sober-minded

Today I went to a funeral–a memorial service, to be more exact–for a young man. He was my daughter’s friend, and he was only 20 years old. Here are some impressions from it I’d like to share.

WHAT I SAW:

I saw hundreds of young people (many more than were evidently expected) of all types and stripes, but the majority of them skater types. I saw a lot of tattoos, piercings, and black garb. I saw fields white for the harvest, though it looked like a sea of black. I saw tears of anguish. I saw pictures of this beautiful young man with people he loved and who loved him; I saw his artwork, some of it very good, sitting around everywhere. I saw his mom, sitting at the front. I saw my daughter, standing along the wall with a lot of other young people who couldn’t find a seat. I saw 10 or 12 young guys walk in procession to the front with skateboards when the service started. I saw a few of them take to the pavement outside later on, and knew they skated in memory of their friend.

WHAT I HEARD:

I heard people crying. I heard music, some from a cd and one song played live and played very well, and all of it was very sad. I heard one young man, though I didn’t hear him very well because he laid aside the microphone they handed him, talk from the heart about his friend; it was short and sweet and I hope I can find out from my daughter what all he said. I heard the young man’s aunt talk about her favorite nephew, and read a little essay she had written a couple of nights ago about him; it was very lovely and touching and genuine. I heard laughter at a few things that were said about that young man, and I knew it felt good to them to laugh a little.

WHAT THE YOUTH PASTOR SAID:

The youth pastor said that God created us to find out who we are and then to go for it. The youth pastor said that he hopes that when he dies, people will say about him that he really knew how to be himself. The youth pastor said that Jesus died on the cross to save us from our “stuff.” (Then the youth pastor said “baggage” to clarify what he meant by “stuff.”) The youth pastor said that faith, in this life, is a guess; we jump in and do the best we can, but that for now we just don’t know.

WHAT THE YOUTH PASTOR SAID, AND WHAT THESE YOUNG PEOPLE AND THIS FAMILY HEARD, THAT WAS LIFE-SAVINGLY TRUE ABOUT GOD, ABOUT US, ABOUT LIFE, AND DEATH, AND ETERNITY, AND HEAVEN, AND HELL:

From the Desiring God Blog today:

At Bethlehem Baptist Church and at Desiring God we use the term “God-centered” a lot. Here is one simple way to tell what we mean and test yourself to see if you are God-centered.

The psalmist describes the motivation of God in saving sinners like this:

Both we and our fathers have sinned… Yet he saved them for his name’s sake, that he might make known his mighty power. (Psalms 106:6, 8)

God was motivated to rescue them and us from our sin and its penalty “for his name’s sake.” What does “for his name’s sake” mean? It means “that he might make known his mighty power.”

What we mean when we say God is “God-centered” is that he acts like that. He saves for the sake of his name. He saves to make known his own power.

And what we mean when we say we are God-centered (or desire to be) is that we like to have it that way. It satisfies us to have God save us for God’s sake. We are happy that this is the way it is. We get pleasure in seeing it and savoring it.

We like to talk about God doing it that way.

Amy knows how to say it.

Sunday was beautiful. Storms raged into the wee hours, then the day broke cool and clear and lovely. The creek was full.

And it was loud. But some brave souls bravely braved the rushing waters in their large black galoshes.

And received, upon their safe return, a hero’s welcome, braces glinting in the afternoon sun. It was a good day.

Sometimes God answers prayer in surprising ways. One way it can be a surprise to us is when we realize that a difficult circumstance we have found ourselves in for some time, is the very means He’s been using to work a long-sought change in our heart and behavior.

A rocky time in marriage can be the means of God’s working that change; or difficult people or situations at church, or a number of other things. It is a beautiful thing when an awareness begins to dawn: “I have been changed. I see more fruits of sanctification, of holiness in my life. I feel more love in my heart for people, more thankfulness to God. There is a greater faithfulness evident. And it is directly due to this hard place I have been in.”

