The kingdom of heaven can be compared to a man

Wheat plant: notice the bending stalk.

A man sowed good seed in his field. Now, this parable comes right after Jesus’ explanation of the parable of the sower. It seems safe to conclude that the seed in both cases is the word of God. But this time an enemy came and planted weeds.

Most of the teaching I have encountered about this parable points out that the man sowed wheat and his enemy sowed tares, or darnel. As these two plants grow, they look very much alike, but while wheat is nourishing, darnel is poisonous. When the two plants ripen, the weight of the wheat causes the stem to bend over. Darnel, on the other hand, remains upright. When it’s easy to tell the two apart, it is possible to harvest and destroy the weeds and then go back to harvest and store the wheat.

But Jesus compared the kingdom not to the wheat, but to the man who sowed it. What do we see when we look at him?

• The man has a sneaky enemy. Just as Satan entered the garden and corrupted God’s creation, he continues his attacks on God’s word. So the kingdom is under attack.
• The man cares about the wheat and is unwilling to risk losing any of it. God’s concern for both his creation and his word is plainly evident throughout Scripture
• The man is supremely patient and is quite willing to let the tares grow with the wheat until their two different natures become obvious. The devil has sown counterfeit word, counterfeit saints, counterfeit gospel. . . You name it; if God has created something, Satan has made a counterfeit. His counterfeits are everywhere. If anyone wonders why God doesn’t wipe them out, remember that Jesus is comparing his kingdom to this man.
• The man will be ruthless to the tares once their true character is revealed. He will burn them up. Jesus came to destroy Satan’s works. His earthly ministry prepared the way for the final destruction that will take place at the end of time.

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed

Mustard seeds--magnified, of course!

In Matthew’s telling of this parable, Jesus points out how small a mustard seed is. It grows very large. Therefore the most obvious interpretation of this parable is that small beginnings have large results. Let’s not stop with the obvious.

First of all, mustard, like wheat, is a seed. Nothing happens to it while it’s in a bucket of mustard seeds. Everything Jesus ever said about seeds in general apply here. The seed must be sown in order for it to grow. There, it dies. Part of any seed sown in the ground actually begins to rot from the moisture in the soil, but the life hidden in the seed also begins to soak up the moisture and becomes a new living being.

A seed sown in the ground is hidden. No one can see it at work. Actually, until the first tiny bit of green appears above ground, no one has any evidence that it is even there. This particular seed becomes a very large bush, and the birds build their nests in it.

Among the various cross references is Ezekiel 31:6, “All the birds of the heavens nested in its boughs, and under its branches all the beasts of the field gave birth, and all great nations lived under its shade.” Here, and also in Daniel 4:12, the bird seem comparable to the nations. Birds come from all around and often migrate long distances. They are not only local birds.

Therefore, if the kingdom is like a mustard seed that becomes home for birds, it also becomes home for people from all around. Jesus taught that the kingdom is not just for the Jews, or just for a chosen few, but for anyone at all who comes to seek shelter.

The kingdom of heaven is exclusive only by excluding everyone who chooses not to become a part of it. No person in the kingdom has any right to seek to expel or exclude anyone else.

The kingdom of heaven is like leaven

Look how high up the bowl the grease is! Someone has faith the dough will rise.

I once heard a sermon on the radio from someone who insisted that Bible imagery must be interpreted the same way every place it occurs. Since leaven often stands in for sin, and since women were less highly regarded than men, he said that some wicked woman infected the kingdom of heaven with all this sin.

You can separate wheat from weeds if you wait long enough, but you can never separate leaven from bread dough once you have put it there. So I’m pretty sure Jesus didn’t intend to paint such a gloomy picture of the kingdom of heaven! Besides, he respected women more than most people of his time. Leaven might be sin other places in Scripture, but surely not here.

I don’t know how women made bread in Jesus’ day, but I suspect that the basic principles were no different from today. When I bake with yeast, I don’t put the yeast directly into the flour. I dissolve it in water and add it along with other wet ingredients. It would make sense if the ancients used something like a sour dough starter.

Here’s what’s important: Once the yeast (or the baking powder for that matter) go into the dough, it looks no different than unleavened dough. Like the mustard seed planted in the garden, you can’t tell it’s there. You can’t see it at work. After a while, though, the dough has risen.

The illustration of leaven, therefore, has many of the same implications as the growth of the mustard seed, but there is this difference: The mustard seed growing into a mustard plant changes only whatever part of the garden it was planted in. It’s probably impossible to stir yeast in so that it is present everywhere in the dough, but by the time the dough rises, not a bit of the flour and other ingredients remain unchanged.

So back to Matthew 6:33, Jesus tells us to put our top priority on seeking a kingdom where

• the king is patient and loving;
• the king will utterly defeat the plans of the enemy;
• small beginnings grow very large;
• whoever will may come and find acceptance;
• its inner workings are hidden from view; and
• nothing that it touches can remain unchanged.

