Sycamore

From Ray Ortlund’s blog a bit back:

“See the man at midnight. Imitate that man. Act it all alone at midnight. Hear his loud cry, and cry it after him. He needed three loaves. What is your need? Name it. Name it out loud. Let your own ears hear it. . . . The shameful things you have to ask for. The disgraceful, the incredible things you have to admit and confess. The life you have lived. The way you have spent your days and nights. And what all that has brought you to. It kills you to have to say such things even with your door shut. Yes, but better say all these things in closets than have them all proclaimed from the housetops of the day of judgment. Knock, man! Knock for the love of God! Knock as they knock to get into heaven after the door is shut! Knock, as they knock to get out of hell!”

Alexander Whyte, “The Man Who Knocked At Midnight,” in Lord, Teach Us To Pray, pages 174-176.

“…the point is that too often preaching is primarily conceived as an event in which God is the topic but not the actor!… It is one thing to talk about the doctrines of sin and grace and another to actually be faced with God in judgment and justification.  It is one thing to hear exhortations to victory and quite another to actually experience the power of being drawn into the plotline of God’s victoy over our enemies (the world, the flesh, and the devil).  Doctrine and exhortation will be involved in all good preaching of Scripture, but preaching can never be reduced to either.  If that happens, it is no wonder that people eventually sense the loss of God’s active presence and look for other means of grace, other sources of “bringing Christ down” into our daily experience that is threatened by meaninglessness and triviality.”  -Michael Horton, A Better Way

While the quote is aimed at preachers, it hits people who listen to sermons just as hard.  While I usually spend my Sunday mornings preaching to people, this last Sunday I had the privilege of sitting in the congregation while Scott preached.  I was surprised how easy it was to slip into a state of mind that was more concerned with how God as a topic was being presented and not how God Himself was speaking through His Word in scripture.

Horton’s last line makes sense - if I start losing a sense of God’s active work in my life, there’s a good shot it’s because in my heart God has become a topic I study instead of a Father leading my by His Word.

Since becoming a Gmail Ninja, I’ve started piecing together how the contents of my emails inform the advertisements they place in the sidebar.  An email between me and Matt about the upcoming missions class?  The sidebar is filled with christian links to missions organizations, fundraising sites, stuff like that.

But the following email elicited something rather different (click for a larger image):

I’m forced to conclude that Google, which knows more information than any other singular entity in history, thinks that Scott is a vampire.

(And as a result of that insider knowledge, they’ve concluded that his “life is messed up,” which merits a visit to happier.com.)

What do you get when you mix creativity, extra groceries, and too much time on your hands?

(Not sure where I found this one.)

From J.I. Packers In Step With the Spirit:

“Super-supernaturalism.”  This is my word for that way of affirming the supernatural which exaggerates its discontinuity with the natural.  Reacting against flat-tire version of Christianity, which play down the supernatural and so do not expect to see God at work, the super-supernaturalist constantly expects miracles of all sorts—striking demonstrations of God’s presence and power—and he is happiest when he thinks he sees God acting contrary to the nature of things, so confounding common sense.  For God to proceed slowly and by natural  means is to him a disappointment, almost a betrayal.  But his undervaluing of the natural, regular, and ordinary shows him to be romantically immature and weak in his grasp of the realities of creation and providence as basic to God’s work of grace.

It’s easy to play it safe and expect God to do nothing out of the ordinary so that you never risk being disappointed.  But it’s just as easy to think that you’re letting God “out of the box” by negating the things God does in an “ordinary” way because they’re somehow less spiritual.  Your monthly paycheck is just as much a miracle as a healing that the doctor’s can’t explain.  Enjoying the times that God does one and not the other is actually shortchanging God’s miracles - all you’re really doing is telling Him that you’re hard to impress and counting that as a win.

I know, because I’m a recovering super-supernaturalist.  In my experience, it’s better to stop rating how impressive God’s actions are and just treat everything like the miracle it is.  (Plus, it’s a lot easier to expect miraculous healings and such when you’re accustomed to God performing miracles every day).

Today’s comes from Thursday, August 13:

You can’t have everything.
Where would you put it?

A great paragraph from Doug Wilson (via Justin Taylor):

A fundamentalist woman in a sun bonnet and a gingham dress, who gets a wicker basket to go pick blueberries, so she can bake her man a pie, with a golden crust, the kind he likes, may be a little bit hokey for your tastes, and certainly for mine. But at least she is trying to achieve an effect that the Bible says women should strive for — she wants to be modest and discrete. She is not trying to achieve an effect that the Bible never urges women to strive for, as in “edgy.” Or “provocative, but not too skanky for an evangelical.” She may be playing the instrument badly, but at least she is playing the right one. Suppose the Bible tells women to play the piano. This does not make every woman an accomplished pianist, but I do have respect for every woman who practices the piano, blunders and all. But the women who show up with a leaky concertina they got at Goodwill are trying to do something else. In other words, let us make a distinction between doing the right thing badly, and doing the wrong thing well.

This doesn’t just apply to women’s dress (though I think that’s well worth talking about).  Los Angeles is full of “cutting edge Christians,” eager to be divorced from the born again stereotypes.  But if you had to pick between being Ned Flanders or being considered more hip than Christian, which would you choose?  While the Bible doesn’t call us to say “oakily dokily,” you can’t argue that good ol’ Neddy isn’t trying.  We should all be shooting for “doing the right thing well,” but we should all be on guard against doing the wrong thing at all.

RELIGION: When circumstances in my life go wrong, I am angry at God or my self, since I believe, like Job’s friends that anyone who is good deserves a comfortable life.

THE GOSPEL: When circumstances in my life go wrong, I struggle but I know all my punishment fell on Jesus and that while he may allow this for my training, he will exercise his Fatherly love within my trial.

-Tim Keller  (via Tullian Tchividjian)

So all of last week I was on a houseboat at Lake McClure for a youth group trip.  (For those of you who don’t know, a houseboat is basically a giant RV on water that maxes out at 5 mph).  Despite the staff’s mutual addiction to the internet and some pretty incredible wireless service considering we were in the middle of a lake, no blogging happened all week.

So coming back, I had some catching up to do.  Below are some quick links from the 500 new google reader posts I came home to:

Michael Card’s relationship with scholar William Lane gets a great treatment at Between Two Worlds.  The summary paragraph is worth repeating:

“During the conversation Bill told me why he wanted to spend his last days here. He didn’t feel that Seattle was home, even after eight years there. Neither did he want to go back to Bowling Green, even though his years there had been some of the happiest of his life. ‘I want to come to Franklin,’ he said. ‘I want to show you how a Christian man dies.”

Ed Welch has written a fantastic short booklet on eating disorders that is well worth passing on.  I personally think everyone should read it, first because disorders are so common and second because using food as an idol is something you probably do and don’t realize it.  (See also a solid blog article about American Idol and self-esteem).

An atheist goes to a mega-church and records his thoughts.  Bear in mind he’s a bit biased, but it really is a great article.  Hard to pick a paragraph, but here’s one:

As people yelled, “Yeah!”, “Amen!” and ‘‘Awesome!” I wanted to yell, “I don’t get it”. I love the way religion convinces people by making things deliberately incomprehensible and you feel too shy to say ‘‘I don’t understand’’ lest you reveal your stupidity.

There’s more coming this week.  Glad to be back in town.