the instagram bible

Beware the Instagram Bible, my daughters – those filtered frames festooned with feathered verses, adorned in all manner of loops and tails, bedecked with blossoms, saturated with sunsets, culled and curated just for you.

Beware lest it become for you your source of daily bread. It is telling a partial truth.

I saw in my vision by night, and behold, I dreamed of a world in which every copy of the Bible was gone, except those portions we had preserved on Instagram. Consider this Bible, my daughters, if you will:

Its perfect squares are friend to the proverb, the promise, and the partial quote, leaving laws, lists, land-allotments, and long-stretching lessons to languish off-screen.

It comforts but rarely convicts.

It emotes but rarely exhorts.

It warms but rarely warns.

It promises but rarely prompts.

It moves but does not mortify.

It builds self-assurance but balks at self-examination.

It assembles an iconography whose artists, by spatial necessity, are constrained to choose

brevity over breadth,

inspiration over intellect,

devotion over doctrine.

Beware its conscribed canvas, where calligraphy conquers context.

Beware.

If the Prosperity Gospel offered us all the things, the Instagram Gospel offers us all the feels. It preaches good news in part, but we need the whole. It may move us in the moment, but it cannot sustain us through the storm.

My daughters, do not misunderstand. Like you, I do not wish to pull up my Insta account to find Levitical laws picked out in filigree and flowers. Nor do I desire genealogies superimposed on sunsets. I do not harbor a puritanical hatred of beauty, nor do I detest the illumination of a holy text by an ardent scribe. May I be the first to hit “like” on a timeless word of encouragement.

I do not ask the Instagram Bible to be all things. I can value, even enjoy it for what it is. But drawn by the glow of its inviting warmth, I must ask myself - and you -  to view it with care,

lest we love the part in place of the whole.

Lest we live as those in a vision by night, as those ensnared in a dream.

Beware the Instagram Bible, my daughters. It shines a partial light. We must know it both for what it says, and for what it does not.

the longing of angels

I wanted to be the angel.

The Christmas Eve living nativity was populated with my classmates – cotton-ball beards for the shivering pint-sized shepherds, a blue tablecloth draped over Mary’s head, a plastic doll nestled in her arms that looked suspiciously female. Joseph in a bathrobe repurposed for the occasion. And presiding above the hallowed scene, swathed in the gossamer of a nylon curtain her mother had edged with gold ric-rac, a tinsel halo trembling above her brow, the angel. Amy Snow, she of the blonde curls and blue eyes, the ivory skin, petite and angelic in every sphere from spelling class to Sunday school. It had to be cold in that costume, perched at the top of a ladder, but she looked positively serene.

Not picked. Gangly, tomboyish, brown-haired, brown-eyed, un-angelic. I shuffled past the scene, hardly noticing the live donkey brought in to heighten the realism. I wanted to be the angel. Any elementary school girl can tell you that the angel is living nativity gold.

As I grew older, I took some satisfaction in learning that angels in the Bible were not actually female. Not petite, and often fearsome. Messengers who delivered the words of the Lord, but who never played the starring role (take that, Amy Snow). But I found that I still wanted to be an angel, and not just on Christmas Eve. When sorrow or difficulty visited my life I sometimes considered how much better it would be to enjoy the sinlessness known by the angels, to get to dwell in the very presence of God where my whole purpose was to give Him the worship he deserved. Uncomplicated. Pure. It’s no wonder so many people believe they will become angels when they die.

But I wonder if being an angel would truly be that simple. Watching humanity labor under the burden of sin and sorrow across millennia. Warring against those they once called brothers, fallen angels for whom there is not a whisper of redemption possible. Blasting the trumpet of judgment as often as the trumpet of joy. Never knowing sin, yes, but also never knowing grace as those shepherds in a field on a dark night would know it.

I have stopped longing to be the angel. The older I grow the more I understand the treasure of the gospel, a message announced by angels but not within their experience to comprehend. The sinless creature cannot savor firsthand the sweetness of salvation. The message the angels heralded was not for them. The fullness of the gospel, displayed in the finished work of Christ, which prophets of old saw in part and labored diligently to understand, that message is for the sons of Earth – a thing into which angels long to look.

As you worship the Lord this Christmas Eve, as you sing of angels in glorious array, ponder this thought: the gospel announced in the form of an infant is for you. It is the hope of ages, the light in the darkness of our sin, the mystery of redemption that only fallen man can fully know. It is the longing of angels.