There are other parables of the kingdom, and other comparisons to learn from them. There is probably more about God’s kingdom in these three parables that I haven’t seen yet. But this is more than enough to boggle my mind for a while. I’ve gotta find that place!

Photo credits:
Wheat plant Some rights reserved by Garry Knight
Mustard seed Some rights reserved by Quinn Dombrowski
Dough ready for rising Some rights reserved by mia.judkinsi

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How easy it is to go to church, participate in Sunday morning activities, and have the experience wear off before we get back home. Back to the ordinary. Back to the messages of the world around us.

The television ads all try to make us focus attention on all the things we don’t have and make us discontent until we get them. They want to make us go out and buy stuff. Do we need that stuff? If we did, we would know without needing commercials as a reminder. Entertainment, too, serves to show everyone how exciting and “fulfilling” it can be to dump commitments, walk away from rules, and live for the next enticement.

A reminder in the wilderness

Moses Pleading with Israel, as in Deuteronomy 6:1-15, illustration from a Bible card published 1907 by the Providence Lithograph Company

Moses stood before a crowd of people who had grown up as wanderers in the wilderness. Their parents, now all dead, had been a grumbling and discontented lot, but this new generation brimmed with eagerness to enter the Promised Land. There, God would give them cities and houses they hadn’t built and fields they had not prepared for planting. Occupying the land and learning agriculture would not be easy, but they would eventually succeed and prosper. Moses foresaw a new kind of trouble that would arise.

Prosperity can be spiritually dangerous. In fact, that is why the world we live in so easily sets spiritual traps for us. People take prosperity for granted and forget that it is a gift from God. That begins a slippery slope.

• Forgetting God, people begin to assume that they have prospered by their own effort and talent.
• Taking credit for their own success, they begin to assume that they deserve life’s best.
• They become spiritually complacent. God becomes someone to acknowledge, if at all, only as some kind of religious entity who can be appeased by some kind of ritual observance.
• Forgetting God and assuming they deserve the best, they become jealous and envious of anyone who somehow becomes more successful.
• They become resentful when they feel like they don’t prosper enough.
• Jealousy, envy, and resentment drive them to actions that destroy both personal relationships and the social fabric of their community.
• Society becomes dysfunctional because of the multitude of evil acts that follow from evil attitudes.

Does that sound familiar? Doesn’t our own popular culture often glorify the jealousy, envy, and resentment and portray people acting out, but without suffering personal consequences of their actions? Doesn’t commercialism encourage discontentment?

I am not at all opposed to buying and selling. It should be obvious from looking around the page that I want readers to buy books through this site and show interest in the products and services advertised here. But I also want you all to remember God.

Israel eventually acted as Moses warned them against. They forgot God. Instead of being in bondage in Egypt, they fell into bondage in their new homeland. Not only did they fall into bondage to the surrounding peoples that they should have conquered, they fell into bondage to their jealousy, envy, and resentment. They fought each other–tribe against tribe and neighbor against neighbor.

The face of prosperity

New well in Kasangombe, Uganda

But I also know about places like Kasangombe, Uganda.World Vision is wrapping up a fifteen-year relationship with Kasangombe, having helped them rise from crushing poverty to being, compared to many other places in Uganda, a little bit of heaven.

Look at the picture. Instead of having to walk for miles to get water from filthy ponds, the people of Kasangombe can now get clean water from several wells. They have formed their own water commission to take care of them and divide the water equitably. Does that look like a picture of prosperity? It ought to.

The poorest of Americans live better than that. Even the homeless can find clean drinking water more easily. Americans who remember the Lord their God live in gratitude for what he has provided for us. Christians should even be grateful in hard times. As we seek the Lord, we find a closer walk with him and stronger faith. But only if we don’t forget to remember.

Photo credits:
Moses pleading with Israel: Public domain, from Wikimedia
Kasangombe well: Friends Serving Uganda

Christ the Redeemer

• Refusal of a request to work beyond 65 must be objectively justified by the employer.
• These pluses, we feel, amply justify a rate increase.
• These features justify the expense of the software.

All of these sentences imply two questions, really. Is it right, or OK, to refuse the request, increase the rates, buy the software, or go to war? Why? It seems that every time we attempt to justify something, a real or hypothetical skeptic has reasons why what what we want is not justified.

“Justify” means the same thing as a religious term. A person who is justified is right with God, or OK with God. God does the justifying. He does not hide his reasoning or his criteria. Several passages in Paul’s epistles in effect explain and justify God’s basic standard.

Justification by works of the law

Moses went up the mountain to talk to God. He came back with the law. Actually, he came back with the Ten Commandments, but the Mosaic law came to include all kinds of regulations that explain how to live day by day. It also set up a system of sacrifices. Why? Because people would inevitably fail to keep the law, both individually and corporately.

On the surface, it certainly looks like a blueprint for how to live a life that God will declare OK. I heard a rabbi on the radio several years ago explaining that to be a good Jew, all you had to do was follow the law. It’s all nicely laid out in the Torah, so, he said, following the law is easy.

