Do You Want to Be an Oak or a Squash?
A student asked the President of his school whether he could not take a shorter course than the one prescribed. ‘Oh yes,’ replied the President, ‘but then it depends upon what you want to be. When God wants to make an oak, He takes a hundred years, but when He wants to make a squash, He takes six months.’
-Quoted by Robert Clinton in The Making of a Leader.
Circumstances
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can’t find them, make them. -George Bernard Shaw
Possibility
If I were to wish for anything I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of what can be, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating as possibility.
-Soren Kierkegaard.
When God Doesn’t Answer Your Prayer
I’m noticing a pattern in my life. Each summer God puts a book in my lap that I really need and that sets fresh trajectories for my life and ministry. Last summer it was the book mentioned in this post.
This summer, quite unexpectedly, I stumbled upon Jerry Sittser’s book from 2003, When God Doesn’t Answer Your Prayer. During my 1.5 years at Whitworth University I enjoyed having Jerry Sittser as a professor. He was/is a great man with a story of suffering that gives unusual weight to his teaching and writing.
Just like last summer’s book, When God Doesn’t Answer Your Prayer is a book about trusting God. I recommend you read this book, read it in conjunction with last summer’s book.
We want God on our terms, to make life nice for us and to cut a safe and secure path for us, with no hassles, no inconvenience, and no suffering. Unfortunately, there is no such God, and there is no such life.
-When God Doesn’t Answer Your Prayer, pp. 172-173
Revival
…the thing above all else that accounts for the fact that the masses of the people are outside the Christian Church today, is the condition of those of us who are inside the Church. Read the story of any revival that has ever taken place and you will find that the beginning of it is always the same. One man, or sometimes a number of people, suddenly become alive to the true Christian life, and others begin to pay attention to them. The world outside is stirred and begins to pay attention. Revival always begins inside the Church, and the world outside seeing it, begins to pay attention.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression, p. 108
Out of Your Depth
Peter and I soon saw that God’s way of dealing with us was to throw us into situations over our depth, then supply us with the necessary ability to swim.
–Catherine Marshall, wife of Peter Marshall. A Man Called Peter, p. 119
Get a Forty-Year Degree
For years, people have recognized the value of a four-year degree, but to succeed in today’s economy, you really need a forty-year degree. In other words, you need to be engaged in lifelong learning. The four-year degree may teach you how to read, write, think, and reason, but its main purpose is to set you up for ongoing learning.
Stephen M.R. Covey, The Speed of Trust, p. 105
Your Insecurity and Jesus
For the past 30 days I’ve been reading a few pages every morning of Richard Lovelace’s Dynamics of Spiritual Life. Of all I’ve underlined in the book (which is a lot), I keep coming back to a few paragraphs in the front half of the book. This is analysis that could turn many lives around:
In the New Testament… justification (the acceptance of believers as righteous in the sight of God through the righteousness of Jesus Christ accounted to them) and sanctification (progress in actual holiness expressed in their lives) are often closely intertwined… However, they are quite distinct: justification is the perfect righteousness of Christ reckoned to us, covering the remaining imperfections in our lives like a robe of stainless holiness; sanctification is the process of removing those imperfections as we are enabled more and more to put off the bondages of sin and put on new life in Christ…
Only a fraction of the present body of professing Christians are solidly appropriating the justifying work of Christ in their lives. Many have so light an apprehension of God’s holiness and of the extent and guilt of their sin that consciously they see little need for justification, although below the surface of their lives they are deeply guilt-ridden and insecure. Many others have a theoretical commitment to this doctrine, but in their day-to-day existence they rely on their sanctification for their justification… drawing their assurance of acceptance with God from their sincerity, their past experience of conversion, their recent religious performance or the relative infrequency of their conscious, willful disobedience. Few know enough to start each day with a thoroughgoing stand upon Luther’s platform: you are accepted, looking outward in faith and claiming the wholly alien righteousness of Christ as the only ground for acceptance, relaxing in that quality of trust which will produce increasing sanctification as faith is active in love and gratitude…
A conscience which is not fully enlightened both to the seriousness of its condition before God, and to the grandeur of God’s merciful provision of redemption, will inevitably fall prey to anxiety, pride, sensuality and all the other expressions of that unconscious despair which Kierkegaard called “the sickness unto death.” [So] we start each day with our personal security resting not on…the sacrifice of Christ but on our present feelings or recent achievements… Since these arguments will not quiet the human conscience, we are inevitably moved either to discouragement and apathy or to a self-righteousness which falsifies the record to achieve a sense of peace.
Much that we have interpreted as a defect of sanctification in church people is really an outgrowth of their loss of bearing with respect to justification. Christians who are no longer sure that God loves and accepts them in Jesus, apart from their present spiritual achievements, are subconsciously radically insecure persons — much less secure than non-Christians, because of the constant bulletins they receive from their Christian environment about the holiness of God and the righteousness they are supposed to have. Their insecurity shows itself in pride, a fierce, defensive assertion of their own righteousness and defensive criticism of others. They come naturally to hate other cultural styles and other races in order to bolster their own security and discharge their suppressed anger. They cling desperately to legal, pharisaical righteousness, but envy, jealousy and other branches on the tree of sin grow out of their fundamental insecurity…
It is often said today, in circles which blend popular psychology with Christianity, that we must love ourselves before we can be set free to love others… But no realistic human beings find it easy to love or forgive themselves, and hence their selfacceptance must be grounded in their awareness that God accepts them in Christ… [There is much evidence in our experience against the idea that we are children of God, but] the faith that surmounts the evidence and is able to warm itself at the fire of God’s love, instead of having to steal love and self-acceptance from other sources, is actually the root of holiness…
Presented in this context, even the demand for sanctification becomes part of the good news. It offers understanding of the bondage that has distorted our lives and the promise of release into a life of Spirit-empowered freedom and beauty. Ministries that attack only the surface of sin and fail to ground spiritual growth in the believer’s union with Christ produce either self-righteousness or despair…
How to Read The Bible
In order to understand the Bible, one must read it. One must read it like any other book. That is not to say that the Bible is only another book, but that the Bible is a book and should be read the way all books are read. The biblical authors expected their books to be read and understood in that way. They used the language and literary forms common in their day. Their books make sense and reward the patient reader with genuine understanding and insight. The meaning of the Bible is straightforward and unmysterious. Many miracles are recorded in the Bible, but what is most remarkable about the Bible is the Bible itself. In it God speaks through the miracle of human language. Through language, modern readers can understand the thoughts of biblical authors who lived thousands of years ago in a culture very different from our own.
-John Sailhamer, The Meaning of the Pentateuch
Disciples
Some people claim that we can be Christians without necessarily becoming disciples. I wonder, then, why the last thing Jesus told us was to go into the world, making disciples of all nations, teaching them to obey all that He commanded? You’ll notice that he didn’t add, ‘But, hey, if that’s too much to ask, tell them to just become Christians–you know, the people who get to heaven without having to commit to anything.’
-Francis Chan, Crazy Love