On this night of remembrance, do not envy the angels. For gazing on the mystery of the incarnation, the angels envy us.

And the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.  For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.    -- Luke 2:10-11

how salvation brings freedom

I grew up in the Bible Belt where, by mid-elementary, most of the kids in my peer group could point proudly to a note written in the front of their Bibles announcing the exact date they Got Saved. At junior high youth rallies the Rededications began, along with a smattering of I-Thought-I-Was-Saved-But-I-Really-Wasn’t's (scribble over that first date and write in the new one). Through all seven verses of “Just As I Am”, and all four years of high school, we children of the Bible Belt battled our doubts and bustled our backslidden selves down aisles to altar rails. Maybe, we thought, this time just maybe the Saving will stick.

Where's the Freedom?

Our problem was this: our sinning had not ceased with our professions of faith. The salvation that had promised us new life in Christ had by all appearances failed to deliver. We still made all the same mistakes, and along the thorny path of adolescence we added fresh failures to the list. Damning evidence, or so we thought, that when we Prayed The Prayer we had somehow not done it right. Where was the freedom from sin we had been promised?

Looking back I wonder if, for many of us, our problem was not with salvation itself, but with our understanding of how the freedom of our salvation actually occurred. It was not until my early twenties that I gained any clarity on this issue. I knew I served a God who was and is and is to come, but I had yet to learn that I possessed from Him a salvation of which the same could be said. Salvation from sin can be broken down into three categories: justification, sanctification and glorification. For the believer, our justification was, our sanctification is, and our glorification is to come. We were saved, we are being saved, we will be saved. I've found the easiest way to understand these three forms of freedom is to remember the three P’s: penalty, power, and presence.

Justification: Freedom From Sin’s Penalty

When we came to saving faith in Christ, confessing our great need of him and asking for forgiveness from the punishment we deserved, we were met with God’s unequivocal “yes”. Christ bore the penalty for our sins, therefore we received freedom from that penalty for all sins past, present and future. We were justified before God our judge because our penalty had been paid. Those who have been justified never need re-justifying. We can look back to the time of our justification (perhaps written in the front of our Bible?) and know that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Our justification is behind us. It is a past occurrence. We were saved from sin's penalty.

Sanctification: Freedom From Sin’s Power

Now that the grace of God has been set upon us as a permanent seal, we are being made new. We are being set free from the power of sin by the power of the Spirit. God’s grace is restoring to us a will that wants what he wants. Before we were justified, our broken wills were utterly subject to the power of sin. We chose sin at every turn. Even when we made choices that appeared good from an external standpoint, because we had no higher internal purpose than to glorify self these choices were ultimately sinful as well. Now, the power of sin is broken in our lives. We have been given the deposit of the Holy Spirit. Though we once chose only to sin, now we have the power (and the growing desire) to choose righteousness. We who were once slaves to sin’s power are now free to serve God. We don’t always use our freedom. We still sin, but over time we learn increasingly to choose holiness. Our entire lives from that handwritten date in our Bibles onward are devoted to “working out our salvation” as we learn to choose righteousness instead of sin, to walk in obedience to God’s commands.

Our sanctification is ongoing. It is a slow-moving growth in holiness. We are being saved from sin's power.

Glorification: Freedom From Sin’s Presence

We will fight to grow in holiness our entire earthly lives. But when we have run the race and fought the good fight, we will enter into the presence of the Lord forever. We will be glorified. In His presence, our soul-rest will at last be complete, as sin and its devastation will cease to assail us. There can be no sin in His presence. Though now we are surrounded on all sides by sinfulness, though now sin continues to cling to our hearts, on a day not too distant we will go to a place where sin is no more. In our glorification we will at last be granted freedom from the very presence of sin.

Our glorification is future. It is the day we trade the persistent presence of sin for the perfect presence of the Lord. We will be saved from sin's presence.

Rest, Labor, Hope

If I and my childhood peers had understood these three aspects of salvation’s freedom better, we might have saved ourselves a great deal of anxiety and a few trips down the aisle. The knowledge that sin is gradually overcome across a lifetime would have been good news to the teenager who thought surely her ongoing sin invalidated her profession. The knowledge that sanctification is hard work would have helped her topple the myth of the effortless stock-photo Christian life. The knowledge that total freedom from sin was a future certainty would have helped her ask in faith for grace for her current failures.