I’m not sure how many people have ever agreed with him that keeping the law is easy. It forbids all kinds of things that people would really like to do and commands all kinds of things that people would prefer not to do. In particular, is is so easy to get caught up in ritual observance to the neglect of the law of love so plainly set forward.

By Jesus’ time, some Jews tried very hard to keep the law. Others didn’t try at all. Gentiles, of course, had no training or education in the law. It stands to reason that those who kept the law must somehow be closer to God than those who don’t. “Sinner” meant those who didn’t keep the law.

But let’s not forget the sacrifices. Those who tried hardest to keep the law still had to perform regular sacrifices to atone for their sin. The sacrifice system constantly reminded of their sin.

So a religious Jew desperately wanted God to pronounce him OK. Having to sacrifice encouraged doubt about that. So if the law says to tithe on your cattle and wheat crops, a very religious Jew would also tithe on his herb garden. The law encourages fasting, so a very religious Jew would fast more often than anyone else. And so it went.

Doing the works of the law easily became some kind of arms race. The most dedicated Jews each tried to be more religious than others. Of course they resented it when Jesus came along and called them nasty names for comparing themselves with each other and pronouncing themselves better than most other people. So much for the law of love

If someone claims to be justified by works of the law, he in effect tells God, “You must accept me as OK because of all the law keeping I have done.” Anyone with that attitude essentially puts himself in the driver’s seat and reduces God to an accounting clerk. An all-powerful accounting clerk to be sure, because only God would count the beans in the jar knowing how many are enough.

Justification by faith

Paul introduced a novel concept–so novel that some of the early followers of Jesus had trouble accepting. One of his earliest written explanations of it come in Galatians 2:15-21. Jewish Christians from Jerusalem had come to a church he had founded and taught that Christ died only for people who kept the law.

Paul countered that no one could be justified by works of the law, and that if they could, Christ died for no reason. Justification by faith says that Christ died to defeat sin. The only way live free of sin is to believe that Jesus paid it all.

If I’m OK because of how well I have performed works of the law, then I must have defeated sin myself. What do I need with the death of Jesus? Of course, all those required sacrifices keep me conscious of sin, so I can never be fully persuaded in my own heart that I’m OK.

But if trying to work my way to favor with God makes him seem like my servant, a servant of my good works, what does this new idea of justification by faith do? Doesn’t turning away from law keeping, acknowledging that I a sinner, and counting on God to declare me OK anyway reduce God to a servant of sin?

Here’s what Paul’s opponents didn’t get: If I give up on an approach that reduced God to a bean counter and admit that I can never accumulate enough beans to be good enough, I free God from the servanthood I had imagined. Instead, I can tell him, “I can’t defeat sin, but you did. So I’ll trust you not only to defeat sin in general, but my own sin in particular by the blood of Jesus.”

That way, God is not conceptually my servant any more, and certainly not a servant of my sin. I acknowledge God as sin’s master. Further, by giving up my own losing struggle with sin, sin is no longer my master. If I accept Jesus’ death as the key to leaving my sin behind me and eventually destroying it altogether, somehow the old me, the one who struggled against sin and always lost, has died. I have been born again as a new me with a new master–Jesus himself. My focus no longer conflicts with the law of love.

Once God has declared me OK because of my faith that Jesus will deal with my sin, I cannot go back to trying to justify myself with law keeping. No one else would justify me for my own efforts. Other people will eventually discover someplace where I fall short–if not of my standards, then certainly theirs. God will not justify me for my own efforts. After all, I knew all along that it wasn’t working when I was trying to justify myself in the first place.

The real problem with justification by works

Where is my focus when I’m trying to get God to call me OK based on my own works? It has to be on my works. When I see other people, what can I do but compare them to myself?

I may see someone who seems to be working harder at it than I am. That’s likely to put me to shame and redouble my efforts so that I will look as holy and successful to him as he looks to me.

On the other hand, when I see someone who does things that I have given up or doesn’t accept the kinds of self-discipline that I have, I can only feel superior. I might enjoy that superiority in smug silence. I might give voice to it in a rebuke.

And when I think of God while I’m trying to be good enough by my own efforts, what more can I have in mind besides how much he approves of me?

Works righteousness is not limited to Jews, ancient or otherwise. It has long infected the church. My mother had an uncle, a life-long Methodist. Late in his life, a Baptist friend told him, “I’m really worried about your baptism. You need to get that taken care of, because you’re too good a man to go to hell.” That person turned the “proper” kind of baptism into a religious work.

That rebuke was meant in kindness. The rebuke of someone betting his life on working toward salvation more often rudely proclaims the person who does not acknowledge the same standard deserves hell.

