Why I Read Frederick Buechner

My first exposure to Frederick Buechner was a recorded sermon that was assigned for an independent study in homiletics.  I don’t remember anything about the sermon except that I didn’t like it and thought his vision of the Christian life was less than it should have been. 

A few years later I read Lion Country, the first of four novels centered around Leo Bebb, and my reaction to that was about the same.  Leo Bebb and his associates are not very impressive people, to say the least, and God doesn’t intervene in their lives to turn them around; they just go on in the same way throughout the series.  I had heard and read of God doing extraordinary things in people’s lives, dramatic, overwhelming things.  Like in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, by Jonathan Edwards, or the story of DL Moody experiencing the Holy Spirit and asking God to stop because he felt like he couldn’t take any more.  My expectation, at this point, was that this is the way God normally works in the lives of His people, by making His presence known in overwhelming and unmistakable ways, and I was disappointed, maybe even offended, by what I took to be Buechner’s low expectations.

But I’ve changed my mind since then.  My outlook when I was younger was colored by some measure of youthful idealism, I think.  And I didn’t pay enough attention to Edwards’ description of this work of God as “surprising.”  What he saw happening was not the norm; it took him by surprise, which led him to report at length on it.

Buechner has a very good description of what he is doing, in both his sermons and novels, in one of his memoirs: “I discovered that if you really keep your eye peeled to it and your ears open, if you really pay attention to it, even such a limited and limiting life as the one I was living… opened up onto extraordinary vistas…. There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly…. If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life.  See it for the fathomless mystery that it is.  In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace” (Now and Then).

Buechner’s character Leo Bebb is not an attractive person, certainly not someone to follow as an example, but he is also not a charlatan. I think Bebb is a good illustration of the fact that people are not one-dimensional, that there is very often more to them than we can see on the surface and that it is a mistake to write them off too easily.  God’s grace is compatible with large inconsistencies in the lives of His people.

Sonny, in the movie “The Apostle,” with Robert Duvall, is similar to Bebb.  He genuinely believes the things he preaches, but he is very deeply flawed; things don’t go well in his life, but he continues preaching the gospel till the end.  Roger Ebert says this in his review: “Sonny is different from most movie preachers. He's not a fraud, for one thing; Hollywood tilts toward the Elmer Gantry stereotype. Sonny has a one-on-one relationship with God, takes his work seriously, and in the movie's opening scene, the preacher pauses at an auto accident to ask one of the victims to accept Jesus Christ, “who you're going to soon meet.” Sonny is flawed, with a quick temper, but he's a good man, and the film is about his struggle back to redemption after his anger explodes.”  A deeply flawed character, but not a charlatan.  Not quite the hero we might hope for, but, if we’re honest, much closer reality than we’d like.  And with all his faults, God uses him to bring people to Himself.

When Mary and Joseph presented Jesus in the temple, most of those who were present missed it, because it was just an ordinary everyday event.  Buechner exhorts his readers to pay attention, because God often appears in ways that are easy to miss.  And because of this, God’s presence always appears hiddenly in Buechner’s novels, sometimes disturbingly so, but I think this is a good thing.  It might teach us to be more attentive and recognize when God appears in hidden and unexpected ways in our own lives.

Some Thoughts on the Jesus Movement

I first heard about Jesus Freaks through Cheech and Chong: “I used to be all messed up on drugs, but then I found the Lord; now I’m all messed up on the Lord.”  The idea was that people were finding, in Christ, what they had previously been seeking in drugs.  The first real Jesus Freak I remember in Sonoma was a guy named Jonathan.  He dressed like a hippy and talked to people about Jesus all over town.  Everyone knew of him.

I was behind him once at the grocery store, and as he was leaving he noticed an older woman gawking at him and said to her, “Jesus loves you.”  The woman’s response struck me as very odd; you would have thought he had slapped her or threatened her physically in some way, because she reacted with what looked like fear.  This didn’t seem like an appropriate response to either his words or his manner.   And a few years later I attended the church he had belonged to, Sonoma Mountain Lighthouse, and people who knew him described him as a very gentle and loving person, just as he had appeared that day at the grocery store. 

I had, sometime after seeing him in the grocery store, become a Christian through an Assembly of God church in Santa Rosa.  Then immediately after this I went into the Navy, and while I was in training in San Diego I and some friends spent the day with some people from a Calvary Chapel, where they were having a baptism and celebration at the beach.  The one thing that stands out in my mind from that day is that these people were hungry to know more of God.

About a year later, while I was stationed in Naples, Italy, on the USS Piedmont, I stumbled across a tent ministry called Christ is the Answer, which, in their words, “grew from the grass roots of the Jesus People movement in the late 1960's and early 1970's.”  They were in Naples for a number of weeks, and I hung out with them every possible moment; then, a few months later, a group of us stayed with them again in Munich while we were on leave.

The people I met in the Jesus Movement had problems, and I don’t doubt that many of them had questionable theological ideas, things that would concern me today.  But they, as a group, wanted to know more of God.  Hunger for God was encouraged and welcomed, as well as an openness to different sources of learning and encountering Him.  They very often spurred me on by their examples and their words.

I was struck by this years later when the denomination I was part of embraced worship in ways that reminded me, in some ways, of the Jesus Movement.  They wanted to be contemporary and made use of modern choruses and worship songs.  But the similarity was only superficial.  In the Jesus Movement, anything that gave us more of God was welcomed and celebrated.  During an open time at Sonoma Mountain Lighthouse, I remember one of the women quoting words from the hymn “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name,” and being moved and encouraged by that.  I didn’t know any hymns, and hearing these words opened new doors for me.  This kind of experience was a regular occurrence, not a one-time thing.  

