The Changing Table - Laboring

As my impending fatherhood comes very near to fruition, and as my daughter Kensli beats up my wife from the inside, I can’t help but think of Romans 8:22-23:

For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

I started this changing table back in late August, just a couple of months after we found out that Patty was expecting (I started to say “we were expecting,” but there are some mothers who have pointed out to me that there is no “we” in pregnancy. I beg to differ: conception is definitely a team effort. TMI, right?). Patty was getting back into the swing of school and people left and right were ooing and ahhing at the prospect of babies and pastels and soft fabrics; you can come see our nursery if you have no idea what I’m talking about. However, for me, the idea that we had just taken part in God breathing life into another human being still wasn’t “real” to me…it blew my mind. Eve’s postpartum words “I have gotten a man with the help of the LORD” hadn’t sunk in yet, so I set out on a project to solidify in my mind the reality that it is no longer “Patty and I,” but “my family.”

As I started designing and planning the changing table, all of my thoughts were on the end result and the images of the beautiful heirloom piece that I had envisioned. I thought of the eye-catching beauty of a wood I was unfamiliar with, of the guests walking by and seeing it and leaving our house saying, “Truly, I never knew beauty and elegance and majestic craftsmanship until I saw your poop-cleaning table!” I thought of Kensli’s husband and I moving this table into their nursery one day as we prepared for their first child. Then I started drawing and cutting the boards, and the visions started to blur.

As I started measuring and marking, making initial cuts with my very entry-level tools and equipment, I soon realized that this wasn’t going to be easy: some bad cuts and poor planning soon turned this vision of grandeur into a pain in the butt…and I stopped working on the project for 3 months.

Come December, Patty began decorating trees and wreaths and warm, cozy smelling candles, and as she decorated the Christmas tree she put up the ornament of our first Christmas together and gave me that sideways glance and a smile. She chuckled and said, “Next year, the ornaments are going to have to be a lot higher on the tree!” and I was sold. Again, the vision of what was to come filled me with vigor and resolve, and I soon headed back out to the shop.

Though the wood had yellowed from sitting unprotected so long, a few hours of sanding peeled back the raw beauty of potential, the promise of “what could be” that I find so captivating in woodworking. Though my tools had gathered dust on the shelves, a little sharpening, a few drops of oil, and a jolt of electricity brought them back to life, and I set my hands to the task once more. Nearly every day throughout December, I spent late nights out in the shop, meticulously shaping the table into what I had pictured in the beginning, seeing each board, each joint, each grain pattern against a background of the life and love that this table would witness.

In that light, I wanted something that would bring some significance and timeless "weight" to this project; man is but a breath, but the word of the Lord endures forever. So, I cut and moulded some planks and had Proverbs 31:28-29 engraved, then stained around them (check out your bible or go to biblegateway.com). You can see the table top below as I started to join the engraved border, making a nice backdrop and fence for the changing pad.

 And through my laboring, God began, again, to work on my heart:

The runner races with the finish line as his aim. The farmer sows with the harvest as his reward. The mother labors with her child as her prize. And the Christian daily dies with forever Life as his joy. In God’s story of redemption, there are some epic, cosmic, eternity-shaping exchanges, like Christ exchanging His glory for our shame and God exchanging our shame for Christ’s glory. Christ also said that if we would come after Him, we must lay our lives down here, so that we can pick them up again forever. It is death here, and life everafter; we can also make the opposite exchange, choosing life here for death everafter. But when Christ comes to dwell in us, He begins to open our eyes to see the surpassing joy set before us that outshines every gain and loss here in this life. This is why Paul can say in Philippians that to keep on living is Christ to him and to die at that moment is gain – if you kill me, I’ll be with Christ. If you let me live, I’ll run with the gospel of Christ. If you imprison me, I’ll witness to the guards. Bring what you may – my greatest treasure is unshakable because it is Christ Himself, and since you can’t take from me what I treasure most, I have nothing to lose! Go ahead, take my cobwebs and my crumbs, because my gold will never depart from me!