Even for people who understand and strive after justification by faith can fall into the trap of condemning others on the basis of works done or not done. What else can it mean when, in the name of holiness, church people condemn others who

• shop or do much of anything else on Sundays
• dance
• play cards
• drink an occasional beer
• watch the wrong kinds of movies or TV–or any at all
• don’t dress for church the right way (whether not dressing up enough, or in more informal churches, dressing up too much)
• and so on

I said earlier that a person engaged in justification by works necessarily focuses his attention on himself. In particular, that means that he can’t have God at the center of his attention. He can’t have what’s best for others at the center of his attention. No one can focus on himself and on the law of love at the same time. The Baptist I mentioned probably thought he had Uncle John’s best interests at heart, but he was being more judgmental than loving.

God is love. A well-known song says, “they’ll know we are Christians by our love.” But will they? Unchurched people see Christianity the same way works-righteousness “holiness” people see it: as a list of “thou shalt nots.” Compelling observance of a list of prohibition absolutely crowds out observance of the law of love.

As long as even a sizable minority of church people pay lip service to justification by faith in church and then practice justification by works once they leave the building, the world will not notice the love.

Photo credits:
Christ the Redeemer–Some rights reserved by Silly Little Man
Faith, hope,love–Some rights reserved by a God’s Child

Peace rally

We all want peace. I’m sure we all really do. But what does it look like? For as long as anyone living can remember, America has been either at war or in serious rivalry with other country. Our government has also operated a long-running Middle East peace process. Is there peace there?

Bumper stickers proclaim “Give peace a chance,” and “War is not the answer.” I well remember the unpopular war in Vietnam and attended peace rallies to protest it. What was peace like there? People would take turns shouting angry slogans into a microphone. Occasionally, in the name of peace, some people threw bricks through windows or even burned down buildings.

Can we find peace at home among friends and family? Of course not. If you’re not experiencing uncomfortable conflict within your family, your work place, or your neighborhood, you’re seeing someone else’s and getting an earful about it. And that’s before you look at the local news.

So what happens if we decide to avoid arguments? Chances are we find ourselves in at least one relationship strained by tension over issues no one dare talk about.

Here is what peace looks like wherever we look: we can have genuinely peaceful and joyful relationships with some people. We can have comfortable and smooth relationships with most people. We can pretend not to be in conflict with others. We cannot possibly avoid stormy, hurtful relationships entirely.

If people can’t get along with all of the other people in their lives without ever getting into conflict, is there any wonder that nations are never entirely at peace with every other nation?

The peace wished for on bumper stickers is an illusion.

Peace not as the world gives

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubles and do not be afraid.” — John 14:27 (NIV) If Jesus gives peace that’s not what the world gives, perhaps it doesn’t look like the peace the world seeks.

Real peace must be something other than an absence of conflict or papering over differences to maintain an uneasy truce. It must also include peace on a dimension that the world neglects to consider:God hates sin. Everyone on the face of the earth falls short of perfection, which is just another way of saying everyone sins.

Therefore, the peace Jesus offers is first peace with God.

• On the cross, he willingly suffered the death that sinners deserve.
• Although he himself knew no sin, he took all sin throughout all the earth and throughout all time upon himself. He became sin. When he died, all that sin died with him.
• He made each of us an offer we shouldn’t refuse: in exchange for willingly giving him all of our sin and agreeing that the death he died was our just penalty, he offers us his righteousness. That is, we can now have right standing with God through faith as if we had never sinned in the first place.
• By faith, we can also recognize that we have been adopted into God’s family. When the Bible says, “work out your salvation,” it means to acknowledge the changed heart that we received with our new righteousness and, with the help of the Holy Spirit, let it work throughout our personalities until it starts to become evident outwardly.

Second, the peace Jesus offers is peace within.

He said not to let your hearts be troubled or afraid. We have each been wounded by all that conflict we have suffered, and it feels like we have to be troubled and/or afraid. Being or not being troubled or afraid is a choice, but feelings can be a great bully. Anyone in the world can choose not to be troubled or afraid, but without the Holy Spirit to shield our hearts and provide guidance, no one has the strength.

The Bible calls Jesus’ peace the peace that passes understanding. It makes no sense that anyone can endure all the hurtful things that happen day in and day out and not respond by being troubled or afraid. It doesn’t have to make sense. Just receive it and trust it!

Third, the peace Jesus offers works within conflict

We can’t avoid conflict. We can’t go very long in this world without getting hurt. Just hours after Jesus promised peace to his disciples, a large group of armed men arrested him. He was beaten. He was mocked. He was subjected to an illegal kangaroo court where everyone knew the verdict before it started. Finally, with jeers and catcalls ringing in his ears, he suffered the agony of the slowest, cruelest form of execution ever devised.

Jesus never lost his peace during the whole ordeal. His accusers found that especially infuriating. His followers panicked and fled for their lives, but eventually they, too, learned to walk in the peace of God.

What does it look like? A person at peace can

• experience trouble without being emotionally overcome by it.
• withstand abuse without needing to retaliate.
• respond to a crisis with prayer and a calm assurance of deliverance without panicking or looking for shortcuts.