In the church plants of my denomination, hymns were off limits, because these only belonged in “traditional services.”  And, of course, they also would not include any silence, because it might interrupt the flow of the worship experience.  But even more troubling, in my interactions with them and in their corporate worship there was little-to-no sense of hunger for God.  The focus was on growing the church, attracting outsiders and being careful to not offend anyone; encountering God in new and unexpected ways was not at all on not the table.

Cheech and Chong, even though they were joking, were really on the right track.  People don’t use drugs for no reason; they do it to find something that is lacking in their present experience.  As St. Augustine says, “You made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”  Our condition as fallen human beings is that our hearts are restless because we are out of sync with our Creator, so our hearts seek rest in other things, which for some people leads to using drugs.

The people I met in the Jesus Movement had found rest for their souls and could say, also with St. Augustine, “You were within, but I was outside, searching for You there — plunging, deformed amid all those fair forms which You had made.  You were with me, but I was not with You.  Things held me far from You, which, unless they were in You did not exist at all.  You called and shouted, and burst my deafness.  You gleamed and shone upon me, and chased away my blindness.”  And because of this, because God had chased away their blindness and burst their deafness, the longing of their hearts was to know more of Him. 

Formation Through Reading and Worship

My favorite biography is “George Whitefield,” by Arnold Dallimore.  It fills two large volumes but does a great job not only with Whitefield himself, but also with his friends and others from the Great Awakening.  One friend decided to read it on my recommendation, but then went on to say he was going to speed read it, because “only what I remember is of value to me.”  (And, I suspect, he was especially interested in finding material to use in his sermons).

But reading is not just filling our minds with information. If the only benefit of reading came from what I could remember, most of my reading over the years would be pointless.  The truth is that we are being formed by the things we engage with, whether for good or ill.  As I encounter the ideas of another person in a book, my mind is being formed in a particular direction.

This doesn’t mean that I am a passive recipient of whatever the book has to offer.  As I read, I can, and should, be involved in the process, engaging my mind, thinking critically about what I am reading.  And as I interact in this way with the author, my mind is also being formed even more than I am aware of at the time.  In reading, we are not just out to get information (especially information we might be able to use in some way); we are learning to think and are engaging with the mind of the person we’re reading (and, in the case of a biography like that on George Whitefield, with that of the person we’re reading about).

I’ve noticed a similar phenomenon in worship, both private and corporate.  For many years I assumed that spiritual exercises were only of value when I was fully engaged, and especially when my emotions were involved.  Like many evangelicals, I saw liturgical worship as something inimical to true worship “in spirit and in truth.”  Liturgy is something one just rattles off, and worship should be “from the heart.”  I’ve often spoken of visiting a sick man in the hospital who had been plagued with one thing after another.  He said to me, “I don’t even know what to pray anymore.”  So I suggested using the Psalms as prayers to give voice to things he couldn’t say clearly, but his response was contemptuous: “I thought we were supposed to pray from the heart.”

Where, though, did we get the idea that praying from the heart means, of necessity, praying off the top of one’s head?  Does prayer have to be extemporaneous to be genuine?  What, then, about singing choruses, a practice many evangelicals find very meaningful?  These are not words that occur in the moment but ones that have been prepared ahead of time.  So why cannot this also be the case in our prayer and worship?  I began finding immense help, about 25 years ago, in using written prayers to guide and supplement my prayer life.

But in prayer and worship, also, like in reading, we’re not only concerned with the immediate effect or experience.  When we engage in worship we are being formed, for better or worse.  And if in our prayers and worship we are just saying over and over again what comes into our minds (because, at least for very many of us, praying off the top of our heads leads to praying in a circle) we can easily end up reinforcing our own self-centeredness.  Liturgy can help us break out of this cycle, and it also is forming us with the words of Scripture and the historic Church.

A good question to ask ourselves, about both our reading and spiritual exercises is, “what might be the longer-term effects of this practice?”  “How am I being formed as I engage with this material?”  The direction I am being moved in is far more important than how I feel about what I am doing at the moment or what details I can remember in the future.

A Change of Identity

When people ask me where I’m from I always say “Northern California,” even though I haven’t lived there since 1977.  It’s where I grew up, where much of my personality was formed, and I still think of myself as a Northern Californian.  Identity is important.  We want to know who we are and where we belong.  

I think this explains the appeal of identity politics: I believe their approach is seriously wrongheaded and leads, among other things, to increased tribalization and division between competing groups.  But the appeal is a sense of connection and belonging; in our fragmented culture, people long for this, having an identity in relation to others.

I had a startling realization of this when I arrived for boot camp in San Diego in 1974.   We were lined up in front of a sign that stated: “You are now men of the United States Navy” and went on to say that we would be expected to act accordingly.  They wanted us to know, right at the beginning, that our identity as members of the Navy was to impact our actions.  It was jarring at the moment, but I also remember that it was very inspiring, providing both a sense of identity and purpose, of belonging to something larger than myself.

In Joshua 5:9, the people of Israel are receiving a change of identity.  They are to begin looking at themselves differently than they have done up to now.  They are no longer slaves, as they had been in Egypt, but are now free people.  “Today I have rolled away the reproach (or “disgrace,” NRSV) of Egypt from you.”

