2) Romans 8:28

saved from the snare

(written by Norm the Elder)

The Word for today:
Psalm 91

mark this: Psalm 91:3
"Surely he will save you from the fowler's snare."

As a young man with a good-sized family, I spent some of my free time trapping wild animals to help supplement our income. I trapped muskrat, mink, fox, and raccoon for their valuable fur.

My strategy for catching these animals was deception. I would entice them with a bait they could not resist. My ruse would lead them into a trap or snare that would cost them their lives. Some of the older and wiser fur bearers would avoid the bait, but many others could not resist the temptation.

In the world in which we live there are many traps and snares set by the devil, his demons, and the world. Make no mistake about it, the purpose of these dangers is to ruin our testimony and destroy our lives. The bait of Satan looks so inviting and is most often placed at our most vulnerable point.

Our scripture today says that God will "surely save us from the fowler's snare." Surely means with certainty, with safety, with security. If we are faithful to God, he has promised to be faithful to us and protect us from the traps and snares that surround our daily lives.

As we study His Word, pray, and walk in His Spirit, our eyes can be open to the dangers and pitfalls around us. We can claim the promise and the victory written in this powerful psalm and avoid the fowler's snare throughout our pilgrimage here on this earth.

Dear Lord,
Through many dangers, toils, and snares I have already come. It was grace that has brought me safe thus far, and your amazing grace that will lead me home. Thank you.

In Jesus' Name I pray.
Amen.

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we will not be high-fiving Jesus

The Word for today:
Psalm 90

mark this:  Psalm 90, ascription  --
A prayer of Moses the man of God.

I don't completely trust contemporary Christianity. I cast a wary eye toward our songs, our TV and radio stations, our seminaries, our denominations, our priorities, and our assumptions. I especially guard myself against some very prevalent views of Jesus.

You see, my relationship with Jesus is my life. And so if I'm in a relationship with a skewed Jesus, then I'm living a skewed life. So I watch, like a hawk, what's being said about Jesus.  If it doesn't match up with the biblical Jesus, I kick the thought out of my head.  I mean I proactively throw it out the door of my head and kick it to the curb.

Whew! I didn't mean to get so contentious today, but I lead with those remarks because I want to take you way back, far away from the prevailing presumptions of the present hour. I want us to chip away all of the accumulated layers of tradition and get down to the real God with whom we are in vital relationship.

The best place to gather a sense of the relationship God intends is in the Psalms. And Psalm 90 is a prime example of relationship with God as it's meant to be:
1. It is the oldest Psalm in the Bible. Thus it goes as far back in time as personal subjective relationships with God have been recorded.
2. It was written by Moses--"the man of God" (see ascription, above) who was unique in all of scripture in that the Lord knew him "face to face" (Deuteronomy 34:10-12).

Read the Psalms as if you are overhearing a conversation. And don't bring just your intellect to the Psalms. Breathe in their atmospherics. Relationships often have more to do with "chemistry" than logic.

In Psalm 90, see God through Moses' eyes--the eyes which saw God "face to face." Characterize his relationship with God. What is Moses' tone of voice? In what ways is his relationship with God like your own? In what ways does it differ?

***

Michelangelo's awesome frescoes, which cover the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, had over the centuries accumulated a grimy film which, art historians knew, muted their originally vibrant colors.

But the steady stream of viewers, passing below in rapt attention during those hundreds of years, had no way to know that they were looking at paintings so darkened by soot and smoke that they were drained of life.

In 1984, restoration of the Sistine ceiling began. The chapel wasn't re-opened to the public until 1994. The differences "before and after" restoration were extreme. Here's Daniel, before and after:

Don't look around the contemporary church and think that this is, necessarily, the way it's supposed to look. Centuries of past practice may have muted the colors.

See God according to scripture. Let your relationship spring solely from that source. Let your soul absorb the relationships with God as set forth in the Psalms. Inhale their atmosphere of reverence, of awe, of trust, and of the fear of the LORD. We will each relate to him individually, but the tone and tenor of our relationships will resemble those set forth in scripture.

We will not be high-fiving Jesus. There will be none of that. Don't take it from me. Take it from Moses, the man of God, who knew him face to face. We will not approach him with an "Attaboy! You did great work up there on the cross!"

Be careful, wary, and on guard concerning your concept of Jesus. Don't take in any one's word about him, except for God's Word. That's where his true colors come shining through.

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get Star-ted

The Word for today:
Nehemiah 13

 

I remember the first Bible I read. It was a plain old KJV (still first in my heart!) without a lot of the notes and charts and lists and maps that come with many of our modern Bibles. There was no concordance, no book summaries. It was pretty much just the Word of God, unfiltered.

But that first Bible had one feature:

That's all there were, a bunch of stars strewn randomly (I at first thought) throughout the pages: one here, one there, another over yonder.