Photo credits:
Peace rally Some rights reserved by thivierr
Men arguing Some rights reserved by o5com
The Flagellation of Christ / Nicola Grassi,c. 1720 (Public domain)

Joshua and the Israelite People / Karolingischer Buchmaler, ca. 840

“Be strong and courageous; do not be frightened or dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.”–Joshua 1:9, NRSV

Moses was dead. Joshua was scared. How do I know that? Because the Book of Joshua begins with God giving him a pep talk. Three times during that pep talk, God told Joshua to be strong and courageous. When he got up from there and went out among the people, they told him to be strong and courageous.

So, was it wrong for Joshua to be scared? No. It means God had him right where he wanted him. It means he was fit for spiritual leadership.

Any ministry worth doing will be bigger than the minister can handle by himself. It will be bigger than all of his friends pooling their thoughts together. It will be so big that only the power of God accomplish it.

Being scared is a good place to start. Moses, at 40, knew that God had called him to help the Hebrew people. At that time, he had no thought for spiritual leadership. Full of brash self-confidence, he murdered an Egyptian. Then he fled for his life. Forty years later, when all that self-confidence had been drained from him, God called him to his ministry. By that time, he was scared.

If being scared is a good place to start spiritual leadership, it is certainly not a good place to stop. So God and all the people told Joshua to be strong and courageous. He immediately began to organize the people to cross the Jordan and begin his ministry.

God expects some measure of spiritual leadership from all mature believers. When God wants more from us than we feel like we can do–when we’re scared–there is only one proper response. Do it anyway. Act in courage in spite of fear. Step forth in faith, expecting God to provide enough strength and light for one step at a time.

God’s message to believers today has not changed from his message to Joshua. Be strong and courageous. Where God has called, he will equip. Apart from God, we can do nothing (except to make a mess of things). With God, we can do all things that he calls us to.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

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If you, then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, now much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!–Matthew 7:11, NKJV

Imagine! In a very offhand way, Jesus told everyone who had gathered to listen to him that they were evil! Who would dare suggest such a thing to anyone today? That would even offend inmates in a maximum security prison.

Mass media did not yet exist in Jesus’ day, but today the leading outlets in print, broadcast, and online media seem to love nothing more than to hear of someone’s gaffe and jump on it. If that person’s enemies or rivals jump first, then the media gleefully cover their outrage.

If anybody today began a sentence, “If you then, being evil. . . ,” the whole audience would be so offended that they wouldn’t hear a word of the rest of the speech. Twitter would be alive with indignation at such arrogance, intolerance, etc. Dozens of people would post the gaffe on You Tube, with any surrounding context omitted. It would play on every TV station for days. The person’s reputation would certainly suffer irreparable harm.

It’s not as if Jesus did not stir up controversy. The Bible describes multiple occasions on which a crowd argued heatedly with Jesus or even wanted to kill him. Yet he said, “If you then, being evil. . . ” and apparently no one batted an eyelash. Why?

Because they knew they were evil. Everyone knew that “There is none who does good, no, not one” (Psalm 14:3b).

The New Testament adds, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). In our society, we like to think of ourselves–and all of humanity–as basically good. Yet we all know that the world is full of evil, from wars and mass murder down to office gossip.

Sermon on the Mount. On the pulpit at Wimborne Minster, England.

Why Jesus was right

If we are basically good, where does all this evil come from? People must somehow be corrupted by society. But what is society besides a collection of people? How can society be corrupt if the people in it are not? The idea that humanity is basically good turns out to be nothing but a comforting lie.

The bad news, then, is no one does good (exclusively and consistently), and everyone sins. By the way, “sin” is a word borrowed from archery that refers to missing the target or falling short. If you have ever said, “After all, nobody’s perfect,” you have in fact confessed the truth that everybody sins. Contrary to popular stereotype, sin encompasses much more than whom someone sleeps with, what someone drinks, or what someone chooses for entertainment. It isn’t necessarily even fun. (What’s fun about holding a grudge and being mad all the time?)

Further bad new is that none of us can do anything about it. Each one of us has our own idea of right and wrong, apart from God’s and apart from anyone else’s. And no one succeeds in doing right all the time even by that standard. There is nothing modern about evil, either. Archeology tells us about the violence and vast social inequalities from prehistoric societies onward.

The good news, the gospel, is that Jesus, who did not sin, became sin for us so that anyone by faith has the opportunity to overcome sin. Not that a believer becomes better than someone else, but that a believer becomes better than before. We still sin, but the realization becomes painful and we continue to allow Christ within us to help us sin less and less.

So, if you, then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, now much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him! Ask him for his grace. He has been waiting for you.

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by chelmsfordblue

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Isn’t it amazing how the whole meaning of a sentence can change when you shift your main attention from one word to another? Most of the time, preachers and writers seem to emphasize “content” and discuss the meaning an importance of contentment. Once, when I was in a particularly foul mood, I came across this verse and got hung up on “state.” I actually said aloud, “Paul, you were never in Iowa,” closed my Bible, and stormed off to enjoy my pity party. I hadn’t learned much about contentment, had I? But that’s the word I want to look at today.