But the thing I find interesting about this is that they had been delivered from slavery at the Exodus, more than 40 years before this.  None of the people hearing these words had actually experienced life in slavery.  Their parents had, but they had left that behind 40 years earlier.  So why did it take so long for their disgrace to be “rolled away?”  And why now, at this moment? 

This isn’t the first time they’ve been on the verge of entering the land.  Their parents had arrived at the entrance to Canaan before this but had rebelled against God and refused to enter.  The 40-year gap was a judgement.  And despite the leadership of Moses throughout this time, it appears not to have been a good time spiritually for the nation, and they had, in fact, not practiced circumcision on those who were born in the wilderness. They had seen God’s judgement on the gods of Egypt and His miraculous deliverance from a life of slavery, and they had seen God revealed in many ways in the wilderness, but for the most part they were not responding in obedience and faith.

After crossing the Jordan, but before conquering Jericho, the first thing they do upon entering the land is to circumcise the whole nation.  This seems unnecessarily risky to me.  Why not do this before crossing over, since while they’re healing they are vulnerable to attack?  But God calls them to do it this way and provides for their safety during the recovery.  And it is after they have successfully crossed the Jordan and have been circumcised that God says He has “rolled away the reproach of Egypt.”

This is when they have truly formed a new identity, no longer as slaves but as free people who belong to God.  They are no longer in Egypt, the place of slavery, nor are they on a journey in the wilderness; they are now in their own land, which God had promised, and are set apart as people who belong to God.  The rolling away of the disgrace of Egypt is not only being freed from slavery — as in the Exodus — but forming a new identity as the people of God, set apart for Him in the place He has provided.  Their identity is not just a negative one — “not slaves” — but a positive one — “the people of God.”

So what does this story from ancient Israel have for us as Christians today?  At least two things come to mind.

1) Our identity is not a negative one.  I remember, as a young Christian, hearing lists of behaviors to be avoided.  But Christians are not primarily people who refrain from certain activities.  The whole thing begins with a negative step, that we have died to sin with Christ, but this is followed by the positive step of living a resurrection life with Him.

2) Living into this identity is a process for us, even as it was for Israel.  Eugene Peterson said in a sermon, speaking about the words we’re considering: “When this wide range of God-experience, this temptation-testing, had been assimilated, they left the wilderness and began a new life in Canaan, a life of salvation freedom.  There was no way, it seems, for them to go directly from the Red Sea baptism to Canaan freedom” (“With the Wild Beasts” in As Kingfishers Catch Fire.  Learning to live in the light of our new identity will be a process, just as it was for Israel.

The details of this will be different for each of us.  We start out in different places, and so my learning process will not be identical to anyone else’s.  One of the dangers of judging the actions of others by saying “I don’t think he is a true Christian; how could a Christian act like that?,” is that we don’t know the full story.  We don’t know where this person started out on the journey and what difficulties and setbacks he’s experienced along the way. I enjoy the novels of Evelyn Waugh, but he was reportedly a very difficult person.  According to one story, he was rude to a hostess, and when she confronted him ‘“How can you behave so badly – and you a Catholic!” Waugh replied: “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.” (Quoted in “Seduced by the ‘Devil’ Hitler” by Francis Phillips in “The Catholic Herald).

Paul says that “it is for freedom that Christ has set us free,” but living a free life in Christ does not happen instantly.  We need to be patient with others and with ourselves, knowing that learning to live a free life in Christ is a process that will occupy the rest of our lives.

Remembering Our Redeemer, Isaiah 63:7-9

First Sunday of Christmas
State College, PA



Some years ago I was talking to a friend and heard someone else in the room say, “well, they got themselves into this trouble and now they’ll need to get themselves out.” They created this problem by their own irresponsibility or bad judgment and now they need to fix it themselves. It would be wrong to bail them out. I wasn’t part of that conversation, so I let it pass, but I found myself thinking later, “what if God had taken this attitude toward us? What if He had left us to get ourselves out of the consequences of our sins?” And, of course, the answer is that if He had done so we would have been utterly and completely lost, because getting ourselves out of this situation is beyond us. This is what we are celebrating in the Christmas season, that God is committed to rescuing His people from their sins. He has not said about us, “well, they got themselves into this trouble – which is true – and now they need to get themselves out.”

If we’ve been in the Church for any length of time we know this and have heard it over and over through the years. But that message gets drowned out by all the other things we hear and by all the pressures of just dealing with life. So, because of our forgetfulness, we need to regularly call to mind what God has done for His people throughout history, as the author does in verse 7: “I will recount all the steadfast love of the Lord, the praises of the Lord, according to all that the Lord has granted us, and the great goodness to the house of Israel.” The author is doing here what the psalmists do over and over. He’s remembering, in God’s presence, the things that God has done to redeem His people.

This is one of the things we’re doing when we use the Psalms as tools for prayer. Many of them do the very thing Isaiah is doing here, recounting “the steadfast love of the Lord.” But our dullness often gets in the way of this. We start to pray Psalm 105, “O give thanks to the Lord, call on his name, make known his deeds among the people,” (v. 1), but when the psalmist starts recounting these things our eyes glaze over and our mind starts to wander. We’ve heard all these things before.

At this point, we need to pause and take ourselves in hand. The problem isn’t with God’s Word; the problem is with us and our forgetfulness. So the thing to do is to stop and refocus. I often use this prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours: “Lord, open my lips to praise your holy name. Cleanse my heart of any worthless, evil or distracting thoughts. Give me the wisdom and love necessary to pray… with attention, reverence and devotion. Father, let my prayer be heard in your presence, for it is offered through Christ our Lord.” This prayer helps me to pull away from my distractions and back to what I am doing. It also reminds me that I need the Lord’s help as I enter His presence.