I would have expected God to bring about good changes in another way. Through some sort of transformational power encounter during a particularly great song sung at church or a conference, perhaps. Or maybe in my prayer closet, He would completely overwhelm me with a sense of His presence and I would descend, like Moses, face shining and clutching a Bible, from that mountain top back down to the family room, forever altered.

But no. He used, it turned out, the completely mundane and frustrating details of an everyday life, lived out faithfully, to bring about a greater dependence on Him, a greater trust, a greater suspicion of my own strength and thoughts and abilities. He grew bigger, I grew smaller.

This is a surprise. It is ever His way. He seems to take our preconceived notions and turn them topsy-turvey all the time. Now that I sort of get the hang of it, I like it. He is great, and I am not. This is ever the surprising truth about God.

Just some brief thoughts I’ve been thinking about lately and talking about a little with family. I have realized more and more that for most of my Christian life (I have been a professing Christian since 1973) I did not really know the Lord. I don’t mean that I wasn’t saved…converted, regenerate, born again. That is God’s work and His doing. But what I am saying is that I didn’t know Him very well. The reason? I didn’t spend the time and effort to get to know Him. I didn’t hang out where He is. I didn’t know where He was.

I started pretty well, but somewhere down the line I decided that knowing God was something you could accomplish by speculating, guessing, assuming and presuming! I didn’t realize that for as long as we live on this earth, we are tied to the Bible as the only source for what we can know about Him. That is where He is…where He is described, where He speaks, where He instructs and teaches us about Himself. To try to know Him any other way–by mystical experiences or our own intuitions–is to end up not knowing Him, but rather having an acquaintance with a god we have manufactured ourselves, for ourselves. In large part, that is what I ended up with. That god, I found, was of absolutely no use or help to me in the day of trouble. I had to go back to the Bible, to anchor myself back to the source of truth about God, in order to have a knowledge of Him and therefore a relationship with Him, that was solid and real. Then I found Him to be all that the Bible proclaims Him to be.

Knowing God is not just something that automatically happens when we are saved. We know from our human relationships that close ones take effort, and thought, and intentionality, and time. That is just the same as it is with God. If we think we know Him yet do not hang out often and with regularity in His word; if we don’t think about His word during the day, enjoying that communion with Him through the Holy Spirit that is called “fellowship;” if our minds aren’t informed by what His word reveals about Him as we pray and talk and converse and teach; then we can’t really know Him. We’re misinformed and inaccurate as to who He is…and we don’t do ourselves or anyone else any good!

There’s nothing mystical or hard to understand about getting to know God. He said, “And you will seek Me, and you will find Me when you search for Me with all of your hearts.” We just have to want to get to know Him, and be willing to go where He is, to listen to Him speak, to read about His great deeds and His workings and what He does and how He does it. We will come to know Him, little by little, better and better. There is no other place, no other source for getting to know Him, than through His word, the Bible. The Holy Spirit takes the words of Scripture and applies them to our minds and hearts in a living way. And we come to know Him.

But we must come to those living words. We must be determined to meet Him there, to commune with Him there and to find Him there. Knowing God does not happen apart from our seeking Him.

“Let us know; let us press on to know the LORD;
his going out is sure as the dawn;
he will come to us as the showers,
as the spring rains that water the earth.” Hosea 6:3

I’d like to direct your attention to a blog that I enjoy a lot. Amy Scott is a young wife and mother who writes about life and God in an engaging and often hilarious way. I only wish I had her way of putting things. Young moms will especially enjoy her writing, but anybody who appreciates good prose will enjoy reading her, too. This post is one of my all-time favorites of hers. I don’t know Amy at all, but I appreciate her!