That’s having a vision of what is to come; that’s laboring for what will be, though it is not yet here. It is our prize, Christ Himself, that we fix our eyes on as we labor toward Him day by day, helped by His Spirit every step of the way. “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.” Hebrews 12:1-2

The Changing Table - Cultivation

It’s been a very long time since I’ve written for this blog, and there’s a few good reasons: for one, I felt awkward “chronicling” the story of my stupidity and my flight away from God. I understand that it is not primarily the story of a stupid young man, but the story of a great and gracious God pursuing and rescuing a stupid young man; if my shame brings glory to the name of Christ and hope to other stupid young men, then, as David said, “I will make myself yet more contemptible than this!” The second reason for the long silence is the beautiful distraction of thrilled and terrified preparations to welcome my daughter, my first child, into the world. In retrospect, the things we’ve been busy doing in readying our family for its third member haven’t really taken up that much time over seven and a half months; but like streaks of sunlight bursting through clouds, the anticipation has outshone most other thoughts and happily burned my eyes so that whatever else I look at, I see flashes and outlines of my impending fatherhood…and it makes me smile. The third reason is directly related to the second: since Patty and I are about to embark on the most beautiful, difficult, and ambitious journey we’ve ever known, I decided to embark on a smaller one, made of wood - I’ve been building a changing table for Kensli Raye Kuriyama.

Deciding what to build first for Kensli was pretty easy: she’s not going to be able to play with a rocking horse until she’s older, giving me time to build one. She’s not going to have mountains of toys for a little while, so I’ve got time to build a toy chest. She’s not going to be Houdini, so I didn’t want to “practice” my novice furniture-making skills on someone so fragile by building a crib/death trap. So my wife, ever the defender of children, lovingly suggested I build something that could not endanger our daughter:  “How about a changing table?” Brilliant! There’s only three things I have to accomplish with a changing table:

1. Hold up an eight-pound baby

2. Don’t give her tetanus

3. Make it semi-attractive enough that I don’t immediately depreciate the value of our home.

I psyched myself up, confident that I could meet the standards; if not, then two out of three ain’t bad! We thought that, hopefully, our children won’t be in diapers forever, so we wondered what we could do with the changing table then? Patty didn’t find it very funny that by the time our children will be done with the changing table, I’ll probably be back in diapers and will need the table myself. So we compromised on a changing table/dresser; I drew up a simple plan, drew out measurements, and started shopping for wood. For this I decided to use aspen, with which I’ve never worked or really even seen in lumber form. I’ve only seen either the trees or aspen wood shavings, but I found edge-glued panels at Lowe’s that I thought would make it interesting. As you can see from this picture of an aspen sauna room that I robbed from the internet, aspen is a pretty soft white wood that kind of handles like pine, but has far fewer knots and a much more even grain. In fact, I thought at the onset that this aspen was pretty plain.

However, after I had prepped some tester pieces of the aspen and started to apply some stain (Patty wanted something darker to go with the rest of the nursery furniture) I was blown away by what the stain unlocked! Here is a picture of the bottom of the top of the table after I stained it the first time after I routed the channels (I believe they’re called “dadoes”) for the sides, back, and center panels.

You can see how the grain really popped! I had no idea how much figure was in this wood, how much character and shape and rhythm it had, just waiting for something to reveal it! Yup, I feel some analogies coming on!

I’ve been called many things: an idiot, a genius, the world’s most handsome man, “that guy from Ace of Cakes,” etc. One thing I’ve never been accused of is patience, stick-to-it-iveness, or having attention to detail (or a healthy BMI, for that matter). That’s why I find it so odd that I enjoy woodworking so much: you have room to slip up a little in carpentry, politics, and neurosurgery – but not in woodworking. And there is no task in woodworking more painstaking and monotonous than sanding. Through hours of hand-numbing work, your task is to remove every blemish on the surface of the wood, to lay low what is high and bring high what is low, to transform splinter into splendor. It is sweat and strain applied to what the wood is for the sake of what the wood can become. It takes something of a dreamer to be a woodworker – someone who, for the sake of what will be, begins and endures through what is. Immediately, my thoughts turn to our sanctification, of our transformation “from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18), how Paul implores us to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12-13). There are two agents in our transformation: God, through His Spirit, and us, as we work with the Spirit step-by-step toward Christ. For instance, a good farmer can labor long and hard each day, but he knows that he is dependent on God to make the clouds rain, the sun shine, and the seed grow. A good farmer prays for rain and sunshine, but he also gets up every day and hoes weeds. This is our partnership.

