Quiet

This morning I read Zephaniah (one of those books near the middle with no fingerprints or underlines) and was grabbed by one part of a verse in the 3rd chapter:

3:17 The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.

I looked up the Hebrew word for "quiet" in a lexicon and a theological dictionary and you know what I found? It means, "quiet." I was hoping for some hidden, obscure facet in this gem of a word but, as best as I can tell, it means what it says. Quiet. "He will quiet you by his love."

When I was a kid, if I did something wrong or got hurt doing something I shouldn't have been doing, I'd try to blubber out an explanation to my mom between deep gasps for breath. I notice my daughter does the same thing, like when she got stung by a wasp a couple of weeks ago. She wanted to tell me what she was doing as she sobbed and all I wanted to do was hold her close to me and love her (even though my wife was the one she ran to - my impulse was to hold her, rub her back, and say "Shhhh."). I didn't need an explanation. I needed to be her daddy.

In Luke 15, a son leaves home as badly as one could. He alienates everyone and wastes what his daddy gave him on trying to outdo Solomon in Ecclesiastes. He realizes his terrible, terrible choice and decides to go home. He prepares his speech but before he can get it all out his daddy starts throwing a homecoming party. I think of Rembrandt's painting and hear the father saying, "Shhhh," quieting the young man with his love.

I pray that we all experience this kind of loving forgiveness and that instead of preparing our explanations, excuses, or whatever it is occupying our minds that the love of God would quiet you and embrace you like you've never experienced before.

Scripture Memory

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A couple of years ago, I started meeting every week with a guy who is on staff with the Navigators. We got to know each other and developed a friendship out of which we started the discipline of reviewing verses of the Bible that we were memorizing. My friend had been memorizing parts of the Bible longer than I've been alive and I was just getting started with the Topical Memory System. After about eighteen months I had memorized the sixty passages in that pack and have moved on to memorize other passages.

Psalm 119:9,11 says, "How can a young man keep his way pure? By guarding it according to your word. I have stored up your word in my heart that I might not sin against you." That was kind of the reason I started memorizing parts of the Bible. Also, you know, it's one of those things I thought I was supposed to do and, I felt a little guilty that I could quote Homer Simpson better than Jesus. So, I did it. At times I wondered why it was so important to me do something that did not come naturally to me at all. Was it misguided piety? Was it so I could rattle off verses and impress people? I really didn't have that kind of "look at me!" motivation, I just wanted to do it. I think it helped my preaching a bit, but I've never been able to figure out where the discipline fit into my life and ministry.

Until tonight.

Tonight, I was getting ready to leave the church when one of my guys had a buddy with him who wanted to talk about baptism. While talking about baptism the guy from my church turned to the other and said, "Are you saved?" I had assumed, wrongly, that if someone was asking about baptism that, well, they were already following Christ. The fellow said, "I don't really know." So, we immediately turned around and the three of us went into my office. I asked him if he even understood the question: what does "saved" mean? I wanted to start at the beginning and explain the human condition. Without thinking I started in sharing and explaining:

Romans 3:23 Romans 6:23 Romans 5:8 Romans 10:9 Romans 10:13 Ephesians 2:8,9 Romans 8:1 2 Corinthians 5:17 Luke 9:23

By the time I got into my truck to drive home I was thinking, "Whoa!" It was amazing to see how a simple discipline meant so much in explaining the love of God in Jesus Christ not with my own words but with God's Word. I carry no authority. It does.

And, because of storing up those words in my heart, one new guy knows the truth about God's love for him and is following Jesus.

Best. Evening. Ever.

More Please

I'm doing some extra-curricular reading at the momement that is meant to generate some ideas I can use for an upcoming Theology of Ministry paper (due in November). It is definitely stirring my mind, but like I experienced during my month away at Asbury, it's stirring my heart as well.

I joked yesterday in the sermon I preached that once I finished the two papers I turned in on Friday I wanted to read something not on a syllabus. So, I started reading a book on Old Testament Theology (I didn't get a single laugh out of that in two services. They must really think I'm a nerd!). The book, linked below, is Dennis Kinlaw's Lectures in Old Testament Theology. Dr. Kinlaw is a bit of a spiritual hero to me. I try to read Preaching in the Spiritonce a year, and I love listening to his sermons and lectures on my iPhone. He taught at Asbury University and Asbury Theological Seminary and so I knew that his book on OT Theology would be right up my alley.

I've only read the first chapter and already have been turned upside down a bit. The essence of that first chapter is that God wants to be known and we can either cooly observe God or we can really know God. Israel's purpose for the Bible wasn't to record things so that modern people could anaylze every jot and tittle and a sterile laboratory; they wrote it down so that future generations could know God. (This isn't to discount serious study of the language, literature, and theology of the Bible. It's the opposite: the more we know the more we can know who God is.)