Maybe you, too, have found salvation mystifying. Maybe you’ve wondered, “If I’m really saved, why don’t I feel fully free?” You’re not yet, but you will be. Our complete freedom from sin is certain, but it is not sudden.  So we rest confidently in our justification, we labor diligently in our sanctification, and we hope expectantly in our glorification.

Be assured of your justification. It was. One day, you were freed fully from the penalty of sin.

Be patient with your sanctification. It is. Each day, you are being freed increasingly from the power of sin.

Be eager for your glorification. It is to come. One day, you will be freed finally from the presence of sin.

that which i did not sow

This spring he put his foot down: “No more tomatoes.” Gardening in North Texas can batter your ego and empty your wallet. You learn what to plant by taking note of what withers in the summer sun. Tomatoes, for instance. Not many delights surpass that of a home-grown tomato still warm from the vine, lightly salted and peppered. But this year it was not to be. Tired of the futility, Jeff decided to leave vacant our raised bed next to the compost pile.

The compost pile: that glorious chicken-wire structure of rotting goodness. Patron saint of gardeners. Colossal eyesore. A steaming homage to our love of eggs, coffee, and the once-fresh produce we were too slow to eat, moldering three feet deep outside the guest room window. Welcome, guests.

For six summers Jeff patiently nursed my fledgling tomato plants, too kind to tell me that my eternal hope for a bumper crop (and my selective memory of the previous summer) was heading me once again toward disappointment. But August said everything he had not, in capital letters.

It’s been a hard spring for my family. The people I love the most have sustained deep hurt and loss. The kind you don’t blog about or tweet about or share on Facebook. “I’m tired of being sad,” I tell my stepmother. “Yes,” she says.  One unexpected phone call is hard. When the phone keeps ringing, well, it begins to feel like August. We are withering.

I didn’t look out the guest room window the entire month of May. I didn’t walk down the far side of the house. I didn’t want to gaze on that vacant rectangle of dirt, dotted with decaying eggshells, where my hope of tomatoes used to grow. “Come out here and see this,” he said.

Mint, engulfing half of the bed. Two enormous pumpkin vines in full bloom, scaling the fence, breezily and brazenly trespassing the neighbor’s yard. And ridiculously, a tomato plant. Forbidden. Unbidden. Sometimes compost has a gardening agenda of its own. Despite our resolve to raise the white flag of surrender, to the west of the guest room the Lord God has planted a garden.

We stand there gaping, two quitters thwarted in our quitting, the seeds of our disbelief sprouting into uncontrolled laughter. We are shaking with it. He reaches for an abandoned stake and places it resolutely around the tomato plant. “Maybe I can build an awning to get it through that August sun.”

This ruling and subduing, this fruitfulness and multiplication - it is a tough business, punctuated with the losses of many Augusts. Gardeners know better than most that we reap what we sow. But the gospel gives a better word: we reap what we had no hope of sowing, a miraculous harvest of grace, sprung from the rot, grown in the shade of a good Gardener ever at our right hand.

This is where I stake my hope.


"The LORD is your keeper; The LORD is your shade on your right hand." Psalm 121:5

has failure become a virtue?

“Christian, you cannot obey the Law. Your certain failure is a means to show forth the grace of God when you repent.”

“We don’t need more lists of how to be a better spouse/parent/Christian. We need more grace.”

“My life strategy for today: fail, repent, repeat.”

Sounds good, doesn’t it? These sorts of statements comprise a growing body of commentary that finds the Law of the Bible to be a crushing burden, not just for the unbeliever, but for the believer as well. Enough with “checkbox Christianity”, these voices tell us. No more “how to‘s” on righteousness. In the righteousness department you are an epic fail, so toss out your checklists and your laws, and cast yourself on grace.

failure gets a makeover

In recent years church leaders have rightly spoken out against moralistic therapeutic deism, which is really just a fancy name for legalism – the idea that we earn God’s favor through external obedience to a moral code. Moralistic therapeutic deism, as in the days of Jesus, pervades our culture and even our churches. And it’s as harmful today as it was when Jesus spoke against it two thousand years ago.