But there is another partnership that has also become beautiful to me while I’ve been working on this table: cultivation. In Genesis 1, as God is finishing His last day of creating all things, He makes Adam and Eve and gives them this charge: “And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth’” (v. 28). God sets mankind in the middle of a garden, which is in the middle of chaos. What’s the difference between a garden and wilderness? Cultivation. Cultivation is man making good things out of what God made and called “good.” Creation + Dominion = Cultivation. The Bible begins with a garden filled with God’s presence and ends with a city filled with God’s presence; so how do you get from a garden to a city? Cultivation. Agriculture, industry, commerce, art: these are not inventions of man but outflowings of the imago Dei, the image of God in which we are made (“Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness. And let them have dominion” (Genesis 1:26). These sections in Genesis are what theologians call the “Cultural Mandate,” the first command from God in which He said to us (paraphrased, of course), “I’ve made a big world and made it good, and in the middle of it I’ve cultivated a garden. Go and do likewise with the rest of the world. And have babies, because you’re going to need the help.” And this isn’t the only time that this topic comes up in Scripture: David glorified God for the tasks He’s given us in Psalm 8 (“Yet You have made him [man] a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of Your hands; You have put all things under his feet” [vs.5-6]). In the New Testament, Paul speaks several times about how and why we work, like in Colossians 3:23 (“Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men”) and 2 Thessalonians 3:12 (“Now such persons we command and encourage in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living.”). Psalms and Proverbs are replete with references to hard work and bearing fruit and earning a wage and a living, along with a plethora of praises to God for the works of His hands. This is God’s likeness and image in us, that we also enjoy creating, building, designing, crafting, improving, beautifying. This is a good and gracious thing when done in the glory and delight of the Father!  

And this is why I love sanding and staining: in this process, I see the work of God’s hand in the wood and the work of my hands in the preparation, and see them explode in beauty, a dance between Creator and creation – God inviting me to work and play.

And They Call It "Ekklesia" Part III



Now his older son was in the field, and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. And he said to him, “Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fattened calf, because he has received him back safe and sound.” But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and entreated him, but he answered his father, “Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!” And he said to him, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.”

Luke 15:25-32

                Enter the stage in my life that I like to call my “Providential Poverty” stage; I was broke, barely scraping by, and developing brilliant ways to spice up the daily meal of Ramen noodles and hot dogs. Due to a concoction of pride and stupidity, I managed to lose a couple of jobs, and finding a new job proved difficult when, for the last couple of years, the only long-term position I held was terminated because of my theft. This was the most shameful and humbling (read: humiliating) time in my life – with one hand I had slapped the world and God in the face and spat out, “I don’t need You!” and then had to extend the other hand and ask for alms.

In the height of my thieving, I was working about five nights a week and taking home around $400 every night, and at that time, I had roughly $300 worth of bills every month (when you split squalor with a few roommates, squalor becomes surprisingly affordable). So, if you do your math, working three nights paid for about four months worth of bills, and working two weeks covered my rent and utilities for a year. The rest was fun money – and I had a lot of “fun” with it. The next year, when the money was gone, as I was developing a taste for dry, crunchy spaghetti as a snack, there was a very sharp familiarity in having no fun money as there was when I walked with a couple dozen Benjamins in my wallet: I was just as lonely, just as dead, just as bitter, and just as broken.

An afternoon in early spring, not many weeks after that February night arguing with God, I was sitting in the cool sunlight outside my little apartment playing my guitar by myself when my neighbor came walking by with her dog. She was an older single woman whose grey hair seemed out of place with the rest of her bright face. She sat on the log bench across from me and asked what I was playing. Confessing that I only knew a handful of songs, each consisting of only four chords, and that they were simple worship songs, I admitted that though I didn’t have much skill, I got great joy from playing them. Pleasantly surprised, she asked to which church I belonged, and though I don’t remember much about that conversation, her last word broadsided me: I had no answer to give her – there was nowhere that I belonged.

