love your wife

So Valorie and I watched "Fireproof" the other night, and while some of the acting was weak, and it was definitely chick-flick-esque, I must say it was worth watching. I was really convicted.

I'm really good for grumbling whenever Valorie asks me to do something. I'm either too tired, or I did it last time, or I don't feel like it, or whatever.

It wasn't like this when we were dating, though. When we were dating, I would follow her a half hour home every night to make sure she got there ok. I would do anything for her, because she was special and mysterious.

So what's changed? Is she less special or less mysterious? I would say no.

When people get divorced, it seems like the stock reason is that they are different people than they were when they got married. I actually think this is true, but I think that this is precisely why you should want to stay married--there's always something new to find out and know. We don't get married because we find someone boring or because we think we know everything about them. We get married because we find someone fascinating, and a lot of the fascination lies in that we don't know everything about that person.

I think I grumble and whine because I'm selfish, and because I've fallen victim to dwelling on the things about being married that never change--the responsibilities.

Thankfully, God used this movie to give me a little bit of a smack in the side of the head. I'm making it a point to actively love my wife, to "lead my heart" instead of following it (paraphrasing the movie here). It's amazing--when you do that, it becomes natural to love fully in the heart again. For some reason I can't explain, flight-of-fancy emotions follow closely behind a measured, deliberate love of the will. Beyond all comprehension, serving my wife with discipline quickly morphs into serving my wife with joy. I see her in a different light, and I want to learn about her, and keep learning about her.

So next time you're about to grumble at some request your wife has made, take that complaint captive, regardless of how the request was made or which instance of the same request it is. Wipe the frown off of your face (or better yet, stop it before it gets there), soften your hardened heart, and do it. Real love comes at a cost to the lover. Real love is the only love worth having. Don't be lukewarm. Love your wife.

what am I proud of?

Praise God for showing me the things that he shows me.

Over the past several days (excluding yesterday), I was being really Christian. We had a Bible conference at church, each session of which I attended. I had Christian discussions with my wife and encouraged her about our son and other issues. I wrote two blog posts analyzing some ideas and some scripture, and I would say that they turned out alright.

But I was being a lousy Christian.

Looking back over the weekend, I can see that my prayer life was nearly non-existent. I had my Bible with me at church, but I didn't really read it there or at home. I felt empowered, successful, enlightened, and altogether pretty flipping good about myself.

One of my favorite passages (as of today) is from 1 Corinthians 1. In verses 26-31, Paul says:

For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

I had read these verses before today, but never really took them to heart. But God, in his wisdom, works in his time, and this section of Scripture was on my heart when I needed it today, even though I hadn't read it in quite some time.

Earlier in this chapter, Paul alludes to Isaiah: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart" (1 Corinthians 1:19). God breaks down our conventional human wisdom. He chooses weakness to conquer strength, foolishness to conquer wisdom.

The gospel is "a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles" (1 Corinthians 1:23) because it goes against the way that we operate in everyday human life. If you want to carry more weight, you must become stronger. If you want to retire at 50, you must manage your affairs with wisdom. Simply put, the strong are strong and the wise are wise, and their lives typically bear fruit reflective of these truths.

But a world where we rely on our own strength to make our provision is a broken world. In Genesis, God tells Adam that it is "because [Adam has] . . . eaten of the tree of which [God] commanded . . . 'You shall not eat of it,' . . . by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread" (Genesis 3:17-19).

Christ came to heal the world. Romans 8:18-25 talks about our hope resting in the eventual restoration of the world (the entire creation!) to what it was before it was "subjected to futility" (Romans 8:20) by man ("him who subjected it" - Romans 8:20). Christ came so that we will one day no longer rely on our own human strengths to meet our needs. And while we must, at present, still toil in this broken world to provide for our families, maintain our finances, and whatever else, we are given a significant foretaste of the glory to come in the person of Christ (the Word) and in the person of the Holy Spirit. The ministry of Christ in the Bible, the ministry of the Holy Spirit in our hearts--there is our strength. By the grace of God himself, we have been given a sort of access to the mind of God, where perfect wisdom is found. And we are given perfect strength in the promise of the hope in which we were saved, to which the Spirit bears witness.