The importance of remembering as a spiritual discipline comes up again and again in Scripture. In Deuteronomy 8 the Israelites are warned against becoming proud when they do well in this world, and verse 18 urges them to “remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth.” Knowing our tendency to be proud of our strength and ability, the author is Ecclesiastes says “Remember your creator in the days of your youth” (12:1). And Paul urges his disciple Timothy to “Remember Jesus Christ,” (2:8) knowing how easily we become distracted by other things in the course of our lives despite regular involvement in church and even in the work of ministering to others, as Timothy was doing.

So, the first problem is our forgetfulness. But there’s more; because of our sinfulness and our tendency to turn away from God, we are constantly in need of His mercy. Verse 8 says, “For he said, ‘Surely they are my people, children who will not deal falsely.’” But they did deal falsely, as Isaiah has been pointing out again and again in this book. And yet God has been persistently merciful and forgiving despite the rebellion and wandering of His people.

This is why we have this phrase in the Lord’s Prayer: “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Even if you have a busy day and can’t do anything else, you can lift your heart to God using the Lord’s Prayer, and it’s not a bad idea to include it in your daily prayers, both morning and evening. Eastern Orthodox spirituality makes extensive use of the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy,” or “have mercy on me, a sinner.” The order for night prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours begins with a time of self examination, asking where we have sinned against God during the day that is now ending. All of these remind us of our daily need of mercy and grace.

Contrary to what some churches have taught, especially in the past two centuries, God’s forgiveness is not dependent on our remembering and confessing every sin. Paul says that we are “standing in grace” (Romans 5), we are surrounded by His loving and merciful care. It’s probably not possible for us to remember every sin we’ve committed even in the last couple of days, and our acceptance before God is not based on this anyway. But the Church, throughout the centuries, has recognized the importance of entering God’s presence confessing our sins and need of forgiveness, as we do at the beginning of the service. It’s not a bad idea to begin your daily prayer time with the order of confession that we use in worship.

It’s common in many North American churches to think that theology doesn’t matter and that it’s divisive. I was taught this as a new Christian. But it’s important to know that bad theology does harm to our spiritual lives. I knew one man who was obsessed with remembering and confessing every sin and lived in fear that maybe he’d forgotten something (which I’m sure he had). He’d been taught that God only forgives sins that we’ve confessed, and it got to the point where he had to be hospitalized for depression. I also know of a man, one of the leaders in my former denomination, who would not pray the Lord’s Prayer because he believed he had been fully sanctified and no longer committed sins. He was very public in claiming this and lived with a complete lack of awareness of his need to receive mercy from God every day and to offer thanks to God for His patience. He thought he’d moved beyond that point, although I suspect many who knew him well had their doubts.

So, we’re forgetful and we sin repeatedly despite our best efforts. But there’s one more thing in this passage in Isaiah: because we so often suffer in this world, we need to know that God is not indifferent and has even entered compassionately into our suffering. You can see this in the translation we read from earlier in the service, but it comes across more clearly in some others. For example, the English Standard Version reads, “In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them.” And here is The Message: “In all their troubles, he was troubled, too. He didn’t send someone else to help them. He did it himself, in person.” God Himself is troubled in all our troubles; He cares about the things that hurt us even to the extent of entering into our suffering.

We need to know this, because suffering can be devastating to our faith. Abraham Kuyper, a theologian and the former prime minister of Holland, said this: “When for the first time in our life the cross with its full weight is laid upon our shoulders, the first effect is that it makes us numb and dazed and causes all knowledge of God to be lost.” When this happens, it doesn’t mean that God is no longer with us or that we no longer belong to Him. I read a book by one of my former professors talking about his daughter’s death in a car accident. He said at the funeral one of his co-workers said to him, “Jesus is your rock,” and he responded: “well, right now that rock feels very slippery.” He hadn’t lost his faith; he was suffering from intense, overwhelming pain. He was experiencing what Abraham Kuyper described, the initial impact of the full weight of the cross.

Pope John Paul II was a sportsman in his early life and loved to spend time hiking, canoeing and kayaking with his friends. But as he got older he became increasingly frail physically and was no longer able to do the things he loved to do; even walking was difficult and painful for him. He meditated on his new situation and said: “I understood that I have to lead Christ’s Church into this third millennium by prayer; by various programs, but I saw that this is not enough: she must be led by suffering” (Witness to Hope, p. 721). Rather than deciding that he was no longer fit to lead the Church, he saw the importance of becoming a model of suffering in Christ’s name: “The Pope has to be attacked, the Pope has to suffer, so that every family and the world may see that there is… a higher Gospel: the Gospel of suffering” (ibid.).

In this he was following Jesus, who came to suffer. On the cross, He entered into the depths of our darkness and alienation when He cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He didn’t observe our suffering from a safe distance and say, “oh, that’s a shame.” No, “In all [our] affliction he was afflicted.”

That’s what we are celebrating in this Christmas season, that the Word was made flesh and entered into our human existence in every way apart from sin. We’re remembering all that God has done to redeem us, which reminds us that we are sinners in need of mercy and grace. And we’re reminded that God is not indifferent to our weakness and suffering in this life. I don’t think it’s at all strange that Christmas day is immediately followed by the Feast of St. Stephen, the first martyr. Then the 28th is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, the children murdered by Herod in his attempt to destroy Jesus. And the 29th is the Commemoration of Thomas Becket, who also died as a martyr. This is the world Jesus entered into at His birth, a world of overwhelming pain and sorrow and of deliberate evil. This is the world He came to redeem: “in his love and in his pity he redeemed them.” Isaiah says this looking back on the history of Israel, but it also points forward to the events we are celebrating now. May God enable us to seek Him and to grow in our knowledge of Him in the coming year.