Tired of having no place to belong, and even more tired of paying for movie rentals with change from my couch, I received and accepted a job offer to teach 5^th graders for a steady paycheck. Now that I was employed by the State of Texas as an educator, it was “Goodbye, poverty! Hello, slightly-lighter degree of poverty!” Now that I was able to afford the essentials that a young man needs to live, like high-speed internet and Hot Pockets, God began teaching me a lesson that, in retrospect, didn’t take that long for it to “stick”: money, trinkets, toys, and the thrill that they bring are utterly, ultimately void. Whether my pockets were full, empty, or somewhere in between, the person looking back at me in the mirror was exactly the same. When I had money, I threw money around and was entertained and distracted; when I was broke, I was trying to get my hands on more and was busy and distracted. It was always at night by myself, with the sound of the rhythmic ricketing of a ceiling fan filling the room as random headlights flashed on my bedroom wall through the blinds that the emptiness in me was so loud and heavy that I seemed pinned to the bed. It was in the quiet dullness of the mornings that I avoided the mirror every bit that I could. A man deep in debt hates the sight of a checkbook, and when the bill collectors hound him, the sound of the phone ringing brings dread; this is how I felt at the thought of having to look at myself, of having to examine who I had become, because I knew that if I were tried I would be found terribly wanting. This followed me to the small town in which I had accepted a teaching job.

Now, closer to home, my dad began to beckon (though it felt like hounding) me to join my family on Sunday mornings, and I eventually relented. Sitting next to them, I found myself in the place and among the people that I had sworn off two years prior, and they call it “ekklesia” – the Church.

To be continued…again again…

And They Call It "Ekklesia" Part II

               

                After giving sight to my eyes and calling me into adoption under His Fatherhood, God soon began reconstructing everything else I clinged to; we will refer to this adjustment of life to the heart ignited by His Spirit as “hand-new eye coordination.” In a gracious and life-altering error, I was robbed of an athletic credit during my senior year of high school, forcing me to take a semester of P.E. I found myself in a gym daily with eleven girls my age, three of whom were pregnant, and each of us were required to do a very small amount of jogging and a great deal of kickball. Wholly uninterested in this, I asked our coach if, after our prerequisite jogging, I could just walk laps rather than play dodge ball and probably damage a teenager’s fetus. He acquiesced, and I spent a semester walking laps and reading a pocket New Testament every day until nothing but a duct tape cover and wadded pages remained of it. Through the opportunities granted by this unfortunate 5^th Period assignment, God ignited in me the greatest delight of my life: Him, as He has revealed Himself in Scripture. This consumed me all semester, and on New Year’s Eve 2002, in the southeast corner of a conference room in a lodge at Plains Baptist Assembly, I submitted to the call to ministry.

                Scrapping plans for a literary degree at an East Coast university, God beautifully confined me to Wayland Baptist University (much to my early disappointment), where I was to study Religion and English. Before graduation from high school, my mantra had been, “Wait ‘til graduation – I’m gonna leave this town in the dust and go on to bigger and better things.” Then, in college, being transformed by the Gospel, my mantra had only slightly changed: “Wait ‘til this graduation – I’m gonna leave this town in the dust and go on to bigger and better things.” During my undergrad, I continued serving at the small, waning church; here, I was progressively instructed in ministry by a very small, very vocal minority in our little church that, while we wanted young people in the youth program, we wanted their families there more (because families write checks), and we certainly didn’t want the kind of youth we had coming every week.

Ninety percent of our youth were from the wrong side of the tracks with parents only slightly interested in them, let alone attending a small, old, blindingly Caucasian church. These kids were supposedly the wrong color, wore the wrong clothes, had the wrong length of hair, used the wrong kind of English, and emanated the wrong aroma (as teenage boys do when they have no one to wash their clothes or enlighten them about the beauty of God’s grace imparted to us through deodorant – antiperspirant is what theologians call a “common grace”). Though I was criticized for partnering with other small youth groups outside of our denomination (when the big church in our denomination ignored our little church), I was okay with all of the griping, scheming, gossiping, and backbiting – it made me a martyr in my own prideful mind, and let’s be frank: I’m always ok with self-aggrandizement .