Over the past several days, I have lost sight of all of this. I have found sufficiency and satisfaction in my state of well-being instead of in Christ. The irony is that my state of well-being was because of Christ. How quickly does the devil seize even what is good and pure in our lives and try to pervert it into some counterfeit goodness? Praise Jesus, though, that even in my recent lapse into a Christless Christianity, he is sovereign. Not even my human stupidity can separate me from the love of God in Jesus Christ, and for that I am most grateful.

after

i carried my father

out of his house

in bags of clothing--

Brooks Brothers

Dockers

cashmere coats

i wore him

out of his clothes

Yves Saint Laurent

in socks

shirts and trousers--

a gradual shift

from his smell

to mine until

all that's left

is mine--

time absorbs

the moment

of transfer

and I've forgotten

when my father

left his skin

and moved into

his things

when he ceased to be

here

in all that's left

of all he was:

bone, voice

aftershave--

my father

a heap of broken images

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images . . .

T.S. Eliot - The Wasteland

I am told that a great deal of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland is Biblically allusory, and so it is entirely possible that there are Biblical references in the passage above (other than the "Son of man . . ." bit). This is not why I chose to quote the passage, though. I'm mainly interested in that last part.

I had the pleasure of attending our church's Winter Bible Conference these past two days. Our speaker was Dr. Vern Poythress, a man with a list of impressive academic credentials and an admirable (realistic) humility about them and their relation to his creator.

One of the things Dr. Poythress examined frequently over the weekend was the idea that we and all of our capabilities are images of God and his character. And so the constance of many of our natural processes (the rising and setting sun, for example) are echoes of the reliability of God and his unchanging nature. We, with our capacity for rational thought and our ability to communicate in sophisticated ways, are likewise reflections of the glorious God that created us.

Dr. Poythress was quick to point out that, whereas Christ, the son of God, is a perfect image of the Father, we and all of our God-derived attributes are imperfect reflections of the Father and his nature.

Why am I writing about this? I was sitting in church this morning, trying to get my son to listen to me. I found myself getting frustrated, because he was the model son yesterday, and it only took him a day to lose his respect for the authority of my wife and myself.

This got me thinking, though--the Bible tells us that Christians sin. 1 John 1:8 says: "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." In Romans, Paul says that though we Christians ". . . delight in the law of God, in [our] inner being . . . [we] serve the law of sin [with our flesh]" (Romans 7:22,25).

Another image Dr. Poythress mentioned was the parallel between the God-Man relationship and the Man-Child relationship. We know from Scripture that the God-Man relationship is broken, and not what it was created to be (Romans 1), and that this is a result of man's sinfulness.

What makes me think, as a human father, that the Man-Child (human-to-human) relationship will be a more perfect imaging than the God-Man relationship? In other words, if I am bound to disobey the law of the perfect God in whose image I have been created, I should expect my son to disobey the law of his imperfect earthly father, at least from time to time (read: frequently).

We are rebellious creatures. We hate to yield authority to anyone or anything. This is why many nonbelievers are offended by the idea that they would be considered sinful because of the actions of one representative man. It is this faith in the self that keeps them from acknowledging Christ, as well--he, like Adam, is a representative whose actions are looked upon as the basis of judgment for a body of others. The difference between the two is in what we deserve. Adam was a rightful representative (or federal head) for the whole human race, because given the same circumstances, not one of us would have made the right choice--God over the self. I realize that would raise objections from a lot of folks, but I believe that, if we're honest with ourselves, we'll admit that this is the case.

Christ, on the other hand, is our representative purely through the grace and love of our Father. Given his circumstances, we would have yielded to the Evil One in the wilderness. We would not have healed the sick--would not have bothered with them, even--and we most certainly would not have sought to bear the punishment for anyone's sins, least of all our own. And yet God in his mercy sent his Son for those very reasons--because we're not good enough to reflect his holiness on our own. Those who believe can hide themselves in Christ's righteousness, so that when God looks on us, all he sees is the perfect image of himself reflected back at him.