Motivated by Hope, 1 John 3:1-3

When I was in High School, I visited Boonville, a town about 2 hours from my home in Sonoma County. There was a circus in town and I recognized it as the same one I’d seen at home a few weeks before; so I spoke to the head guy and mentioned this to him. He responded, “well, what are you doing here?” To which I answered, “this is where I’m from,” which was not really true. I was born in Mendocino county, further north on the coast and my family was deeply rooted there, but Boonville is inland and is about halfway between Sonoma and Manchester, the town where my family lived when I was born. Boonville was a place I traveled through on my way to somewhere else.

Why did I respond in this way? Boonville is in Mendocino County, and I think I felt, at that time, a stronger sense of connection with Mendocino County than the wine country in Sonoma, where I was growing up. My grandfather, who was one of my favorite people in the world, lived on the coast and knew everyone in the area. I often stayed with my sister and brother-in-law and was very close to their two sons, who were only a few years younger than I was. I think the rural coast environment felt more to me like a place I wanted to belong to. I identified myself as someone from Mendocino County, and that sense of identity was very important to me.

Several years ago I read a letter in “Runner’s World” magazine where a woman asked “at what point can I call myself a runner?” She didn’t think she ran very well, so she wasn’t sure she could legitimately claim that name. But the response from the magazine was “if you run, you are a runner.” I suspect this was a helpful answer and gave her the freedom to think of herself as a runner without second-guessing whether she was good enough. Our identity is important to us and can either free us to do the things we want or hinder us by taking away our confidence.

I suspect the success of identity politics right now is related to this. I think this movement is seriously wrong-headed by pitting groups against each other, leading to an increasing sense of tribalism in our culture, but its appeal is in giving people a sense of who they are and where they belong. And I was glad last Sunday to hear Chris Wicher point out that God’s Word gives us a sense of identity: “if you abide in my word you are truly my disciples” (John 8:31).

These verses in 1 John take this a step further by identifying us not only as disciples but as God’s children. We are disciples, people who are learning to follow Jesus, but we’ve also been adopted into God’s family and are called to increasingly bear the family likeness. If we see ourselves as slaves and God as a hard taskmaster, our Christian lives will be deeply impacted by this. On the other hand, if we believe we’ve been given a “get into heaven free card,” which guarantees our future salvation, and see God as an indulgent grandfatherly figure, that will also have a major impact on the way we live out our lives as Christians. The Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor and writer A.W. Tozer wrote that nothing so twists and deforms the soul as an unworthy or low conception of God (see “God is Easy to Live With” in The Root of the Righteous).

What we can see in this passage is that an awareness of our true identity, a confidence that we are God’s children, will lead us to begin eliminating things from our lives that are in conflict with this identity. We want to increasingly bear the family likeness. Being called to follow Jesus Christ as His disciples is an amazing thing. But then to be told that we are not only disciples but beloved children goes beyond our wildest imagination. Our discipleship is rooted in our adoption as children of God and we want to please our loving Father who has graciously called us to belong to His family.

So, the first thing these verses tell us is that God, in love, has made us His children: “see what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.” God has adopted us into His family and set us apart as His children, we who by nature were “without hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12). The words “what kind (of love),” translate a word that often meant “from what country.” “It is as if the Father’s love is so unearthly, so foreign to this world, that he wonders from what country it may come.” It carries with it a sense of astonishment (John Stott, The Epistles of John). This love the Father has bestowed on us in calling us His children is astonishing.

Now this sounds like a wonderful thing, and it is. But it doesn’t mean that we’re “kings kids” and that our lives on earth will go smoothly (as some have said from time to time), because it’s also true that we live in a world that doesn’t know God and is in rebellion against His lordship. So our identity as God’s children means that we are out of step with a world that doesn’t know or acknowledge Him. John says the world “doesn’t know us,” doesn’t recognize us as God’s children. Of course not. If they don’t know Him, they’re not going to know what it means when we say we are His children.

So, the first thing in this passage is a reminder of our identity, in the present, as God’s children. But the second thing is that although we know who we are as God’s children, we don’t know what our future, in God’s kingdom, will be like. We are members of God’s family, but we don’t know the particulars of what this will look like in the future.

It’s important to remember that God’s revelation is about leading us to salvation, not satisfying our curiosity. A few years ago a popular Bible teacher named Harold Camping forgot this and thought he had learned from Scripture that Jesus would return in May of 2011. He should have known better. After all, Jesus said to the apostles when they asked Him about the coming of His kingdom: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority” (Acts 1:7). These words should be enough to rule out that kind of speculation, but for some reason he got caught up in trying to calculate the date of Christ’s coming, and many others throughout the centuries have done the same. It’s good to keep in mind these words from Deuteronomy: “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law” (29:29). The things revealed are things that bring us to God and prepare us for eternity, “that we may follow all the words of this law.” God is not interested in satisfying our curiosity about the things He has not revealed, and prying into these things -- the date of Christ’s return, what our lives will be like when we’re in His presence -- is a dangerous thing and a first step on the path of disobedience.