In this presentation, Dr. Kinlaw shines even more light on something I was thinking while reading the introduction of Harald Linström's book Wesley & Sanctification. One scholar accuses Wesley of being merely an empiricist when it comes to theology, which is certainly a valid argument. Wesley was concerned with the experience of the Christian faith. However, as I read that paragraph in Lindström's book I kept thinking, "But Wesley wanted us to experience the God of the Bible that he studied vigorously - it was a melding of heart and mind. He wants us to know (mind) the God we are to love with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength." Lindström made the same point a couple pages after I thought this, but it did not come alive for me until I read chapter 1 in Kinlaw's book. It's not gnosticism, it's intimacy.

Oh, that we might get more of this! Read more, study more, but do it to get more of God!

Lectures in Old Testament Theology
By Dennis F. Kinlaw, John N. Oswalt
Buy on Amazon

Reading

I'm finally done with two of the three papers assigned to me before I left Asbury last month. The other one is not due until November 7th and I am excited to get started on that one, but for now, for the weekend, I'm going to relax and read some of the other books I picked up while in Wilmore. I picked up several books from The Francis Asbury Society including the one I started today - Heroes of the Holy Life. This book contains several mini-biographies of Christians who were deeply concerned with holiness and filled with the Holy Spirit. It's been an inspiring read for the two hours I've had it open. I recommend it. There is a lot of good to be gleaned from Christian biographies and this one is a good starting place. Your heart might get so captivated by one of the people that you read a fuller treatment of their lives somewhere else.

Two Exerpts from Today's Reading.

The American Jesus is more a pawn than a king, pushed around in a complex game of cultural (and countercultural) chess, sacrificed here for this cause and there for another."

Stephen Prothero, American Jesus quoted in Stephen Seamands, Give Them Christ

And, sadly, Jeremiah 36:24 (NIV) "The king and all his attendants who heard all these words showed no fear, nor did they tear their clothes."

Both cause me to tremble.

Accepted

The cross proclaims that when you and I were at our worst, God loved us the most. We may have been rejected by others and tempted to despise ourselves, but we are infinitely loved by God. The cross settles the issue once and for all. No matter how others may define us or how me may be tempted to define ourselves, God has pronounced the final verdict: Accepted through his blood.

Wounds that Heal - Dr. Steve Seamands

My assumption coming into the DMin program was that none of it would impact my heart. I was completely and utterly wrong.

Community and Character

Somewhere I heard the quotation, "You can acquire anything in solitude except character." We need the whole community to test us, to refine us, to enable us to develop aspects of character including strength, kindness, and wisdom that we cannot gain without trials. We all need critics and rebukers, malcontents and misfits - even if (especially if?) these cause us pain - so that our feasting is virtuous and honorable.

Marva J. Dawn. The Sense of the Call: A Sabbath Way of Life for Those Who Serve God, the Church, and the World (p. 219). Kindle Edition.

Indeed. This is the danger for us who live too much in our own heads - we never get tested by the blessing of our community and end up stunting our own sanctification. Blessed is the one whose community is, in the name of our Triune God, building one another up in love (Hebrews 10:24-25).

Seek First

I'm not sure I've ever worked as hard academically as I have these last two and a half weeks. That's a confession, not a brag. It actually feels a bit natural to commit wholeheartedly to something I feel I'm good at.

I only mention that part of my time back at seminary to set up a huge contrast. Forasmuch as I have felt alive in the academic environment during the time I've been here, it is a pitiful tiny thing compared to the gracious work of God in my heart. God brought people, books, and ideas into my life since 29 July, but none of that compares to the Holy Spirit come to break me of my self-centered dependence.

This isn't to say that the work is complete or even that large work has been wrought. It is to say that for the first time in a long time God has drawn the attention of my heart to him in an inescapable way. I spent much time since I came to know Christ putting him off, saying "Wait till I'm ready to surrender every bit of me to your will." With that attitude, that day will not arrive until I stand before the Judge (Hebrews 9:27). Now my resistance is at an all time low and the deep attractiveness of God's holiness is pulling me toward him.

In one of the many evidences of God's great heart work since I've been here, Dr. Robert Coleman came to visit with our cohort yesterday. He has long been one of my heroes of the faith and a man deeply passionate for God because he was a man deeply changed by God at the kneeling rail in Hughes Auditorium across the street in 1950. I listened to him say some pretty moving and profound things yesterday, particularly about holiness, but the thing I keep coming back to is his recounting of the Asbury College revivals in 1950 and 1970. There were lots of questions about that. The underlying question was "How can this happen again in my church?" Dr. Coleman wisely counseled that we cannot create revival but we can be ready by our willingness to lay ourselves bare when it comes. He reminded us of Psalm 85:6 (ESV) "Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?" to point out that the point of reviving us isn't to make much of us but so that God is the central focus of our whole lives. Our rejoicing isn't because we feel good about it but because God is so great and so magnificent that our hearts can't help but rejoice in him.

This is what I perceive right now. The attractiveness of God's holiness isn't about me but about him. My holiness isn't about doing things right but about being obsessed with God with my whole heart because God's greatest gift to us is himself. Why wouldn't I want as much of that gift as I could possibly get?