                Since I didn’t return a great deal of the Pharisaic fervor to that vocal minority, they turned their sights on my pastor, who had a family to think of, and he succumbed to “preaching for the parsonage,” effectively using me as a bullet shield between him and the Inquisition. Frustrated for having to fight the church to “do church,” I left for slightly-less-yellow pastures. Next, I spent months in a nearby community as an interim youth pastor while the church was searching for a new pastor. To summarize, a gentleman vying for this position left me out to dry as well, since an overly-ambitious college student is an easy scapegoat. Very discouraged, I finally got some great news that my spiritual hero, a man who had discipled me early in my faith and was influential in me accepting the call to ministry, was coming back to the area to lead youth at a large church around here. Stoked beyond belief, I jumped at the chance to be his intern, willingly traveling over 200 miles roundtrip every week just to do that. However, as time passed and I conveyed to him that I was struggling with my calling and my walk with Him, he publicly shamed me in front of dozens of other parents and college students helping with the youth. Hurt, enraged, ashamed, and broken, I threw my hands up; rather than recognizing all of these events as evidence that we all need a Savior to impart to us a new nature, I did what a proud, arrogant, self-righteous young man would do: I folded my arms and told Christ, “If this is Your Church, You can keep Her.” As a perfect bridegroom would, He graciously and sternly answered, “She’s my Bride – if you want Me, you must take Her, as well.” In an ill-advised launch into willing rebellion against God, I responded, “So be it,” and dove face-first into the “dark night of the soul,” the bleakest, coldest two years of my life in which I was crushed between the icy hands of Alone and Empty. I used friends, girls, entertainment, money, and anything and everything else I could find to numb the aching void in me; I betrayed good friends, manipulated good girls, and cut every lifeline I could find. After being fired from a local bar and grill for embezzling a few thousand dollars (this is all after I was saved and served in the ministry for 4 years or so), I left town, thinking I could start anew. The problem with running from brokenness is that the source is me – and there’s nowhere to which I can run from myself. After enduring the same dark night of the soul in another city, I eventually found myself in my small apartment, broke and cold one night in February, asking God why He wouldn’t leave me alone: “I blew it! I left You! Why can’t You do the same?! I screwed up my end of the bargain, so we’re done – just leave me be!”

                That night, as He did in a small lodge in the Colorado Rockies, He whispered to me the same thing He had said years ago: “You have nothing to offer Me, nothing by which to earn My attention or affection – but I have everything to offer you. I have come to adopt you, not to hire you. I have come to make you not My employee, but My son.” It is God’s kindness that leads us to repentance (Rom 2:4), and this was a most kind invitation to come back home – home, where there awaited the family that I had left behind; and they call it “ekklesia” – the Church.

To be continued...again...

And They Call It "Ekklesia" Part I

This post is what I hope to be the first of a series, chronicling the calling, doubts, joys, pains, victories, and heartaches of what God is doing in the hearts and lives of my brothers, sisters, and I who hunger for the glory of God in Plainview, Texas. I feel the urge to record these things at the relative outset of this journey (although God has been orchestrating these things from before the foundations of the earth), in order that transparent honesty be fostered, to portray the yearning hearts who hunger for Christ magnified in our small city, and the quest to find Him worshipped in it and through it. I write these things now so that, at the end of it, I could not look back and claim that I had it figured out, that I had planned or foreseen these things, or give any credit to a blasphemous notion that it was anything of my own devising that led to what, I pray, brings God great glory by lives transformed by the Spirit of God through Jesus Christ, and that these lives, set free by His Gospel, turn in overflow of thankfulness and affection for Christ, and raise their hands to Him and shout, “Worthy!”

Similar to our entrance into the MetaNarrative of God’s story, here in between the “Already” and the “Not Yet,” I begin this story in media res, with God having already done so many mighty things before this writing. As a testimony of nothing more than a man born blind who was given sight by this one they call Jesus, I will obviously be limited to my very finite perspective; ergo, if I assume wrongly of anyone in word or deed, I apologize and ask for grace. I can only avow to the things that I have seen, and can only come claiming to know one thing: Christ, and Him crucified. In that heart, I begin this record with the aim of God’s glory, my humbling and sanctification, and as a witness to the grandeur and fame of the living God, who has done and can do mighty things in Plainview.

                Enter a young man, born into a loving, believing family. As a boy, I lived with a heart of inferiority and a lack of a sense of belonging; for instance, I was born into a family of athletes that, from my perspective, seemed to experience so much joy and connection through such games. Born with severe asthma, I simply couldn’t keep up: I was born with weaknesses not found in my siblings or friends. From this, I always felt less-than and perceived myself to be a disappointment to my parents, though I can point to nothing in my life to ever give me that notion. In response to this, my wicked heart sought out my other giftings, which were not as present in my siblings and friends, and I set my hands to construct them into a temple in which I could worship my greatest idol: me. I began to polish and hone my sharp tongue, wit, humor, and insight to become instruments with which to hack and hew at everyone I knew in a destructive effort to reduce everyone else to the feeling of worthlessness that I felt. Over two decades of life, these gifts in me began to become my identity and god, because without them, I was left with only the weight of the boulder of worthlessness that loomed just overhead. I hurt so many people, was so bitter and spiteful, so proud and so full of gall, and to this day, my inner heart still yearns to erect these idols once more.