It wasn't too many days before I happened to notice, on the page opposite the Table of Contents, a star symbol, followed by this explanation:

A star immediately following a verse in the Old Testament indicates that in the concurrent opinion of many scholars and theologians, the verse embodies a prophetic reference to Christ.

So that's what the stars mean!

I never really got too far beyond what I learned those first few times through my old Bible.  All of my subsequent teaching and writing has been essentially nothing more than pointing out to students and readers where the Star is on page one, and where the Star is on page two, the Star on page three, on page four...

The Old Testament tells us all about the Star--then waiting in the wings--who would one day take center stage:
"I see Him, but not now; I behold Him, but not near; A Star shall come out of Jacob; A Scepter shall rise out of Israel, And batter the brow of Moab, And destroy all the sons of tumult."  (Numbers 24:17)

The Wise Men followed that Star:
Behold, the star which they had seen in the East went before them, till it came and stood over where the young Child was.  (Matthew 2:9)

The Star keeps on shining all the way to the last page of your Bible:
"I, Jesus, have sent My angel to testify to you these things in the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, the Bright and Morning Star."  (Revelation 22:16)

I love our modern study Bibles with all their graphics and their helpful commentary.  But I wish that the first time through, everyone could read the Bible I had.  Because those stars shone through the clutter and helped me to see that, from star to star, the Bible and the entire universe is about one thing: Jesus. 

***

Where, then, are the stars in today's reading of Nehemiah 13? They're right here:

They had not met the children of Israel with bread and water, but hired Balaam against them to curse them.  However, our God turned the curse into a blessing. (Nehemiah 13:2)

This is a direct prophecy of what God did at the cross of Jesus Christ, who bore the curse of sin for our salvation.

And I was very angry, and I threw all the household furniture of Tobiah out of the temple.  Then I gave orders, and they cleansed the chambers.  (Nehemiah 13:8-9)

This scene is like going to the movies and watching a preview of "Jesus Cleanses the Temple."

Neither Nehemiah or Jesus tolerated the money changers and religious racketeers:

Then the merchants and sellers of all kinds of wares lodged outside Jerusalem once or twice. But I warned them and said to them, "Why do you lodge outside the wall? If you do so again, I will lay hands on you."  (Nehemiah 13:19-21)

On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple area and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves, and would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple courts.  (Mark 11:15-17)

***

The Stars might not be printed in your Bible like they are in mine. But there is nothing stopping you from taking your pencil and, wherever you see Jesus in the Old Testament, drawing one of these in your margin:

Better yet, of course, would be to get a big yellow crayon to mark every Star sighting:

 

 

In fact, it is the official recommendation of the Stand in the Rain Blogger's Association that for real Bible study, there could be nothing finer than a big old Bible and a shiny new yellow crayon!  Get yours soon and get Star-ted!

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from the rubble of Jericho

The Word for today:
Nehemiah 12

Ezra, the scripture scholar and teacher, had tried for a decade to get the wall built. Nehemiah, the decisive man of action, managed to get the job done in just over seven weeks:
So the wall was finished on the twenty-fifth day of the month Elul, in fifty-two days. (Nehemiah 6:15)

When the huge project was finished, Nehemiah organized a spectacular victory celebration. It featured two choirs that circled the wall in opposite directions.

He placed Ezra at the front of the first choir, and put himself at the tail end of the second choir's procession.

When the two choirs met in the middle, near the temple area, they held a worship service the like of which had not been seen in Jerusalem for many generations.

“Even if you finish your wall, if a fox walks on top of it, it will collapse,” their enemies had predicted (Nehemiah 4:3). How wrong they were, for here we see the wall supporting an entire parade. The trumpets were blowing. The choirs were circling the city, singing with all their might. And the walls stood firm.

What a contrast to a very similar scene in the book of Joshua, chapter 6. Then, when the people circled the city of Jericho, shouting and blowing trumpets, Jericho's thick walls came tumbling down.

The Lord Jesus Christ told a parable which defined the difference between Jerusalem and Jericho. Wise men, he said, will build their houses upon "the rock:"
"Whoever hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock."
But foolish men will build their houses upon shifting sand:
"Everyone who hears these sayings of Mine, and does not do them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it fell. And great was its fall." (Matthew 7:24-27)

From the time in Nehemiah 8 when Ezra stood on a wooden platform, reading from a simple scroll, the people had begun to reconstruct their lives according to the Word of God.

Never forget the contrasting pictures of Jericho and Jerusalem. And when the day comes--it might be today--when you must rebuild your life, or your marriage, or your family, or your church, or your relationship to God, remember to open the Word of God. Search out its rebuilding instructions and follow them.

Then watch a miracle in the making, as a Jerusalem rises from the rubble of Jericho.

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