Thinking Out Loud

Gerrit van Honthorst, (1592-1656): The Denial of St. Peter, 1623 I have to wonder if there might have been some Christ-follower in the crowd on the Day of Pentecost asking silently just who Peter thought he was. After all, it hadn’t been that long ago that Peter had disgraced himself by denying – in Jesus’s great moment of need – that he even knew Jesus. And he did it not once but three times!  Three times he had the opportunity to stand like a man and announce his allegiance to Jesus as his friend and teacher, and all three times he failed miserably. And yet, there we have it: the same Peter who so completely befouled his reputation as a friend of Jesus in that dark moment had the audacity to stand before thousands only a few weeks later and proclaim Christ as if he had served his master faithfully all his life! How to account for Peter’s transformed self-image?  How could he rebound from such deep spiritual shame to such confident spiritual boldness? Peter’s colossal failure...

Image by  Pexels  from  Pixabay The man who first discipled me was the late Jim Feiker. He was one of the pastors at the church my wife and I attended when we were first married. Jim and I spent hours together, praying, reading Scripture and speaking together about what God might want to do with my life.  One of the things that Jim often talked about was “taking a day alone with God.” Of course I was familiar with the valuable spiritual discipline of daily quiet time with God, but I had never heard of taking an entire day alone with God.  It was a habit for Jim to spend a day alone with God once a month. He would go off to be by himself, armed with nothing more than his Bible, his journal, and maybe one other book. He would fast that day and devote the entire time to thinking, praying, reading Scripture, being alone with God.  After hearing Jim talk about a “day alone with God” so often, I decided to try it, to see what it would be like to spend an entire d...

Photo by  Everett Bartels  on  Unsplash To hear some people talk, the path to salvation is simple and straightforward. “All you have to do is trust Jesus.” They’re right, of course. God’s gift of salvation in Christ is simple. It’s so simple, in fact, that children can sometimes grasp it more easily than adults. As adults, our competence and confidence can get in the way of our accepting the fact that there is simply nothing we can do to bring about our deliverance beyond repenting (letting go of our sin and all our self-justifying devices) and believing in Jesus (putting all our confidence in His death and resurrection to pay the debt of our sin). That is the New Testament’s gospel call: “repent and believe.” But here’s where our Western minds can betray us: because the gospel is so straightforward and plain, we can easily imagine that the process of trusting God in this way is merely intellectual. It is nothing more than acknowledging a set of facts: 1. God loves me and...

Photo by  Elena Mozhvilo  on  Unsplash Idolatry has so many faces, all of them handsome. I have made an idol of something when I look to it, not God, for protection and provision, when I tailor the habits of my life to meet its demands. Greed is an obvious idol. Obvious, that is, to all but the idolator. Scrooge was oblivious to the way his greed had reduced him to a cypher. He looked to money to provide and protect, and he built his life around acquiring and holding on to money, and his idol, like all idols, poisoned his entire life. But it's not only a vice that can be my idol. Any good things will do: the thirst for wisdom, love of country, love of family, any worthwhile endeavor can become the Deity for Whom I Would Sacrifice All. It is a kind of idolatry, in other words, that provokes a man to betray everything he believes in for The Cause: think of the pro-life assassin, the mother who retaliates against her daughter's rival, the man who abandons his wife and family...

Image by JackieLou DL from Pixabay  When we think about the sufferings of Jesus, we naturally think of the horrific physical abuse, the unspeakable, brutal violence that was visited upon His body. The Romans had perfected the art of inflicting exquisite pain on the crucifixion victim; Jesus suffered at the hands of experts. And yet the death of Jesus was, in many respects, unremarkable for its time. As ghastly as it was, crucifixion was routine in the Roman world.  But Jesus’ suffering was unique.   No man had ever suffered what he endured that day. It not just the physical and psychological agony experienced by every other crucifixion victim. In the cross, Jesus’ greatest suffering was that he endured the very pangs of hell. He drank the cup of His suffering to the last drop. He bore the deadly curse for us.  How? Let’s remember how quietly Jesus had responded to His suffering. As he was being tried, he had maintained such composure: He stood silently while His...

Image by  Pexels  from  Pixabay I know people go to seminary to learn theological terms, and I learned plenty of -isms and -ologies during my summers at Dallas Theological Seminary. But one term - grace - found its mark deep in my heart because of something Michael Green did. Michael Green was a young professor who taught the required course on evangelism. He was big on personal responsibility and organization. “You’re in seminary now,” he would say. “There’s no excuse for late or sloppy work,” and many other exhortations to that effect. One of the class requirements was a take-home test, which we were to grade in class on a certain day. As I did every summer at DTS, I had dutifully noted all my due dates for all my projects in all my courses on a calendar after the first day of class, but I had written down the wrong date for this take-home test. I didn’t realize my error at first.  This day I came to my class on evangelism, and I heard my classmates discussing the ...

photo by Henry Zbyszynski, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36046970 Like most Americans in 1980, I had little hope that the US Olympic hockey team would be a match for the heavily favored Russian squad, which had won five of the previous six Olympic gold medals. The fact that the US team, the youngest in the tournament, had made it to the medal round was a remarkable achievement in itself. This was in the old days, when Olympic competition was still trying to maintain its status as an amateur competition. The US team was a collection of college all-stars matched up against the Russian Dream Team, grizzled veterans who towered over the young Americans in both skill and experience. It was a classic David v. Goliath mismatch, and it still ranks as one of the greatest upsets in all of sports history. After the Americans prevailed, Al Michaels, the announcer who called the game for ABC, tried to put it into context for his American audience: It was like a football...