Of course, we can’t leave off looking at “content” entirely. The Amplified Bible explains the word parenthetically as ” satisfied to the point where I am not disturbed or disquieted.” In context, Paul was expressing thanks to the Philippian church for a financial gift. Therefore he went on to say that he was content when he had all of his physical needs met and when he didn’t.

Christians ought to learn the same, but we can also profitably extend the concept to the spiritual realm. I don’t mean we should ever be content with our own personal spiritual development. We must keep growing and become increasingly sensitive to the sin in our own life so we can get rid of it. But we can and must learn to be satisfied to the point where we are not disturbed or disquieted with what God has already done for us. Read this aloud as your own spiritual affirmation:

• I have been blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ (Ephesians 1:3)
• Having been justified by faith, I have peace with God. (Romans 5:1)
• God comforts me in all my tribulation. (2 Corinthians 1:3)
• I have been crucified with Christ. It os no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. (Galatians 2:20)
• I have been born again to a living hope. (1 Peter 1:3)
• I walk by faith, not by sight. (2 Corinthians 5:7)
• God’s divine power has given me all things pertaining to life and godliness. (2 Peter 1:3)

So how do we learn to be content?

First of all, it helps to be clear on what we ought to be content about. Contentment is not the same as complacency. Life presents problems, some of which we can take steps to solve. If you’re out of work, for example, don’t be content with having no income. Find a job. Start a business. Do something. In the meantime, don’t get all bent out of shape in the lousy state of finances. Being content with what you have means, among other things, not wasting mental energy obsessing about all the things you don’t have.

Take your own spiritual and emotional temperature

Are you upset about anything? Specifically, are you upset with anything that you can’t directly change (like someone else’s behavior)? You have identified a situation where you need to learn to be content. Do you notice something that used to drive you crazy and it doesn’t any more? Congratulations. That’s a big area of personal growth for you. If you’re not sure how you got to your present contentment from where you used to be, ask God to remind you. You can apply the same lessons to whatever’s bugging you now.

Meditate on scriptures

The affirmations I wrote hardly scratch the surface of what’s in the Bible. The New Testament uses the phrase “in Christ” or something similar more than a hundred times. More often than not, that phrase will contain a statement of something God has already done in your life.

For example, 2 Corinthians 5:17 says, “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation ; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.” I am a new creation in Christ. The old me is gone, and God has put a new me in the old one’s place. Going on to the next verse, you will read some more things that you have because you are in Christ.

Believe what you find in scriptures

Genesis 5:16 says, “Abram believed God, and it was accounted to him as righteousness.” God had made a promise to Abram some time before, and as I wrote in Becoming Abraham, he had just gotten through complaining to God that he had been reduced to naming one of his servants (apparently) as heir. In other words, he had devoted his life to pursuing that promise for more than ten years, but didn’t really believe it yet.

• Loving a scripture is wonderful, but not the same as believing it.
• Memorinzing a scripture is wonderful, but not the same as believing it.
• Agreeing with a scripture is wonderful, but not the same as believing it.
• Telling others about a scripture is wonderful, but not the same as believing it.

Going back to taking your spiritual and emotional temperature, if you read a promse in the Bible and think, “yes, but” or “what if” (or worse, “yes, but what if”), do you really believe the promise? The Bible says you have something, but you have not learned to be content.

Read 2 Corinthians 11:23-28, things that in 4:17 of the same book he called “momentary, light afflictions.” Was he content in the Lord the first time he was beaten? The first time robbers beset him? The first time he had to go hungry when he hadn’t intended to fast? Certainly not. The scripture at the top of this post says that he learned to be content.

Have you learned to be content?. Start learning. In the meantime, be content that Jesus, who has faced the same temptations you face, has defeated them for you. Don’t be content with your discontent, but you might as well be content in it, recognizing that Jesus is even now in the process of helping you to learn to be content.

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by Julie Jordan Scott.

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Map of Abram's journey

We know Abraham as the father of many nations. Arabs and Jews both claim him as their ancestor. His life story forms the very foundation of the basic Christian concept of justification by faith. He did not start out that way. We first meet him as a name at the tail end of one of the tiresome genealogies that make parts of the Bible so dry: “After Terah had lived 70 years he became the father of Abram, Nahor and Haran” (Genesis 11:26). How did this Abram grow to become the Abraham so many people revere?

God called Abram and he answered. As Genesis 12 describes the call,

The LORD had said to Abram, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you. “I will make you into a great nation 
   and I will bless you; 
I will make your name great, 
   and you will be a blessing. 
I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; 
and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

So Abram left, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Haran. He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all the possessions they had accumulated and the people they had acquired in Haran, and they set out for the land of Canaan, and they arrived there.
Abram traveled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. At that time the Canaanites were in the land.

The LORD appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built an altar there to the LORD, who had appeared to him. From there he went on toward the hills east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. There he built an altar to the LORD and called on the name of the LORD. Then Abram set out and continued toward the Negev.