                Then one day in a small lodge in the Colorado Rockies, the One I had heard stories of all my life, whispered a message that He has had to daily speak again ever since: “You have nothing to offer Me, nothing by which to earn My attention or affection – but I have everything to offer you. I have come to adopt you, not to hire you. I have come to make you not My employee, but My son.” The boulder of worthlessness fell that day, but fell to become a bedrock and a foundation, fell to become the only platform from which I could rightfully receive that adoption into sonship; because, only founded on the realization that I could not merit His approval and estimation were my hands freed to take hold of His, to be lifted up rather than struggling to clamber up His mountain. This was spit and dirt, a hand on my eyes, and my life since has been one of becoming accustomed to sight.

                In June of 2002, I was welcomed into the King’s family, adopted as one of His sons. In December of 2002, I was welcomed to join His sons and daughters as He sent them out in the ministry of reconciliation, to announce that He is redeeming everything back to Himself and His Kingdom. This took the form of a small, languishing group of people, divided and arguing about how to get more people through the front door. And they call it “ekklesia” – the Church.

To be continued…

A Brief Discourse in Logic: The Hope, Beauty, and Reason of the Gospel

Patty was gone to a conference this past week, leaving Wednesday night and not getting back until late Sunday night. She spent most of those days at “The Groaning Cosmos: Sin, Suffering, and the Gospel,” which was a conference for the Association of Biblical Counselors, hosted at The Village Church in Flowermound, Texas. If you’ve got some free time, google it – buy the audio, I promise it’s worth it; and most of the speakers there (Paul Tripp, Matt Chandler, Jeremy Lelek, Tullian Tchividjian, Bob Kellemen, and Elyse Fitzpatrick) either have free podcasts or are frequent twitterers. But this isn’t a plug.

This past week was a very, very long week with Patty gone. I found myself constantly wanting to call or text, hoping someone would buy me an iPhone so we could have some facetime. I listened to songs that made me think of her and paused from time to time at the home screen on my phone, where my wallpaper is one of her bridal portraits. In the midst of it, I started thinking about my older sister, who lost her husband in an accident a few months ago, how, with red face and running mascara, she would sit and look at his pictures on her phone or camera, occasionally pausing to touch the small digital face smiling back at her. And in the midst of all that we felt in those times, I found myself feeling and thinking one thing more poignantly than all: how I yearned to feel that way for Christ. This is why I feel compelled to write the following:

A Brief Discourse in Logic: The Hope, Beauty, and Reason of the Gospel

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son, whom He appointed the heir of all things, through whom also He created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature, and He upholds the universe by the word of His power. After making purification for sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name He has inherited is more excellent than theirs. – Hebrews 1:1-4

I think of a watershed, in which the ocean fuels the clouds, rain falls and forms the headwaters, which forms rivers and creeks and flows through valleys, pooling into lakes and trickling down into aquifers, from which I draw water through the tap in my kitchen. Suppose I lived in a land where the ocean were toxic, the rain subsequently so, and where the headwaters were poisoned by that rain: each part in the process would likewise be tainted, including what fills my glass and, truly, all water that leaves my house and returns to the ground. One could see that all we consumed and all we exuded was tainted, and that this slowly kills everything. To combat this, one might install filters and build treatment plants by which to combat the toxin; this sounds reasonable, but if the ocean is poisoned, then the toxin in the rain on these headwaters is equally pervasive, and therefore the poison rains upon the whole country, infiltrating every substance under the sky. So, would the materials tainted by toxic rain be effective in cleansing the water of the toxin of which they themselves are comprised? No: the whole country is poisoned. No effort to use broken things to fix other broken things ever ends in a fix. A broken machine that manufactures broken tools will never be repaired by the broken tools it manufactures.

So we struggle in efforts to construct a better filter and build a better treatment plant. We struggle to clean the waters before we drink them, and then shake our fists when the water that leaves our home is toxic still. In all of human history, we have suggested and strained toward better filtration, but have never succeeded. Though we alter the color by inserting dyes of various hues, or the taste by injecting something to cover the palate, or the odor by mixing in a fragrance, we have never made any advances in removing the toxin. In this land, no man has ever poured for himself a glass of pure water.