As a response to this skewed view of Law, some have begun to articulate a skewed view of grace - one that discounts the necessity of obedience to the moral precepts of the Law. I call this view “celebratory failurism” – the idea that believers cannot obey the Law and will fail at every attempt. Furthermore, that our failure is ultimately cause to celebrate because it makes grace all the more beautiful.

These days, obedience has gotten a bad name. And failure has gotten a make-over. 

Interestingly, Jesus battled legalism in a different way than the celebratory failurist does. Rather than tossing out the Law or devaluing obedience to it, he called his followers to a deeper obedience than the behavior modification the Pharisees prized. He called for obedience in motive as well as in deed, the kind of godly obedience that is impossible for someone whose heart has not been transformed by the gospel. Rather than abolish the Law, Jesus deepened his followers’ understanding of what it required, and then went to the cross to ensure they could actually begin to obey it.

set free to obey

The gospel grants both freedom from the penalty of sin and freedom to begin to obey (Rom 6:16). And what are we to obey? The Law, that once gave death but now gives freedom. God's Word teaches us that behavior modification should absolutely follow salvation. It just occurs for a different reason than it does in the life of the unbeliever. Modified behavior reflects a changed heart. When Peter says we have spent enough time living as the pagans do, surely he means that it is time to stop disobeying and begin obeying. Paul tells us that grace teaches us to say no to ungodly passions, not merely to repent when we fail to say no. He goes on to say that we are redeemed, not from the Law, but from lawlessness (disregard for the Law). If, as John attests, all sin is lawlessness (disregard for the Law), ought we not to love the Law and meditate on it day and night, as those who desire deeply to cease sinning? When Jesus says “Go, and sin no more,” don’t we think he means it?

Any profession of faith that is not followed by evidence is an empty profession. And faithful profession without faithful obedience is spiritual schizophrenia. It is to affirm that God exists and then to turn and live as if he does not.

Celebratory failurism asserts that all our attempts to obey will fail, thereby making us the recipients of greater grace. But God does not exhort us to obey just to teach us that we cannot hope to obey. He exhorts us to obey to teach us that, by grace, we can obey, and therein lies hope. Through the gospel our God, whose law and whose character do not change, changes us into those who obey in both motive and deed. Believers no longer live under the Law, but the Law lies under us as a sure path for pursuing what is good, right and pleasing to the Lord. Contrary to the tenets of celebratory failurism, the Law is not the problem. The heart of the Law-follower is.

Obedience is only moralism if we believe it curries favor with God. The believer knows that it is impossible to curry favor with God because God needs nothing from us. He cannot be put in our debt. Knowing this frees us to obey out of joyful gratitude rather than servile grasping.

Imagine telling your child, “I know you’ll fail, but here are our house rules. Let me know when you break them so I can extend grace to you.” We recognize that raising a lawless child is not good for the child, for our family, or for society as a whole. We don’t train our children to obey us so they can gain our favor. They already have our favor. We, being evil, train and equip them to obey because it is good and right and safe. And how much more does our Heavenly Father love us?

moving beyond “fail and repent”

We must not trade moralistic therapeutic deism for celebratory failurism. Sanctification is about more than “You will fail, but there is grace for you.” Growing in holiness means that we fail less than we used to, because at long last we are learning to obey in both motive and deed, just as Christ obeyed. There is a difference between self-help and sanctification, and that difference is the motive of the heart.

Earnest Christians look to their church leaders and ask, “Teach me to walk in His ways.” We owe them an answer beyond, “Fail and repent.” We owe them, “This is the way, walk in it.” The way is often delineated by lists – a list of ten don’ts in Exodus 20, a list of eight do’s in Matthew 5, a list of works of the flesh and spiritual fruit in Galatians 5, and so on. These are lists that crush the unbeliever but give life to the believer. They make straight the paths of those who love them, and though the way they delineate is narrow, it is the way that leads to life.

The Law becomes a gracious means of conforming us to the image of the Savior. We love the Law because we love the God of the Law, who has engraved it on our very hearts. We do not start our days planning to fail, nor do we celebrate failure. Rather, we set our faces like flint and resolve by the power of the Spirit to obey.

I delight to do your will, O my God;

    your law is within my heart.”      Psalm 40:8

choose hospitality

On November 6, 2010 I tweeted the Most Regrettable Tweet of my mediocre social media career. In anticipation of the holiday season, I decided to weigh in on hospitality. The tweet was a flawless blend of selective memory and self-righteousness, designed to heap condemnation on the heads of my followers under the guise of offering wise counsel. It was a verbal “selfie” snapped from my best angle, positioned to make me look very, very good. Let’s have a look at it, shall we?

