Psalm 119:1-8

Psalm 119 is the longest chapter in the Bible, and it is rich with teaching about how we can access our ultimate delight in God! I’ll be taking it section by section as we discover the Psalmist's pathway to joy.

[1] Blessed are those whose way is blameless,
who walk in the law of the LORD!
[2] Blessed are those who keep his testimonies,
who seek him with their whole heart,
[3] who also do no wrong,
but walk in his ways!
[4] You have commanded your precepts
to be kept diligently.
[5] Oh that my ways may be steadfast
in keeping your statutes!
[6] Then I shall not be put to shame,
having my eyes fixed on all your commandments.
[7] I will praise you with an upright heart,
when I learn your righteous rules.
[8] I will keep your statutes;
do not utterly forsake me!

Psalm 119:1-8, ESV

Almost everyone at the college I attended ended up going on the high ropes course, at least once. Nestled in the woods surrounding the campus, the high ropes course was an enjoyable get away for many people. It also served as the go-to team-building exercise at the school, as each climber depended on the people below them to safely navigate the course.

To ensure the safety of everyone using the course, there were certain rules that everyone had to follow, without exception. Everyone on the course was to wear a harness. Everyone was to have a belayer, the person on the ground who would catch the rope if you fell. Every belayer was to have a backup belayer, just in case. Ropes were tied a certain way. Gloves and helmets were worn. If we followed the rules (statues, commands), everyone would have a good time. If we didn’t, we risked serious injury to ourselves or others.

The Psalmist opens up Psalm 119 with an ode to the great delight he finds in the statutes and commands of God! It is a delight, because it lead to blessing (v. 1-2). Those who keep God’s commandments diligently, who seek him with their whole heart, who make every effort to live according to God’s ideals, will not be put to shame (v. 3-6). There was a positive corollary between the Pslamist ability to live according to the way that God had called him to live, and his personal delight. The more that he learned of how God called him to live, the more it would lead him to praise (v. 6-7)! The Psalmist realizes what we learned on the high ropes course in the woods: the more closely we align ourselves with how we are supposed to do things, the better our experience actually is.

Like many of us on the ropes course, the Psalmist also ends with a cry of trust. Do not utterly forsake me! (v. 8) God himself has set the standards and the ideals; the Psalmist seeks to follow them with his whole heart. Now he cries out to God in trust, that God would not leave him nor forsake him.

The Psalmist has discovered what many of us need to be reminded of: that following God’s law is not about obedience, it is about delight. We serve the God of the universe because we find great delight in how he has called us to live. It is our great joy to do it. And that great joy, knowing that it leads to our own blessing, encourages us to obey.

He also recognizes what has been made plain to us through the Gospel of Jesus Christ: God has not forsaken us, but in fact has ensured that we can actually fulfill the law of God the way we were intended to do from the beginning. This is a truth that leads to an even greater joy and delight! God has made a way, he has not forsaken us, and we can now delight in his call.

God’s law is not from some heavy-handed dictator who wants our obedience at all costs. Because of Jesus, God’s law becomes a gift that is given to ensure our joy; the more we understand that, the more we will have the power to obey!

Lake House Weddings & Family

I have four sisters. This past weekend, the fourth and youngest of them got married.

Instead of doing the traditional wedding, where you invite every Tom, Dick and Harry that you've met over the last twenty years and treat them to a night of dining, dancing, and drinking on your dime, my sister wanted to do something smaller and more intimate. She rented a large lake house outside of Charlotte and invited the immediate families on both sides down for the weekend. The wedding would be Saturday afternoon.

Everyone arrived on Thursday or Friday, we spent the day on the lake Friday, Friday night we BBQ'd and hung out at the house, Saturday we golfed (the guys) or lunched (the girls), and Saturday afternoon we had the wedding in the backyard. Afterwards, we had a catered dinner on the back patio overlooking the lake. The party went into the night, and then everyone went home on Sunday.

Aside from it being a great weekend, it also reminded me what really matters about a wedding, and why we do them in the first place.