Ziggurat of Ur

God said, “Go.” Abram left. It wasn’t quite that simple. The previous paragraph says that he was born in Ur of the Chaldeans, one of three sons of Terah. They all married. Haran died, leaving a son.

Terah took his orphaned grandson Lot and his childless son Abram and set out for Canaan. They stopped at Haran. The Bible does not say why they left Ur for Canaan or why they did not continue on. According to Acts 7:4, though, God called Abram before he left Ur.

Some commentators criticize Abram for leaving Ur with part of his family and stopping at Haran. It seems like imperfect obedience. On the other hand, the Bible records many, many times when God gives a promise and then makes people wait. We have no idea how long they remained in Haran before Terah died, but one way or another, the stop tested Abram’s faith.

As I explain in a longer article, Nobodies of the Bible: Abram, both Ur and Haran were part of a large Mesopotamian civilization that gave the world the science of astronomy and its sinful partner, worship of the moon. The Bible tells us nothing about what either Terah or Abram thought of moon worship, but as soon as Abram answered God’s call, it became impossible for him to practice any form of paganism.

We don’t know how old Abram was when God called him in Ur, but he was 75 when he left Haran. He had no children, and God’s promise had no meaning until he had a son to inherit it. He may not have been very worried then. After all, he was only five years older than his father had been at the birth of his firstborn.

Abraham's Departure / József Molnár (1850)

Abram obeyed. He packed all his stuff, gathered his wife and servants (and maybe some friends who shared his enthusiasm for learning to know the God who speaks to people, and, unfortunately, a nephew he should have been left behind. They all set off for Canaan. Abram didn’t know if that is where God wanted him to wind up, but he had to go somewhere. Returning to Ur would have been the only wrong destination.

Once he arrived at a place later called Shechem, God promised to give that land to his descendants. In other words, Abram himself wouldn’t possess a bit of it. It looks like there was already a Canaanite shrine there, but Abram built an altar to God, defying this new paganism he had encountered. Then he moved a little farther, pitched his tent, built another altar, and called on the name of the Lord.

He would live as a nomad until the day he died. He would pitch his tent many times in many places. Its location was always temporary. Meanwhile, he built altars. He worshiped at them, and they remained when he departed.

Scripture does not record another word that God spoke to Abram for another 10 years. That’s the way God works. He invades our thoughts without warning, speaks so vividly that it feels like something wonderful will happen in the next fifteen minutes–or at least by the end of the week. Then the waiting begins.

It’s hard to receive a promise and wait. A year or two is bad. Abram had lived with his promise since before he left Ur. Still childless when God told him he had arrived in the land promised to his descendants, he must have thought that, finally, he and his wife would start a family. Ten more years passed. Abram continued to worship faithfully. Meanwhile he did some noble things and some foolish, cowardly things. Day by day, the promise faded. He developed a plan B and designated one of his servants as his heir.

Then God showed up again. Abram spilled out his frustrations and worries. He pointed out his lack. He complained. Haven’t all believers done the same thing, sometimes with more than one promise? God spoke his promise again. The servant would not be Abram’s heir. He would have a son from his own body. He told Abram to look up at the sky and try to count the stars. God promised him that his descendants would be that numerous. “Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness” (Genesis 15:6).

This verse marks the first occurrence of any form of “believe” in the Bible. Nowhere does Genesis record that Abel, Enoch, Noah, or even Abram himself when he first heard the promise, believed God. He had no more evidence, no more logical reason than before. He believed anyway.

He and his wife hatched a scheme to help God along, so the son born a year later, Ishmael, was not the son of promise. God did change Abram’s name to Abraham, his wife Sarai’s to Sarah, and promise that Sarah herself would bear a child, but not until 13 years later. Abram/Abraham continued to do some noble things and some foolish and cowardly things for the rest of his life. Being declared righteous does not guarantee against committing sins from time to time.

Abram started out as nobody but a name in a genealogy. God spoke to him and made a wild promise. No amount of waiting, no amount of his own sin, could deter him from hanging on to that promise. As he waited, his faith grew. And that is how a person of no discernible importance to any society he lived in became Abraham, father of many nations, including the spiritual nation of those of like faith.

Photo credit: Ziggurat of Ur Some rights reserved by Russell Petcoff. — Ancient Ur is now in modern Iraq. I have found many very recent pictures of this ziggurat with U.S. soldiers, but it was originally built for astronomical research and moon worship.

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The prophet Isaiah lived in bleak times. Early in his ministry an ungodly king, Ahaz, made a cowardly alliance with the Assyrian empire, which reduced the once proud kingdom of Judah to vassal status. The next king, Hezekiah, restored true worship, but tried to be politically and diplomatically clever instead of relying fully on God to protect him. Assyria, which had overrun the northern kingdom of Israel and forced all of its people into exile sat poised to punish any hint of resistance to its harsh demands. Meanwhile the entire had become corrupt, with the strong oppressing the weak and otherwise ignoring the law of God.