Note the double-whammy: if your house isn’t orderly on a daily basis, you will withhold hospitality from others and set a bad example for your children. Moms everywhere, be encouraged!

Three years later, I still cringe remembering that tweet, mainly because I have failed to live up to it repeatedly ever since. I presume my house was clean on November 6, 2010, but it has rarely been so in recent months. Even as I type, I am looking out across a disordered landscape of scattered laundry, schoolbooks, dusty baseboards and chipped paint. That tweet neglected to mention what my house looked like when my children were small, how I would hide clutter in the dryer when guests came, how hard I found it just to get dinner on the table for my own family, much less for someone else’s. So I regret that I proposed to moms a standard to which I could not hold myself.

But more importantly, I regret that tweet because I have come to recognize that the standard it proposed is flawed. It revealed my own lack of understanding about the nature and purpose of hospitality. In my self-righteous desire to offer advice, I had confused hospitality with its evil twin, entertaining. The two ideas could not be more different.

entertaining versus hospitality: what’s the difference?

Entertaining involves setting the perfect tablescape after an exhaustive search on Pinterest. It chooses a menu that will impress, and then frets its way through each stage of preparation. It requires every throw pillow to be in place, every cobweb to be eradicated, every child to be neat and orderly. It plans extra time to don the perfect outfit before the first guest touches the doorbell on the seasonally decorated doorstep. And should any element of the plan fall short, entertaining perceives the entire evening to have been tainted. Entertaining focuses attention on self.

Hospitality involves setting a table that makes everyone feel comfortable. It chooses a menu that allows face time with guests instead of being chained to the cook top. It picks up the house to make things pleasant, but doesn’t feel the need to conceal evidences of everyday life. It sometimes sits down to dinner with flour in its hair. It allows the gathering to be shaped by the quality of the conversation rather than the cuisine. Hospitality shows interest in the thoughts, feelings, pursuits and preferences of its guests. It is good at asking questions and listening intently to answers. Hospitality focuses attention on others.

Entertaining is always thinking about the next course. Hospitality burns the rolls because it was listening to a story.

Entertaining obsesses over what went wrong. Hospitality savors what was shared.

Entertaining, exhausted, says “It was nothing, really!” Hospitality thinks it was nothing. Really.

Entertaining seeks to impress. Hospitality seeks to bless.

But the two practices can look so similar. Two people can set the same beautiful tablescape and serve the same gourmet meal, one with a motive to impress, the other with a motive to bless. How can we know the difference? Only the second of the two would invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind to pull up a chair and sip from the stemware. Our motives are revealed not just in how we set our tables, but in who we invite to join us at the feast. Entertaining invites those whom it will enjoy. Hospitality takes all comers.

why be hospitable?

Hospitality is about many things, but it is not about keeping a perpetually orderly home. So, forgive me, Twitterverse, for my deplorable tweet. I could not have been more wrong. And may I have a do-over?

Orderly house or not, hospitality throws wide the doors. It offers itself expecting nothing in return. It keeps no record of its service, counts no cost, craves no thanks. It is nothing less than the joyous, habitual offering of those who recall a gracious table set before them in the presence of their enemies, of those who look forward to a glorious table yet to come.

It is a means by which we imitate our infinitely hospitable God.

So, three years later, here is my advice to myself as the holiday season begins: Forgo the empty pleasure of entertaining. Serve instead the high-heaped feast of hospitality, even as it has been served to you.

hope for the broken home

I am a gardener, after my mother’s example.

I remember the simple script, hung by a nail next to the sugar canister: “Bloom where you are planted” -  a red geranium sketched in the bottom left corner. It hung in the five-bedroom house, the one with the father who went to work and the mother who made a home and the children who arrived to her greeting after school. It hung also in the two-bedroom house, the one with the mother who went to work and the children whose keys unlocked a silent kitchen and the father who came on Saturdays.

Both houses were mine. When I was nine years old, my parents’ divorce was final, and our family, like so many others, was left to make sense of the aftermath.