The first reason, of course, is that marriage is a visible reminder to us of Christ's relationship with the church. It reminds us of the covenant that God makes with us, through Christ, that he is going to love us because he loves us, not based on the deservedness of the beloved, but simply because he has decided he will love us. It is unbreakable; it is unending. Marriage reminds us of this.

When we have a marriage ceremony, this is what we are commemorating. This solemn service is a reminder of the enormity of the commitment of marriage. It symbolizes far more than we typically think; more of us would do well to take it seriously.

The second reason we have a wedding, however, is so that the vows that we make are done in the presence of witnesses. If it were just about the solemn reminder of what we are doing, the ceremony could be done in my office. I could put the fear of God into the couple. Or, perhaps a judge, with black robe, hidden behind a large wooden desk, raised up so that the poor couple is put into a submissive position by design. Yet it's about more than the reminder; it's about the witnesses. And these witnesses to the vows aren't just witnesses, they are people who, ideally, will actually hold the couple accountable to the vows that they have seen them make. They will remind them of what they said they would do; they will help them keep those vows when life is difficult. They will be there for them, supporting them, so that when life or marriage gets hard, there are other people to lean on.

Whittle down the multitude of people at any given wedding to the handful of people who will actually take their "witnessing" seriously; who, when the hard part of the vows (the worse, the poorer, the sickness) becomes the reality of the vows, will actually be there to make sure that the having/holding and loving/cherishing will actually be maintained until death does the couple part; you might find that it's not much more than the immediate family anyway. 

Well-intentioned people want to celebrate with the couple getting married. They are genuinely joyful at the celebration the couple is experiencing; genuinely desiring to honor them and help them on in their marriage and in their life. But life is long. Memories fade. "Witnesses" forget what they saw. There are only so many commitments we can be a party to witnessing before it is beyond our ability to hold them all up when the difficulties come.

It's fun to have huge parties, but sometimes it can overshadow what it is that we are actually witnessing, and why we are even there to begin with. It was nice to know that as I looked at the faces of the people witnessing this couples vow, they were going to be with the couple long after the party ended...

Infrastructure & Kingly Gifts

It's not sexy to talk about building or maintaining an infrastructure, but just try to change the world without one. - Seth Godin

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/10/infrastructure.html

In the A29 Network we talk about leaders as prophets, priests, and kings, based on the three offices of Jesus. (I'm not actually sure where this paradigm for leadership originated, but it's the only place I hear the language.) Every leader will be have a primary strength area, a secondary strength area, and then an area that they are weak.

Prophets are leaders who speak the truth. They cut through the confusion and clarify what it happening. They are visionaries.

Priests are leaders who love. They love the people around them, are compassionate, and make people feel cared for.

Kings are leaders who organize. They plan. They are strategic. They understand how seemingly disconnected parts work together and the implications of decisions.

Kings are the ones responsible for infrastructure, and as per the quote above, are typically the ones who get ignored (at least in church ministry). Their work happens in the background, and if they are really good at what they do, their work disappears. You never see it. You just experience it.

Take Apple: Steve Jobs was the prophetic leader. He had a vision. He was (apparently) often brash. He knew what he wanted. He got things done by the sheer force of his personality. He's the one who saw the iPhone in your hand before you even knew you wanted an iPhone.

Tim Cook, on the other hand, is a kingly leader. He organizes. He's the reason the thousands of little parts in your iPhone come together at just the right time, in just the right time frame, in just the right quantity, at just the right profit point, so that the iPhone that someone else envisioned actually ends up in your hand.

Steve Jobs (rightfully) got credit for his vision. Tim Cook (rarely, at least in the general public) gets the credit for almost certainly being the most effective kingly leader on the planet. His work disappears. We look at the phone in our hand and think, "amazing!" Rarely do we stop and think about what was required to make 13 million of them, ship them to multiple countries, and sell them all in three days, with enough stock remaining to do that again in a few weeks in nine more countries, then within three months to well over 100 countries. In fact, the only time you'd think about it is when there is a glitch in the system: when you show up to the Apple Store and they don't have exactly the model that you wanted in that exact moment.