Isaiah tirelessly pointed out how far the entire society had fallen from the knowledge of God. He proclaimed that God’s wrath at the people’s sin would result in destruction and exile–not at the hands of Assyria, but Babylon, a rising power that Hezekiah had allied himself with. But when Isaiah looked at the future, he saw not only the coming judgment, but the grace God had ready for after his wrath had accomplished his purpose. The brief 12th chapter sings about the coming grace in the face of all the trouble that faced the kingdom

In that day you will say:
“I will praise you, O LORD.
Although you were angry with me,
your anger has turned away
and you have comforted me.
Surely God is my salvation;
I will trust and not be afraid.
The LORD, the LORD, is my strength and my song;
he has become my salvation.”
With joy you will draw water
from the wells of salvation.
In that day you will say:
“Give thanks to the LORD, call on his name;
make known among the nations what he has done,
and proclaim that his name is exalted.
Sing to the LORD, for he has done glorious things;
let this be known to all the world.
Shout aloud and sing for joy, people of Zion,
for great is the Holy One of Israel among you.”

The song begins with an individual voice: I will praise; I will trust. Then it continues with the same voice addressing a group using second person plural: you will draw; you will say. And those imperatives? Give thanks to the Lord; sing to the Lord; shout aloud. Those are plural, too. It is impossible to have a transformed community without saved individuals. It is also impossible for saved individuals to flourish in the absence of a transformed community.

Only an individual can experience salvation. Only within a community can anyone really enjoy it. What’s more, the community cannot hold the joy within itself. The only proper response to salvation is to share it and make it known to the whole world.
Centuries after Isaiah wrote this song, angels appeared to a group of shepherds and proclaimed that the Savior, the Christ, the Messiah that the nation had long awaited had been born that very night. Those shepherds lived in a time with its own threats and looming troubles. A Christmas season to celebrate was many more centuries in the future. But the shepherds could and did rejoice anyway as they witnessed the nativity.

They celebrated the birth of the Savior. They had no notion of what he would do. We have the whole New Testament to tell us what Jesus did. Christians who know Jesus personally also know what he has done not just in history, but in their own lives. They have relived the progression that Isaiah sang about. No wonder Christians can rejoice, at Christmas and always, regardless of the perils confronting them or the society around them. Songs of joy in hard times? They come spontaneously with understanding of the meaning of Christmas.

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by a.drian

Satan appeared to win a great victory in Eden by corrupting the man and the woman God had made. God declared that the seed of the woman would ultimately defeat him. Humanity became so corrupt that God destroyed all but eight individuals in a great flood. Afterward, humanity continued with unabated wickedness. But God had a sneaky plan.

• He commissioned Abram, a wealthy but unremarkable man living in an important city to go to a far country and live as a nomad, with the promise that his descendants would inherit the land. Abram was childless, by the way, and didn’t have the promised son for another 25 years. Along the way, his name was changed to Abraham.
• Neither Abraham’s son nor grandson actually occupied the promised land. The grandson and all his children moved to Egypt, where their descendants were eventually enslaved for four centuries.
• Then one of the slave babies, Moses, was actually raised as a member of the royal family. He saw his destiny and tried to take it into his own hands, with the result that he had to flee into exile. Forty years later, God found him tending sheep and sent him back to make a great nation of that band of slaves.
• Finally in possession of the promised land, Abraham’s offspring became plentiful, but weak because of their wickedness. God chose a king for them from an apparently prominent family, but instead of picking a kingly, impressive-looking son, chose David, the youngest. David’s father had not considered him important enough to invite to meet with the prophet. He was out on shepherd duty.
• David built a strong kingdom and received a promise that he would never lack an heir to his throne. Eventually, however, his kingdom first split into two parts, both of which collapsed under the accumulated weight of their sin. A few generations after that, when the people were restored to their land, God ceased to speak to them through prophets.

Annunciation / Fra Angelico

Like Moses and David and other unlikely people God chose to call, Mary was probably hard at work, thinking mostly of the task at hand–or perhaps of her betrothed, Joseph–when the angel Gabriel startled her (Luke 1:26-38). He announced that she would become pregnant and bear the king promised to David, while still a virgin. (There was too much sin in her family history for the Son of God to be born as a man in any other way.)

How like God. He did not come into the world openly, as the son of someone the world considered important. He prepared an obscure peasant girl, descendant of a shepherd whose own family considered him insignificant, to be his human mother. This Son, Jesus, continued the pattern. He grew up in a backwater district of a Roman province best known in Rome as a source of trouble. He began to preach in the surrounding villages, expecting people to figure out who he was from the way he spoke and acted. The leadership of his own people never caught on.

Jesus later called himself the door and declared that anyone who did not enter by the door was a thief and a robber. The door into the world as a real human being is through the womb. God wanted to sneak up on the devil and the world by becoming human legitimately, through the door. From before he called the obscure Abram–in fact, from the time he warned the devil of his eventual defeat by the seed of the woman–God prepared Mary, in both her lineage and obscurity, to provide the necessary womb.

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by carulmare.