The conference ends and a woman approaches me at the podium. She is on the verge of tears.  She has approached me before – no, not her, but ten others with the same question brimming in the corners of their eyes. I have spoken for almost an hour, but she remembers one passing detail: “You come from a broken home. Thank you for saying it.”

“Broken home” - the term is hers, not mine. A single mother, worried that her children will be consumed by the devastation of her failed marriage, that their trajectory is faithlessness, bitterness and sorrow. She sees me and wants to know: how did you bloom?

What formula I can offer? The fracturing of a marriage can look many ways. There are no hard and fast rules for how to cobble together hope. I can only tell my story, one shaped by three gifts my parents gave.

The first, of course, was a great deal of prayer. On my behalf, across many years.

The second was a great deal of selflessness on the part of both of my parents, and my stepmother as well. All three of my parents gave me permission to love and cherish all three of my parents. They treated one another with mutual respect, both in their words and actions. I was not asked to choose one parent over another. When a marriage fails, the resulting web of relationships is not always made up of honorable people. By the grace of God, mine was. I knew they had deep hurt toward each other, that thirty five years later they still do. But I knew they placed my relationship needs above their own hurt.

The third gift, astonishingly, was a high view of marriage. Who would believe it? But no one in my family would say that divorce is a simple solution to a difficult marriage. It never gets easy, never stops aching, never slips completely into past-tense. It is a measure of absolute last resort. Rather than teach me to hold my marriage lightly, my parents taught me to hold it in high regard, to enter into it with care, to guard it with determination.

An incomplete account, of limited help, but my story nonetheless. I feel deep gratitude toward my parents, somehow able to recognize that just because their marriage was a failure didn’t mean that their divorce had to be. Finding their family planted in rocky soil, they determined, as far as it was possible with them, to help us bloom.

I have been blessed with three devoted parents, but I believe - and have witnessed - that even one devoted parent can foster blooms in the desert. Do I come from a broken home? I do. And so do all of us, I suppose. I have known more love and respect, more kindness, more selfless pursuit of relationship in my “broken home” than many know in their traditional families. Take heart in this, mother in the aftermath – a failed marriage does not doom you to a failed family. No malediction guides your course. Surely the grace of God is for homes both broken and intact. Surely, if any of us blooms, we do so by that grace alone.

I am a gardener, after my mother’s example. And my step-mother’s as well, truth be told. I carry a sentimental attachment to a particular flower, tracing back to my childhood, to a sign on a nail next to a canister of sugar. My yard spills over with geraniums. The Victorians assigned a meaning to that blossom - though other flowers symbolize peace or healing, the geranium symbolizes folly.

A fitting emblem for this child of divorce, this child of God. For it is folly to believe that something whole can come from something broken. Yet God chooses what is foolish in this world to shame the wise. He chooses the weak, the low, the despised. He chooses the broken. And these, against all logic, he redeems. Mother of a “broken home”, lift up your eyes. Find hope in the folly of the gospel - it is for you. Ask the Father to give all that is needful, all that is good.

I pray hope and wholeness bud beneath His care. I pray you and those you cherish bloom.

of summer's lease and sabbath-song

Last night, as if on cue, the cicadas began their summer serenade. I love their mechanical, monotonous, lullaby-like whirring, welling up at dusk on a heat-laden summer evening. From my childhood it has been a sound bound tightly to all that is summer – a chorus signifying the return of stillness, an invocation to rest, rest, rest.

After nine months of school, activities and friends, the four Wilkin kids are once again fully present in our home. Our summer will be marked by some travel (cousins who need to enjoy our company), some learning (good books to be read, good recipes to try), and some household chores that never seem to get done during the school year (it cannot be an accident that the number of dirty windows in my home divides neatly by four). But the highest item on our summer agenda, and the one we all look forward to the most, is rest. There will be time to listen to the cicadas.

Here is a remarkable thing about the Christian faith: we have a God who commands us to rest. Our God commands us to hold still, to cease from labor, to actively enter into repose – not merely as a means to regain our strength, but as an act of worship.

The gods of other religions and the god of self, these demand ceaseless toil. To please these gods, worshippers work incessantly at the business of self-denial, approval-seeking, pilgrimage - repeated rites that strive to prove the worth of the supplicant and earn the favor of the deity.

Those who seek the approval of lesser gods commit themselves to a course of utter exhaustion.