What would happen if there were a change in the ocean? Suppose that pure water fell from pure clouds, formed pure headwaters that filled pure rivers. How long before the water I drank became pure? How long before the water I returned to the ground were pure? There would naturally be no poison in my glass or pan or tub or sink, and subsequently no poison flowing from my house back into the ground. There would be no need for filtration and treatment plants, which never achieved what they were built to accomplish. The greatest problem was a source issue, only solved by a change in the source, and all of the subsequent toxicity could be purified by that root change. But how do we wash what is defiled when what we have to wash it with is itself defiled?

So what hope have we? We see that the poison spoils all, fatal from its source. The only hope is for someone or something big enough to change the source. But for such a task, who must this being be, and what must he be like? He must necessarily be entirely untainted by that toxin if there is any hope that he could cleanse it. Therefore, he must be perfect in power to change the source and to remain untainted by it, and perfect in purity, not being from this spoiled ecosystem. However, to have the power to purify and the desire to purify are two different things; therefore, he must have motive, for what would a being perfect in power and purity find for himself in powerfully purifying our land? We may answer, “What if he also be perfect in love?” But if he is perfect in love, he must love perfectly that which is most lovely and perfect, and that would obviously be himself, perfect in power, purity, and love, not us or our poisoned world. If he is perfect in these things, then he has no need, especially from toxic creatures in a toxic world. Therefore, we come, seemingly, to a dead end: even if there be one who can change the source, what reason can there be for him to choose to do so? The who seems the easier answer; the why is more perplexing. Here at this impasse, perhaps, it is revealed that the toxin has so perpetuated itself in our bodies and our country that our vision is blurred.

If this being, perfect in power, purity, and love, who perfectly loves what is perfectly lovely, namely himself, then is it not in the nature of love to display and share what is lovely? When I’ve found a great restaurant or recipe, isn’t my first reaction to share the news of it? If I love a musician’s work, don’t I play it for others to hear? If I love my wife and her beauty, do I not naturally praise her and remark on what I find beautiful in her? By nature, love brings forth admiration, and admiration naturally brings forth praise of the object loved; praise is a public proclamation of the worthiness of that object to be loved, and naturally compels the lover to share it, and we delight to see others love it, as well. Therefore, if there be a perfect being, perfect in love, he must love himself most highly as he is the very thing most highly worthy of love; and in this highest and purest love, would he not naturally seek to share it, and have others delight in it? Though love can be poisoned, twisted to end on the lover rather on the object loved, one who is not tainted by the toxin would not be prone to do so, and indeed would be unable to do so, just as one who is not wounded is unable to bleed. Does it not follow that, if he loves perfectly what is perfectly lovely, namely himself, his greatest delight would be for his loveliness to be seen and delighted in? Wouldn’t his greatness happiness be in displaying his perfection, that others may see it and delight in it? So would not a being, perfect in power, purity, and love, delight to display his perfection by instigating contact with a poisoned world, changing the source of the toxin by providing a pure source that only he could offer, and thus rescue the citizens of that world from the poison, and see them turn to him and say joyfully, “How perfectly lovely you are!” This does not betray a deficiency in the being that needs affirmation and adoration, but a glad being that delights in the gladness that others find in what is perfectly lovely: himself.

This is the Gospel, that a perfect God, out of an overflow of His perfection, created all things and created within all things a longing to delight in what is most lovely. We introduced a toxin in Sin, which is by its very nature a rebellion against the perfect God by whom and for whom all things were created. Our poison has pervaded and infiltrated every corner of the country we inhabit, from the cosmic to the atomic, visible and invisible, and we are poisoned people in a poisoned world playing with poisoned things in an effort to fill a hole meant for an untainted Perfection. This is the necessity for the Gospel. The hope of the Gospel is for a perfect God who is perfect in power and purity that He may be able to rescue us. The joy of the Gospel is that through His Son Jesus Christ, He has rescued us! Christ was and is the antidote, plunged into the very heart of the poison, to absorb all of the poison, to become Himself the poison, and to be justly and rightly expunged from the land. In triumph, perfect in power, purity, and love, He conquered the venomous Sin and the end of Sin, Death; He conquered it fully and perfectly, being raised again untainted and alive, sounding the death knell of Sin and Death, and sitting at the right hand of the perfect God, making purification for the poison that plagued the land. Now, those whom He has purified, out of their delight in His loveliness and perfection, run back into the countryside to announce to all that hope has come, that there is a new ocean, a new rain, a new headwater from which flows living water. They sing unending songs for the Unending Beauty and gave all things for the Greatest Pleasure, which is the One who has come, to rescue and to be delighted in.