What we do know is that when Jesus appears we will be like Him, because we will see Him as He is. Paul says that we see now “but a poor reflection as in a mirror” (1 Cor. 13:12), but even so “we who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever increasing glory” (2 Cor. 3:18). Even though we don’t see Him clearly now our communion with Him is transforming us into His image, and when we see Him clearly we will be fully transformed. Communion with Jesus is transformative even in our present clouded condition, but we know that in the future we will become fully like Him, “because we will see him as he is.”

So John tells us about our identity as God’s children and that in the future we will be transformed into the image of Jesus Christ, but then he says something about how this affects our lives in the present: “everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself as he is pure.” Knowing that when we see Him face to face we will be fully transformed into His image doesn’t lead us to sit back and do nothing: “well, I obviously can’t see clearly enough to bring about this transformation now so I may as well wait until His appearing. What’s the point of my feeble efforts in the present?” This is not the case at all. Knowing that we will one day see Him face too face motivates us to purify our lives in the present, even though what we accomplish in this life will always be imperfect..

How do we purify our lives? We confess our sins to God, as we do at the beginning of our worship service, and we turn our backs on the things in our lives that we know are displeasing to Him. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to make use of our prayer of confession in your own devotional life throughout the week. And spend time in God’s presence, cultivating a growing relationship with Him. Make regular use of the Psalms in prayer, and maybe pray through a hymnal or a prayer book. Spend unhurried time in God’s presence and invest some time in finding tools that will help you do this.

Something I’ve found helpful in the past and recently returned to is a prayerful way of reading Scripture called Lectio Divina, which is just Latin for divine reading. From what I’ve observed, Evangelical Protestants often limit their use of the Bible by only engaging in Bible study. I believe in Bible study and have spent lots of time doing it. But we need to do more than study God’s Word; just knowing what it means is not enough to purify our lives. So here’s a brief description of this prayerful reading of God’s Word.

Start by choosing a passage of Scripture, and after beginning with prayer for God’s help, read a short portion of it, maybe just a phrase or two. Go back and reread it several times, allowing it to sink in more deeply. Some people find it helpful to read out loud. If the passage is a narrative, visualize what is happening and imagine that you are there. If it is a teaching passage, think about how it might impact your life and how it connects with other things you know in the Bible. A friend of mine who was a psychiatrist once described meditation as worry; when we worry we go over and over in our minds what might happen in the future. So meditation on Scripture is doing this, going over and over different possibilities, what it might mean and how it might impact our lives.

By this time you may have become aware of things you need to pray about. If so, begin to pray in response to what you’re reading, and if not, just offer the words of the passage as a prayer and ask God to make it more of a reality in your life. And after you’ve done this just sit quietly in God’s presence, aware of the things you’ve been reading and open to whatever else He wants to say to you. You can go back and forth between these four steps and don’t need to proceed neatly through them. Start by doing this for a short time so you don’t wear yourself out, and tomorrow you can come back and start where you left off, or go on to another passage if you feel the need. The point is to interact with God in His Word and to give the Word time to impact your life in a deeper way.

But devotional practices are not the only part of purifying our lives. It’s very possible to have regular, strong devotional practices and yet be deceiving ourselves if our devotional life has no impact on the way we treat other people. Since God, in His grace and mercy, has shown such astonishing love toward us, He calls us to show love toward one another, especially those we interact with every day. Praying over God’s Word can be a place where He both makes us aware of changes we need to make and also gives us the strength to love others as He has loved us.

With all the noise surrounding us in our culture, we need to remind ourselves often of our true identity as members of God’s family. “What marvelous love the Father has extended to us! Just look at it—we’re called children of God! That’s who we really are. But that’s also why the world doesn’t recognize us or take us seriously, because it has no idea who he is or what he’s up to. But friends, that’s exactly who we are: children of God. And that’s only the beginning. Who knows how we’ll end up! What we know is that when Christ is openly revealed, we’ll see him—and in seeing him, become like him. All of us who look forward to his Coming stay ready, with the glistening purity of Jesus’ life as a model for our own” (The Message). May God enable us to order our lives in ways that prepare us for the day when we will see Him face to face.

Disciplined Spiritual Growth, 1 Timothy 4:6-10

Shiloh Lutheran Church

State College, PA

A few weeks ago I was having coffee with a friend. He has schizophrenia and was on my caseload when I worked in the mental health field, but I always scheduled him for Friday afternoons, because meeting with him ended my week on a positive note, even when he wasn’t doing that well. More than anyone I’ve known, he has learned to manage his mental illness. He’s brilliant and I love talking to him about ideas and things we’ve both read. I enjoy spending time with him, which is why we were having coffee even though meeting with him is no longer part of my job.

He is having some health problems and was scheduled for major surgery in a few weeks, so he asked me, very pointedly, some questions about prayer, especially how to pray. So I made a few general comments and then talked to him at some length about a way of prayer called Lectio Divina, which is just Latin for Divine Reading. I’ll say more about this later in the sermon; he seemed very encouraged by the suggestion and we parted ways. But when I left I realized that I have not been practicing this form of prayer I recommended to him. Admittedly we can’t all do everything all the time, but this is really one of my favorite ways of praying, and I had not been doing it for some time. It had just gotten away from me, crowded out by other things. So, since that day I’ve been practicing this way of prayer nearly every day. I offered this suggestion as a help to him, but it has ended up helping me. It may have helped me more than it helped him. That’s the way it is when Christians talk to each other, and this is one of the reasons I dislike the image of ministers as religious professionals who run churches, who are somehow disconnected from the community of faith.