But not the Christian. In our obedient observance of rest, the work of our Savior is understood most clearly. We rest not as an attempt to earn his approval, but as an assent that his approval has already been earned in the sun-going-down, Sabbath-initiating work of Christ on the cross. Christ worked that we may rest. He, in a gathering dusk, exhaling the first note of a blood-bought chorus of infinite rest.

The God who grants us soul-repose commands our worship in the form of bodily rest. As with all worship, the worshipper is blessed in his obedience. He finds himself restored and ready to resume the effort of tilling his corner of the garden once again. More importantly, he finds himself reminded that both the garden and the one who tills are contingent and derived, depending every moment on the sustaining breath of the Creator. He is thereby mercifully relieved of his idolatrous, exhaustion-breeding belief that the work of his hands upholds the universe in part or in whole.

This is a good and timely reminder for our family.

Nothing obstructs our ability to fulfill the Great Command like exhaustion.  In the daily busyness of life-as-usual, the love of many grows cold. But the rest the Lord ordains for His people is a communal rest, a rest that places them in company with one another, hands emptied of labor, minds emptied of cares. Because emptied hands can deal the next round of spades, or make a dandelion chain, or pass around the popsicles. And emptied minds can join in the conversation bubbling up from the back of the minivan.

Love grows warm once again in the emptied spaces of rest. We remember our love for the One who sustains us, we recall our love for the ones who surround us. Worshipful rest is that which renews our love for God and for others. It is the rest that restores our souls.

Summer is, for our family, a time when the worship of work gives way to the worship of rest. We will not fill these precious days with more ways to be distracted, exhausted and pulled in a thousand directions. The evensong of the cicadas invites us to join in the worship of loving God and each other with renewed intent, awash with gratitude that our souls find rest in the finished work of Christ.

Well did Shakespeare observe that “summer’s lease hath all too short a date.” Before we know it, the season of work will return to claim its laborers. So we will heed the invocation of the cicadas to rest, rest, rest – knowing that our rest here is as vital as it is brief, longing for that future rest when our Sabbath-song of worship, once raised, will redouble and reverberate across eternity.

gazing on the good of good friday

How much pain? For how long? How much blood? How many layers of flesh removed by the lash? How heavy the beam he carried? How far the distance he walked? Between which sinews were the nails placed? How sharp the thorns? How precise the work of the spear? Tell me, was it death by suffocation or blood loss? Show me. Re-enact it. Film it. Paint it. Describe it in song lyric and sacred reading. Carve it in detail and hang it on a wall. Give me the sound, the smell, the spectacle of it. Take me back to those moments, and spare no effort to help me enter into the scene.

Because if I had just been there to see it I would understand - I would understand the extent of my sin and the miracle of the resurrection. Because if I could just register these images and speculations deeply enough in my psyche I might better celebrate the beauty of three-days-later.

But would I? Do I? Or shall I look beyond the suffering of skin, scalp, sinews, suffocation to the harder truth to which they point? Shall I look beyond the stock-in-trade of Good Friday observance, these CSI-worthy musings, capable of capturing only the smallest part of what transpired on the cross? For if I seek to internalize the suffering of Christ, surely I must look beneath the externals. If I seek to internalize the sufferings of Christ, surely I must look to his rejection.

Rejection. I have known it – I have known the visceral shock, the hot-and-cold nausea of learning that another human being believed me guilty of something I had not done, believed it to the core of their understanding, believed it to the exclusion of hearing any defense on my behalf. You hate me. You hate who you think I am. You wish me harm. You have passed your sentence on me. You will not change your mind.

Now it begins to come into view, what happened that day.  It begins to, yes, if I extrapolate the depth of that pain, multiplied out to the nth degree. Rejection to the multi-billionth power. The Passion Play, seen through this lens, begins to feel flat. The crucifix above the altar begins to look like so much wood and pigment. As hard as I gaze, it does not speak of this weight, this crushing weight, so much greater than a timber across the back. As intently as I focus, it does not render the sting of this scourging lash, so much more brutal than a cat-of nine-tails.

But I am not there yet, no – my understanding is not yet as awakened as Good Friday demands. For in my limited experience of human rejection, on the day that my fellow man turns his gaze from me, the loving gaze of my Father does not waver. On the day that my fellow man pronounces me cursed, my Father still shouts that I am blessed.  Blessed to the uttermost.

But not so, the Son. Not so, the sinless Son, rejected to the uttermost.