The main problem is assuming you don't need the kingly gifts in your organization. That's what most churches do, in my experience. They love the priests (how could you not? They are so caring!). They love the prophets (they give good sermons!). Kings aren't even on the radar, even though organizations are simply not effective unless there is someone without the kingly gifts in a high level of leadership. That's why many church organizations remain small. You can't get anywhere unless you have an infrastructure that actually allows for the ideas you have to come to fruition, and the people you have to be organized into a meaningful movement.

VW Diesels and our Complicity

Yet the Volkswagen scandal is a reminder of how our human sinfulness, in ways both individually and corporately, holds us back from shalom. It’s a story of greed, pride, self-deception and outright lies, mostly by engineers and corporate officials. And even if I didn’t know about it, on some level, no matter how clean my fossil-fueled vehicle seemed to be, I remained complicit in a world economy that is damaging creation.

My bro-in-law has one of these VW Diesel's that were included in the scandal. He purchased it because, quite frankly, it's a sweet car and got great gas mileage with low emissions. Two out of three of those things remain true. Unfortunately, it's just polluting a lot more than anyone thought.

The first response to something like this is typically anger. Angry at the system, at Volkswagen, corporate greed, and just generally feeling lied to and cheated. The second response, though, is frustration. Frustration at all the things we were angry about, and how it feels like we can't change them, but then the general frustration of realizing that, no matter how much we wish we weren't, we're part of the problem.

VW had some motive (largely financial) to lie about the emissions of these vehicles. They knew that with the right combination of performance and the perception of being green, these things would sell like crazy. And that's what happened. The problem was, it wasn't actually possible to put those two things together. It couldn't perform as well as it does and still be as green as they had hoped. So they cheated.

The pessimist in me says that VW knew that there was a whole crop of people who would love to drive a green vehicle, but had no intention of sacrificing performance to do it. That's not necessarily wrong, but it's also not necessarily green. Lots of people would be "green" if it didn't cost them much...

How to be a Christian

Every Christian I know has at some point wondered whether they were doing it right.

We wonder whether we are doing the right things, praying enough, giving enough, committed enough, sinning too frequently, going to church too infrequently, going to the right church or the wrong church with the right doctrine or wrong doctrine, whether we loved their neighbor too little, and on and on.

It's sad that so many of us live under that pained confusion, not ever really embracing joy, actually feeling quite burdened about all we believe, but it's not surprising. 

We're the first Christians to ever have lived in the 21st century. We can read all that we want about the people who came before us, but they didn't live in our context. Some things will be the same. Much won't be.

We're also the first Christians to have unlimited access to everyone else's thoughts, all the time. We're exposed to hundreds of voices declaring that they've finally figured out exactly what Jesus would think, all the time. We're reminded over and over that even when we think we're doing pretty good in our faith journey, someone thinks we've got the whole thing screwed up.

I had a conversation with a friend recently who mentioned that he was preaching through a particularly difficult Old Testament passage, and before preaching it he knew that he was going to have a handful of young fundamentalists who were going to tell him that he didn't preach enough about the law and God's holiness and how God should slay us all in our path. It's no wonder that we feel conflicted, like we're messing up. What if those young fundamentalists are right? What if our primary way of approaching God should be in fear, as if we're one wrong move away from getting the lightning bolt? One misstep away from his wrath?

That fear–the fear that God is just waiting to catch us screwing up–is not just the fear that keeps the religious-types devoted, but it's also the fear that keeps the wayward from coming close. For every believer who comes to church with a scowl because they are pretty sure that's what God wants from them–unadulterated, pure, religious dedication–is another believer who avoids it because they just feel like they don't measure up.

Both the Pharisee and the Tax Collector are invited into the family of God because of the Gospel.

This is why the Gospel is about freedom. The Pharisee needs to be freed from the massive burden of self-righteousness, and no little amount of self-doubt, that comes along with believing we have to earn our credibility before God. The tax collector needs to be freed from the burden of knowing that he can't measure up, or is somehow kept at an arms length from the true kingdom. The Gospel doesn't agree or disagree; it actually provides a whole new framework. It's no longer about you. It's about Jesus.

The more we can embrace that freeing thought, the more we'll simply be Christians. No heavy burdens. Just resting in what Jesus has done.