“It is the chief end of man to glorify God by enjoying Him forever.”

-John Piper

Deep Calls Unto Deep...

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+42&version=ESV

Above is a link to Psalm 42. Though not expressly written, most scholars agree that this is a song written by David, and many place it during the time that he is in exile, running from Saul, and cut off from the Temple.

There’ve been some fairly popular modern songs written around the first couple of verses in this song; I remember singing one of them from the hymnal. The songs in themselves may or may not sing of something true and right, but I think they’ve missed the point of this song wholesale: if we read on, David is talking about extreme anguish.

He has been cut off from connection with the worship of God and the fellowship of worshippers, and though he has not been totally “put out” from God (and gives no evidence of believing that to be true, contrarily still directing his cries and prayers toward God and His dwelling place), he is disconnected by force from the personal and communal worship in the Temple. He has dined on his tears (v. 3) day and night, so grieved that he foregoes food and water. But then, as we read on, we see one of the reasons why David was such an awesome man of faith, why he was called “a man after God’s own heart.” David shows himself, spiritually, to be a bad mammajamma, or if you’re Matt Chandler, you would say “this is why he’s varsity:” David begins speaking the Gospel to his own heart!

Look at who David is addressing in verse five: his soul. If we follow his logic here, he’s moved from expression of deep anguish to remembrance of connection with God, and immediately turns on his downcast soul: “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?” He starts doubting his doubt! That’s evidence of “varsity” league, my friend: rather than wallowing in the despair, he puts his own trouble and dismay on trial. And look at what he combats it with: remembrance. Remembrance, not only of “good times” in the past, because there is no guarantee that he will have “good times” in the future, but remembrance of the One who never fails: “Hope in God; for I shall again praise Him, my salvation and my God.” This is David’s chorus.

Faith is less an object of the heart, and more of the mind, and less an object of the mind, and more of experience. When we can’t explain the reason we have been commanded or in questions of God’s nature, we so often cop out by shrugging out the phrase “we just have to have faith.” But we grossly misinterpret what Christ means by having “the faith of a child” (Luke 18:17). I’ve watched my nephew jump into his mother’s arms from the trampoline a hundred times; the kid doesn’t hesitate. Why, then, does he confidently jump into her arms without a moment’s thought? Because she has caught him every single time: he has faith that she will catch him. Not once in Scripture are we ever commanded to have blind faith; on the contrary, just as in Psalm 42, we are called to remember who God is and what He has done, and to take faith in Him. We have a firm foundation for our faith in Him because He’s got a few thousand years worth of a perfect track record of being faithful that we can look to and say, “He has never failed – He will not fail here.” God keeps His word, period, and thus our faith is founded in Him; ergo, faith is not a “feeling” or even a choice only, but is vouchsafe obedience in the One who never fails – it is the culmination and natural result of knowing Him. Inversely, lack of faith is a libel on His name and character, and betrays a lack of knowing Him.

Patty and I are wrestling with this now: we’ve heard the calling for us to uproot and move to Dallas so that I can be equipped at seminary and she can be plugged in and flourish and blossom in her calling as a counselor. This means leaving behind family and friends we love dearly, in a place we have grown to love by God’s hand shaping our hearts. Even though this may only be for a season, the cost is the same as if it were for the rest of our lives: everything we hold on to in this world. However, as great as the cost is, and as sharply bent we are to fix our gaze on the “price tag” of obeying, David has words for us: “remember.” Remember, O my soul, how much sweeter He is than all the things that He has made. Remember, O my soul, that the path in which He leads me is pointed back to Him, so that following Him gets me more of Him. Remember, O my soul, that He disciplines me like a child, and that at times, “no” is better for my soul than “yes.” Remember, O my soul, that I have died to myself and the life I live is no longer mine, but His who lives in me. Remember, O my soul, that He is good. “Hope in God; for I shall again praise Him, my salvation and my God.”