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Stiff-arming the Truth
Though a short exhortation always precedes the act of confession in our Lord’s Day worship, why not place confession after the sermon? Imagine the large variety of sins that could be harvested by spending more time in the Bible field. More Spirit-inspired truth gives the Spirit more tools to dig for deep rooted sins.
There’s nothing wrong with liturgy in a different order. Revelation provides reasons to repent so presumably more revelation leads to more reasons leads to more repentance.
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No Give, No Glory
Glory is sacrifice, glory is exhaustion, glory is having nothing left to give. Almost. It is death by living.
—N.D. Wilson, Death by Living, 180-181
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Not What We Once Were
By His grace, we are the water made wine. We are the dust made flesh made dust made flesh again. We are the whores made brides and the thieves made saints and the killers made apostles. We are the dead made living.
—N.D. Wilson, Death by Living, 167
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More Than One Vessel
We eat to know that we’re not alone.
I adapted that statement from a line in the movie “Shadowlands.” In it, C. S. Lewis is talking to a troubled student whose father had a saying, “We read to know we’re not alone.” Certain books do speak for us, we realize that the author thinks as we do and scratched it onto paper. We recognize kindred spirits in characters or at least in the mind of their creator.
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There Are No Rough Drafts
Living means writing your every word and action and thought and drool spot down in forever. It means writing your story within the Story. It means being terrible at it. It means failing and knowing that, somehow, all of our messes will still contribute, that the creative God has merely given Himself a greater challenge–drawing glory from our clumsy botching of the past. We are like factory workers in a slapstick comedy, standing at our positions beside the too-fast conveyor belt that flings the future and all of our possible actions at us.
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You've Got to Know When to Get Out of There
Fight or flight are two typical reactions for a person who encounters a stressful or threatening situation. Let’s say you are walking down a dark alley late at night when three large men in masks step out from behind a dumpster. Or let’s say that your mother-in-law chooses her granddaughter’s birthday party to make a point about the lost etiquette of thank you notes and how she never gets them from this generation.
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The Best of Burdens
Drink your wine. Laugh from your gut. Burden your moments with thankfulness. Be as empty as you can be when that clock winds down. Spend your life. And if time is a river, may you leave a wake.
—N. D. Wilson, Death by Living, 117
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The Investment of Suffering
Some people spend their days in pain with bodies that keep the yearning front and center, that keep loss always in the mind’s eye. Widows. Orphans. The sick. The damaged (by birth or by man). Know this: God has special promises for you, and He loves bringing triumphant resolutions to those who have tasted the deepest sorrows.
—N. D. Wilson, Death by Living, 109-110
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Impossibillions Is a Lot
Our futile struggle in time is courtesy of God’s excessive giving. Sunset after sunset make it hard to remember and hold just one. Smell after smell. Laugh after laugh. A mind still thinking, a heart still beating. Imagine sticking your fingers on your pulse and thanking God every time He gave you another blood-driving, brain-powering thump. We should. And we shouldn’t, because if we did, we would never do anything else with our living; we wouldn’t have the time to look at or savor any of the other of our impossibillions of gifts.
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A Spoiled Supper
One way that communion has been spoiled is by an incorrect understanding of worthiness. In the middle of his instructions about the Lord’s Supper, Paul warned against participating “in an unworthy manner” and said, “Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup” (1 Corinthians 11:28). We ought to judge ourselves truly, then “we would not be judged” (11:31).
The Lord is serious about who He eats with.
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Of Mortal Ills Notwithstanding
You cannot throw a diva fit backstage in this production and force the understudy to take your place. You are in every scene. You are on the field for every play. And you go into the next one and the next one and the next one carrying the baggage and the wounds and the weariness of the last one and the last one and the last one.
—N. D.
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The Gunk on Our Glasses
What is the purpose, could we even say benefit, of planning a time in our worship service every Lord’s Day to confess our sins? Is our focus on sin a way of worshipping sin? It’s certainly not meant to be. Is worship with a focus on our sin a guilt-producing event? “You probably haven’t felt as bad as you should have this past week, sinner. Don’t you realize what a worm you are?
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It's an Important Difference
How do you tell a scribe from a prophet…? The prophets love the people they chastise….
—Marilynne Robinson, Gilead: A Novel, 162
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There Is Still Work to Do
Assumption One: Paradise was easy living. Incorrect. It was joyful and glorious, which is a very different thing. Adam and Eve were given an entire planet to tend. Every last creature to identify, name, and oversee. Or, in the case of the dragon, identify, name, and kill. All before the fall. All while the world was perfect. Adam and Eve were not in hammocks, relaxing in the light of a perma-sunset with even tans while sipping on honeysuckle bouquets proffered by miniature ponies.
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Hard to Find, Harder to Miss
Good Story: a linked thread of occurrence, real or fictitious, in, around, and after trouble of some degree or sequence, in which the triune nature is consistently revealed with artistry either through the real actions and choices of particular characters, the author’s direct participation, or through the author’s indirect judgments latent in the choices of style and arrangement in the recounting.
—N. D. Wilson, Death by Living, 72
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Image Bearing by Battle
Nails are forged for pounding. Man is born to trouble. Man is born for trouble. Man is born to battle trouble. Man is born for the fight, to be forged and molded— under torch and hammer and chisel— into a sharper, finer, stronger image of God.
—N. D. Wilson, Death by Living, 69
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Parents Are Always Parenting
Other real live souls are now depending on you. You are the creator of their childhoods. You are the influencer of their dreams and tastes and fears. You are the emcee of all reality, the one to introduce those small people to the true personality of their Maker (as imaged by your life more than your words). The choices you now make have lives riding on them. Always.
—N.
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Bricks on the Wall
Some Bible opposites are easy to couple. The opposite of night is day, of dark is light, of truth is lies. Some opposites are a bit more creative. For example, the opposite of evil is not always good. When it comes to the way of salvation, the opposite of evil is justification. The opposite of foolishness is not necessarily wisdom considered by itself. The opposite of foolishness is faith and the fear of the Lord, and the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
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Such a Bone Head
Harsh. Badly behaved. Worthless. Impossible to talk to. These adjectives are used about a character in a well-known narrative, but not about a low class halfwit. They do not describe an independent man but one who received care and kindness from others he didn’t know. They aren’t directed at a man whose wife was cranky and ugly and hard to tell which was worse; his wife was discerning and beautiful.
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They All Involve Hills
Here’s a good case for pastors to fight on the front of free speech rather than of tax exemption. One reason is because we will lose the rhetorical battle about money.
[P]rogressives have successfully camouflaged their lust for other people’s money as the high point of their altruism, and our objection to being pillaged as our greed.
A second reason is because the liberals say that they love free speech.