May he grant me the grace to look on my own son with such patience, grace, and humility. God the almighty humbled himself for our sake. May I seek to show my son that type of love as best I can reflect it.

From small group study on 1 John

I thought it might be a good idea to occasionally post some material from what we're working on in Small Group. It might provoke some good discussion (with the 0 people that read this, right?) about things I'm thinking or wondering about.

Right now, our small group is going through Tim Keller's study on 1 John. I love Tim Keller's books, and I love his study on Romans, but I'm sometimes displeased with some questions that appear in his smaller studies (ok, I've only done two of the smaller ones, including the 1 John--the other was Galatians). Some of the questions are heavily influenced by some interpretation that Keller himself has made, and to consider an answer is to stand on ground that Keller has established in his mind but not in the study.

All of that being said, I still find his studies very useful, and most of the questions are pretty good. The lesson we worked through last evening (Lesson 6: Something to Rely On [1 John 4:7-21]) had a question that I found useful, because, while it has a seemingly obvious answer, it forced me to look at the actual text to support my answer. So, the question:

Many people look at outward circumstances of their lives to determine whether God loves them. What is the problem with doing that? According to John, how do we really know God loves us?

The passage has clear evidence of two sources of assurance that God loves us: Jesus (vs.9-10) and the Holy Spirit (vs.13).

Verses 15-16 say that "whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God . . . [comes] to know and to believe the love that God has for us." What does it mean to confess that Jesus is the Son of God? I could try to go into the implications of God having a Son, but I think we can answer very simply: it means that we believe that he is who he said he is. Verse 14 implies that this requires believing those who ". . . have seen and testify that the Father . . . sent [Jesus] to be the Savior of the world." And so the Bible (or more specific to this case, the New Testament) is a source of evidence that bears witness to God's love for us in Jesus. The New Testament is written largely (perhaps entirely) by people who have both seen and testify to the truth about Jesus.

In verse 13, we are told that "we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit." John 15:26 says that the Spirit ". . . will bear witness about [Jesus]." And so the Spirit assures us of God's love by "[bearing] witness with our spirit that we are children of God . . . and fellow heirs with Christ" (Romans 8:16-17).  1 John says that our being called children of God is evidence of his love (1 John 3:1), and so there is a logical progression from the Spirit's ministry in us to an affirmation of God's love. 

So what about those outward circumstances of our lives? I'll venture to say that the Scripture I've looked at so far has already shown us the way in which God proves his love, but a person could ask "so are Christ and the Spirit the only ways that God shows his love?" While I can not think of any other ways (or at least any other ways that are conclusive), I will not bother with giving a firm "no." But the Bible does give some clear indications of what sort of "outward circumstances" we can expect as followers of Christ.

Jesus himself said that because he "chose [us] out of the world, . . . the world hates [us]" (John 15:19). He doesn't stop there. In John 16:2, he says that his followers will be treated as religious outcasts and even killed by those who think that doing so is a service to God. The rest of Romans 8:17 says that we must "suffer with [Jesus] in order that we may also be glorified with him."

Does this mean that suffering (an outward circumstance) is then evidence of God's love for us? My gut tells me no, particularly because non-Christians suffer, too. It may be evidence when it is coupled with saving faith, but even then, I hesitate to call it evidence of his love. I can confidently assert, however, that it is not evidence against his love. Jesus tells his disciples that he has told them about their impending suffering "to keep [them] from falling away" (John 16:1). He is telling them not to doubt the love that God has for them. He has chosen them (John 15:19); they will suffer. Those two realities coexist.

Welcome

I think I'd like to start writing a bit again. Time will tell if I keep up with it or not, but I'd like to at least give it a try.

This space will be for poetry, prose, discussions of the awesome word of my awesome God, and perhaps some other things, too. I look forward to communicating with the written (typed?) word again.

- B