(photo by Lydia Matzal on Unsplash) I heard someone say once that you can summarize the Bible in four words: “God wants everybody back.” True words.  Those four words are the impetus behind Jesus’ Great Commission to take the Good News to people who don’t know that God loves them so much that He gave up His Son to bring them home. The early church carries the mission The Book of Acts opens with Jesus outlining what it would look like when the church carried out His instructions in ever-widening circles: “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem… in [the surrounding region of] Judea… [then crossing ethnic boundaries] in Samaria… and to the uttermost parts of the earth” [all people groups everywhere] (Acts 1:8). Two millennia later that work is still ongoing, as missionaries keep taking the Good News about Jesus to groups that have never heard of Him. But I’ve long thought it odd that as important as the Great Commission is, that mandate is not reiterated as an imperative in the epistle...

Photo by  Peter Vanosdall  on  Unsplash When I taught the course on current social problems at Dayton Christian High School, I would tell my students that anyone who wants to follow Jesus in responding to social problems will find himself on a narrow, slippery path flanked by deep ditches on both sides. It requires great focus to stay on the path, it’s easy to fall into one ditch or the other, and it’s hard to get out of the ditch once you’ve fallen in. What’s worse, when you do follow the narrow path of Jesus, you find yourself taking shots from people in both ditches. You simply won’t fit into any of the ready-made moral categories that dominate our national conversations about the issues. Why is this so? Because our civil discourse has become alarmingly uncivil, and our national conversation about social issues has become more polarized than at any other time I can remember. If you’re anything like me, you’ve found yourself asking how Christ-followers can respond to so...

(Image by u_puw75baxua from Pixabay)  I’ve written several posts about what I learned in my rehab after knee replacement surgery. Here's one more thing I’ve noticed. A WIDER PERSPECTIVE FROM MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS The entire rehab process is so slow that it is easy, as my therapist told me, to become discouraged. All along I’ve been encouraged by friends and family (especially my wife) as I’ve soldiered on in my in-home exercises. That kind of encouragement has been priceless. But a couple of times in this process I have been encouraged by experts, people who are professionally familiar with the process, and I’ve needed to hear from them. At my first follow-up appointment with my doctor, he took x-rays of my new knee. When he came into the exam room with the results, he was not just smiling, he was beaming. There was no clinical detachment there; he was genuinely and obviously pleased with what he saw. All I could see, of course, is the scar and the swelling, not much to smile about...

I could hardly believe my ears.  My grandson Roman was six years old. Like most children his age, he was full of questions. But he asked me a question one day that astonished me and provided a fabulous opportunity. I had told him that my job is to help people understand the Bible. That’s a rough summary of what a pastor does, I know, and there are so many other aspects to pastoral ministry. But that was the abbreviated version that I gave my grandson that day. He must have been in just the right mood because he looked at me and said, “Explain the Bible to me!” How do you explain the Bible to a six year old with the attention span of a gnat? I knew I had to make it simple, accessible, and most of all brief.  I opened my mouth to begin, but he interrupted me again.  He wanted to write it all down. Now the challenge is even greater. I not only have to make it simple enough to understand, I have to put it into a few simple words that he can write down. I grabbed a nearby Post...

(Image by u_puw75baxua from Pixabay)  The two previous posts were about how my physical therapist’s initial session with me helped me get a good perspective on what to expect. He told me that pain is not to be avoided but is actually part of the process of recovery. He told me that I needed to take a long-term approach to the whole matter: if I try to measure my progress day by day, I’ll get discouraged (as many do). Instead, I should think about my progress week by week.  But there is one more thing I noticed, and it’s not anything the therapist said. It’s something Paul said. HOW THE BODY WORKS There are a few verses in Scripture that remind me of specific moments in my life. Sometimes I’ll write a personal note in the margin of my Bible to remind me of the time that verse came to life in my experience. The human body was one of Paul’s favorite metaphors for the church. The different parts of the body are, like the different members of a local fellowship, interdependent on o...

(Image by u_puw75baxua from Pixabay)  This is the second of three posts about what I learned as I rehabbed after knee replacement surgery. In my initial session with my physical therapist, he helped me get the right mindset for what I was in for. He explained to me that pain is part of the process, how I should expect the first three weeks to be difficult. As I wrote in my previous post, he was right: the pain was a factor, especially in those early days. My knee was stiff and sore for weeks, and I often had to remind myself that the pain was trending in a good direction. It was not for nothing; it served a good purpose. THE OTHER THING THE THERAPIST TOLD ME But the therapist told me something else that has been helpful in the process. He told me not to expect to see progress day by day. The process is nonlinear and long-term, three steps forward and two steps back. He said that instead of measuring my progress day by day, I should measure it week by week. He told me to expect to b...

 (Image by u_puw75baxua from Pixabay) Several years ago my doctor replaced my arthritic knee with a new titanium joint. What follows in the next few posts are some of the things I learned from my weeks of rehab. I’m now in the third week of rehabbing my new knee, and the going is slow. A friend who is scheduled for knee replacement next month asked me what the rehab is like. I told her it is painful and incremental. One day of rehab is pretty much like the next: stretching, icing, resting, and walking, as the song says, “with painful steps and slow.” When you’re in physical rehab, everything takes forever, it hurts, and it is exhausting. But the process would be much far more difficult had it not been for my first session with my physical therapist and the orientation he gave me when he told me about what to expect. And I have found myself thinking that what I’m learning now about rehabbing my knee is also true about how God uses pain in our lives. This is the first of a three-part...