The passage we’re looking at this morning gives us a picture of disciplined spiritual growth, whether we are church members or those who are involved in vocational ministry. Whichever category we belong to, as long as we are living in this fallen world, we need to hold firmly to two opposite truths. On the one hand, the Church is highly exalted in union with Jesus Christ. In Him we have every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms, and we are seated with Him at the right hand of God. This is a prominent theme in the New Testament and it‘s one of the things I‘ve been meditating on recently in my prayerful reading of Scripture. For example, Paul urges the Colossian Christians, “Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:1-3). The Church is in union with Jesus Christ, and our true home is in heaven with Him. But, at the same time, we’re still living in this world which is continuing in rebellion against Him, this world that is dominated by spiritual forces of evil. We’re engaged in spiritual warfare, whether we like it or not. We’re living in a war zone and can’t escape from the conflict, no matter what we do. “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12). We’re living in a world that is dominated by powers intent on destroying us.

Most of our enemy’s attacks are subtle, and if we’re not alert we won’t recognize them as attacks at all. The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis, is full of insights in this area. It’s a series of letters from Screwtape, a senior demon, to his nephew, Wormwood, advising him on how to destroy the life of God in his victim. In one of the letters, the human victim has just experienced spiritual renewal and repentance. Here’s what Screwtape says about it: “The great thing is to prevent his doing anything. As long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance. Let the little brute wallow in it. Let him, if he has any bent that way, write a book about it; that is often an excellent way of sterilising the seeds which the Enemy plants in a human soul. Let him do anything but act. No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will. As one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel” (pp. 60-61). As long as he doesn’t do anything, as long as he doesn’t follow up on it, the “little brute” can wallow in his repentance all he likes and Screwtape will be pleased. As long as he doesn’t act on it, his repentance is imaginary, because true repentance involves a change of direction, turning around and going the other way.

In the fourth century, a monk named John Cassian compiled a list of 8 sins that are especially dangerous, to help his fellow monks in examining themselves. Two centuries later, Pope Gregory the Great reduced the number to 7 (what we now call Gregorian Chant is named after him). Here’s the list: pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, lust and gluttony (David L. Hall, The Seven Deadly Sins, pp. 12-13). It’s not that these seven deadly sins are the only ones to worry about. But they describe conditions of the heart which lead to all sorts of other sins. That’s why they’re deadly; they lead us on a steady course away from obedience to God.

The one I’m interested in this morning is sloth. The sin of sloth is what Screwtape is talking about when he says: “Let him do anything but act. No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will.” This isn’t the same thing as what we call laziness. Here’s a definition of sloth: “The root of sloth and that which makes it sinful lies in the will. Sloth is an infectious evil that poisons the will so that there is no motivation – no passion – to act. Sloth is the cause of the self being overly protective of one’s time and energy.... Sloth persuades the will to make no effort... expend no energy. Sloth says, ‘It’s not worth it.’ Sloth makes that which is of ultimate importance seem not worth the effort” (David Hall, p. 57). Sloth destroys our motivation to do that which is most essential. We may be workaholics, but we’re guilty of sloth if we’re using work to escape from other things God wants us to do. Sloth prevents us from acting in response to God’s call in our lives. We may go through periods where we feel bad about our negligence; maybe we go forward in a meeting from time to time and ask for prayer. But we never act on it, and year after year we find ourselves going nowhere spiritually. The longer we allow this pattern to continue, the more difficult it is to break. “Sloth is an infectious evil that poisons the will so that there is no motivation – no passion – to act.”

In the passage we’re looking at today, Paul urges Timothy to diligently train himself in godly living. He doesn’t want sloth to prevent Timothy from going forward spiritually. Listen to verses 7-10 in The Message: “Exercise daily in God – no spiritual flabbiness, please! Workouts in the gymnasium are useful, but a disciplined life in God is far more so, making you fit both today and forever. You can count on this. Take it to heart. This is why we’ve thrown ourselves into this venture so totally. We’re banking on the living God....” Paul wants Timothy to approach his spiritual life like an athlete in training, giving himself to the routine of daily exercise.

The first thing we can see in this passage is that discipline in our spiritual lives is absolutely necessary if we want to survive in this spiritual war zone. The central idea in this passage is in the second half of verse 7: “train yourself to be godly.” Timothy was ministering in a difficult place. The spiritual life of the church was being undermined by false teachers, and his job was to deal with the situation. We can see this in Paul’s words at the beginning of this letter: “On my way to the province of Macedonia, I advised you to stay in Ephesus. Well, I haven’t changed my mind. Stay right there on top of things so that the teaching stays on track. Apparently some people have been introducing fantasy stories and fanciful family trees that digress into silliness instead of pulling the people back into the center, deepening faith and obedience. The whole point of what we’re urging is simply love – love uncontaminated by self-interest and counterfeit faith, a life open to God. Those who fail to keep to this point soon wander off into cul-de-sacs of gossip. They set themselves up as experts on religious issues, but haven’t the remotest idea of what they’re holding forth with such imposing eloquence.” The way to guard against the snares the enemy sends our way is to be diligent in spiritual discipline, to be diligently training ourselves in godliness.