Amy’s Humble Musings

I’ve always enjoyed reading, and so from my earliest years as a Christian, I read. Although I thankfully did read a few good, sound authors early on (most notably Francis Schaeffer and C.S. Lewis), I also read many books and articles by less helpful writers and teachers. I read all these books because I wanted to know more about God. But there was one book that I neglected much of the time…it was the only book that really had the answers I claimed to want. And of course I’m talking about the Bible.

Why do we often find God’s word to be the last book we pick up to learn about God? It would be ironic if it weren’t so tragic. The books I read over the course of my first 30 years as a Christian led me, too many times, away from a true knowledge of Him. Those books used misdirecting language so that when I did read the Bible, the truth about God was distorted. My perception of Him was faulty because I read the wrong books.

The amazing thing is this, that God has chosen to reveal Himself through a book, through words that are His words. There is no other way we’ve been given to find out who God is, what He is really like, and what He requires of us. Creation testifies that there is a God; the Bible explains Him to us. Words matter and the accuracy of the words matter, because an accurate knowledge of God really matters.

Knowing God as He really is makes a difference in our homes and in the church. Life and death may quite literally hang on whether our knowledge of God is a true knowledge. Based on our perceived knowledge of Him, we will make choices about how we train our children and treat our husbands and flee temptations. These are day-to-day choices with eternal ramifications.

Not to overkill the point here. There are many good books, helpful books, books that direct us to the truth of Scripture. They help us in our understanding of God and of His word. But there is no substitute for the Bible itself. The Holy Spirit works in and through God’s word to bring truth and life to us, to cleanse us and sanctify us, and to reveal God to us in Jesus Christ. We should saturate ourselves in the words of the Bible, allowing them by the Spirit to take up rich residence in our hearts until an overflow of the Spirit and the word result in a blessing to our families and to the people of God, and to the world.

When Augustine, who became the great 4th century theologian, was sitting under a tree in despair over ever knowing the truth about God, he heard the voice of a child from a nearby house saying in a sing-song voice, “Take up and read!” He did so, picking up his copy of the Scriptures and turning to Romans 13, and that moment “the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.”

So I encourage you today, “take up and read!” If you “aren’t a reader” you can certainly, with God’s help, become one, for He has words for you to know! Or perhaps you can become an avid listener (here is a very good audio Bible.) The point is to go often to the life-giving source, to the very words of God, and drink deep!

We had a great time tonight in our AWANA class when Joel, our friend and former children’s pastor, came to speak to the 3rd and 4th grade kids. Joel talked to them about Jesus’ crucifixion and about His sufferings for us, about the cruel treatment He endured and mostly about why He did it–why He went through with it all. Joel did a great job and presented a clear Gospel message to the kids. He ended the talk with “7 reasons why Jesus did what He did for us” (culled from John Piper’s “50 Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die,” since Joel only had about 20 minutes!) At one point in his talk, Joel asked the kids to give some reasons Jesus died. Although it wasn’t quite the answer Joel was moving toward, I loved it when one of the boys suggested, “Because God and Jesus planned it.”

They’ve been listening. We have talked several times in class about how Jesus’ death on a cruel Roman cross was the plan of Father, Son and Holy Spirit “from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8), and about how “this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, they crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men” (Acts 2:23.) Joel emphasized to them that Jesus, though crucified and killed by these godless men, was not their victim:

“For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father” (John 10:17-18.)

That all crystallizes just fine in the mind of an eight or nine-year-old as “God and Jesus planned it.” How beautiful is the sovereignty of God; how wonderful are His purposes and plans! How kind He is to reveal Himself to us through His word, so that we can grasp, however frailly and dimly, something of His great majesty and mercy. Grasp it enough so that we will sing of it forever, beginning now! Enough so that we can lay down tonight on our beds and have as our last conscious thought of the day this comfort: “God and Jesus planned it.”

No, not money. Here are a few offerings from Wendy Alsup, who serves as a deaconness (!) at Mars Hill Church in Seattle, Washington.

“The Ideal Christian Woman”

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4