So my gaze is lifted to the great good of Good Friday: the Father’s face turned eternally toward me because it was turned from the Son. The sinner accepted, the sinless rejected. The punishment that brought me peace, no mere matter of thorn and nail. The curse that brought me blessing, no mere matter of blood and bone.

This Good Friday may the eyes of my body soberly acknowledge the blood and the nails. But may the eyes of my heart gaze on the rejection that secured my acceptance, and glory in the willing death that brought me life.

my take-away from TGCW12

I had the privilege of spending last weekend in Orlando at The Gospel Coalition Women’s Conference with over 3500 women. It was a marathon of speakers and workshops, punctuated by coffee breaks and quick calls home to check in with loved ones. I knew why I had come: last summer I sat transfixed at my computer as Kathleen Nielson spoke about her hope for the conference, and about the need for sound teaching by women to women. I heard her saying exactly what I had been saying for ten years, and I sat there and sobbed. Then I blew my nose and started saving my pennies. As a retreat speaker, I don’t look for extra opportunities to spend a weekend away from my family with an accumulation of women, but there was no way I was missing this.

Were the speakers edifying? Absolutely. Were the seminars informative? Yes. But the image that stays with me from last weekend is this: young women, hordes of them, some still in their work clothes, some with strollers, some eight months pregnant, some with that look a girl gets when she knows her family is probably eating Cheerios and Skittles for dinner and she.just.doesn’t.care for the next forty-eight hours. Some of them from a thousand miles away. All of them out-of-their-minds excited to be taught, and taught well.

Do you know why I cried at my computer last summer? I cried because I want to end the crisis of biblical illiteracy in the church. I cried because I am determined to rescue a generation of young women from a faith grounded only in the shifting sands of emotionalism. I cried out of sheer relief that I wasn’t alone in my hope that things can change.

For too long women of belief have been the willing recipients of gender-specific teaching that patronizes their intellect and panders to their emotions. For too long churches have neglected to raise the bar, settling for a ministry model that is content to connect women in relationships without challenging them to deeper understanding of the Word. For forty-eight hours this weekend I got to hear influential voices raise a cry for a different standard. For forty-eight hours I got to entertain the very real possibility that the tide could turn.

Do you know how hard it is for the average woman to get away for the weekend? And they came by the thousands. There were many messages worth pondering at the Gospel Coalition Women’s Conference of 2012. The one written plainest on my heart is this:  “Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest.” May the workers be many. May we ask this in His Name.


UPDATE: You can find audio/video of the conference sessions here.

sundered and sealed

Why do you believe the Bible is the book it claims to be? Why do you believe it is the very Word of God?

Scholars say it can be trusted because of manuscript evidence, archaeological evidence, prophetic accuracy, and the statistical probability that a message could be written so consistently across so many different authors and so many years. M-A-P-S. I’ve taught that acronym many times, and it is reassuring to think about even now. Knowing there is objective proof that the Bible is the book it claims to be appeals to my love of reason and my desire to keep reason and faith inseparably joined. But I have a deeper reason for believing the Bible is what it claims to be: I believe it to be the Word of God because it has done exactly what it said it would do.

“For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”

And this it has done: it has divided me. It has cut me to the bone.

It has severed the offending hand of my greed and gouged out the offending eye of my desire.

Over and over again.

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True to its diagnosis, I am a creature of a thousand grasping hands and a thousand roving eyes. Yet it continues its ministry of a thousand faithful amputations, parsing the sin from the sinner, separating the lie from the truth, dividing the darkness from the light.

And in the dividing, miracle of miracles, it is rendering me whole.

So, yes. I believe the Bible is true. It says this is who you were and it is right.

It says this is who you are and it is dead on.

So when it says this is who you shall be I can readily hope.

And when it says this is who I AM I can readily worship.

No blind leap required. This book has not lied to me. Not once.

It knows me. I am known by it.

I thank God for dusty scrolls and artifacts and fulfillments and probabilities all raising their voices in a chorus of affirmation: this book is what it claims to be.

And I add my own voice to the clamor: “You have sanctified me by the truth: thy word is truth.”

I believe because I have been sundered. I believe because I have been sealed. Living Word, cut and cut again, that truth may be found in my innermost parts. Separate me from my sin. Seal me unto salvation. And what you join let none put asunder.