If we don’t exercise diligence in our spiritual lives, we’re opening ourselves up to the attacks and delusions of the enemy. This shouldn’t surprise us. One of the effects of the Fall is that things tend to deteriorate when we leave them alone. What happens to your garden if you don’t carefully cultivate and tend it? It grows weeds, which choke out the things you’re trying to grow. And the same is true in our spiritual lives. If we neglect them, they’ll grow weeds which will choke out the life of the Spirit.
The word Paul uses in verse 7 means to exercise, or train. The word is gymnazo, which our word gymnasium is taken from. The author of Hebrews uses the same word in chapter 5 of his letter. The Hebrew Christians are on the verge of turning away from the gospel. They’ve been enduring persecution and difficulties, but now they’re ready to throw in the towel in the hopes of getting some relief. In chapter 5, the author rebukes them for their lack of maturity: “We have much to say about this, but it is hard to explain because you are slow to learn. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil” (5:11-14). They’re in trouble and are on the verge of turning away, because they haven’t exercised themselves, trained themselves to be godly. They’re in a perpetual state of spiritual immaturity. If they had been exercising diligence, they’d be mature by now and would have the spiritual resources to get through the crisis.

The word translated “strive,” in verse 10, is one that’s often used of an athletic contest. Paul uses a form of this work to describe athletes as those who strive in the games. “You’ve all been to the stadium and seen the athletes race. Everyone runs; one wins. Run to win. All good athletes train hard. They do it for a gold medal that tarnishes and fades. You’re after one that’s gold eternally. I don’t know about you, but I’m running hard for the finish line. I’m giving it everything I’ve got. No sloppy living for me! I’m staying alert and in top condition. I’m not going to get caught napping, telling everyone else about it and then missing out myself” (1 Corinthians 10, The Message). Paul’s motivation is that he wants to survive over the long term. He doesn’t want to get derailed by any of the enemy’s snares. He doesn’t want, in the midst of preaching to others, to lose the race himself. So he diligently trains himself for godliness, knowing that if he doesn’t do that, he won’t survive.

So spiritual discipline is necessary. But it’s not necessary like a bitter pill that we just have to swallow, even though we feel thoroughly miserable about it. Discipline isn’t easy. It isn’t the thing most of us would naturally choose on our own. But it’s profitable. That’s the second thing to notice here: spiritual discipline is profitable. It brings with it immense blessing, both now and in eternity. That’s Paul’s point in verse 8: “For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.”

Godly discipline is profitable, because it enables us to live more and more in the way we were created to live. The false teachings that were being spread in Ephesus were producing pretty disagreeable people. Listen to Paul’s description in chapter 6: “These are the things I want you to teach and preach. If you have leaders there who teach otherwise, who refuse the solid words of our Master Jesus and this godly instruction, tag them for what they are: ignorant windbags who infect the air with germs of envy, controversy, bad-mouthing, suspicious rumors. Eventually there’s an epidemic of backstabbing, and truth is but a distant memory” (The Message). This is the kind of thing that is produced by their false teaching, because it doesn’t lead to godliness. It leads to an unprofitable, wasted life.

That leads to the third point, which is that spiritual discipline is motivated by hope. This idea comes across well in New Living Translation: “Physical exercise has some value, but spiritual exercise is much more important, for it promises a reward in both this life and the next. This is true and everyone should accept it. We work hard and suffer much in order that people will believe the truth, for our hope is in the living God....” Spiritual discipline, training for godliness, looks forward to eternity and finds motivation in the fact that one day soon this will all be over and we’ll be standing in God’s presence.
Spiritual discipline is necessary in this spiritual battleground that is all around us; it’s profitable both for this life and for eternity; and it’s strongly tied to our hope for the future. If we’re not motivated to cultivate godliness in our lives we’re either not thinking clearly, or we haven’t thought much about the fact that we will soon be standing in God’s presence, giving Him an account for how we’ve used our lives. Or we’re enslaved to the sin of sloth, which produces the qualities Screwtape was hoping for: “The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.” It’s easy to deceive ourselves. We can be working 16 hours a day and still be guilty of sloth, because we may be using work as a way of avoiding something else God is calling us to do. So we need to begin by repenting of this sin and presenting our lives to the Lord to use as He wishes.

So what is this way of prayer, Lectio Divina, that I mentioned at the beginning of this sermon? It’s very simple, and I’ve often gotten distracted by complicating it or expecting it to be something it is not. It’s not a way to experience an emotionally intense time in God’s Word. This may happen, from time to time, but this is not what Lectio is primarily about. It is simply a way of reading and meditating on God’s Word and being attentive to Him.

There are four steps. The first is to read a passage of Scripture. I normally just read a phrase or so. I’ve been meditating on Ephesians 1 for a few weeks now and am not even halfway through the chapter. Read a few words and allow them to sink in; reread them over and over again. The purpose is to allow them to sink more deeply into your heart and mind. The second step is meditation, which has probably already started to happen by this point. Think about what is being said and how it connects with other things you’ve read in Scripture and how it might impact your life. And just reread it, allowing it to enter your mind in a deeper way. Those are the first two steps, Reading and Meditation.

The third step is Prayer. You’ve been listening to God speaking in His Word, so now respond with prayer. Sometimes it will be obvious what you need to pray for, but if not just turn the things you’ve been reading into prayer. Prayer is responsive speech. You’ve received something from God’s Word, so now respond to Him with your own words, whatever comes into your mind. And then, the fourth step is Contemplation, which is not as familiar to many Protestants. But it’s really not very complicated. Just choose a word or two, or even a phrase from the passage and sit in God’s presence, being silent and attentive to Him. If your mind starts to wander, recall the word or words from your passage. The point is not to receive a particular experience, but simply to sit in God’s presence after having listened to Him speaking in His Word. I encourage you to try this, to let this become part of your training in godliness, and in doing so may you taste more and more the reality of “every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” that God has given us in Christ.