Lessons Learned #9 Bearing Good Fruit

Lessons Learned #9  (yep, still working on them)

The kids and I were talking yesterday about powerful literature and movies, and discussing why so many Christian attempts are poorer than their counterparts.  We don’t get a pass just because we ascribe to the Truth.  Excellence must be earned, and nothing short of excellence, in whatever our calling, does not bring the highest honor to our Creator God; in fact, sometimes it downright shames His Name.  While none of our accomplishment contributes the least pebble to our justification, and unless the Lord uses it particularly, is not even indicative of our sanctification, it is our responsibility as a use of the talents He has entrusted to us.  Much of this is developing our gifts; much of flows from developing our inner character to become more like Christ, to continually be asking for the gifts of the Spirit.

I recently read an article on the fantasy genre, in which the author was bemoaning the wretched collection of this literature by poor authors.  He made the point, if you want to write like Tolkien, you need to be a Tolkien.  Well, we all wish we were that brilliant.  But the point is, Tolkien studied hard,  worked hard, wrote laboriously and endlessly, started with the grammar and structure and language of things, created whole worlds from which to build an enduring story.  We want too many shortcuts.  Spiritually, too.

RC Sproul says, “I don’t know how many times, when giving exams to college students, I have seen something like this written in response to an essay question:  “Dear professor, I didn’t prepare adequately for this examination.  I’m so sorry.  I won’t let it happen again.  Please be merciful to me because I really do love Jesus.”  These students made the argument that I should not require responsible behavior from them because of their profession of faith in Christ.  When I saw a plea like that, I jotted a note on the exam page, saying, “I am delighted to hear of the state of your soul, and I hope you’ve grasped the doctrine of justification by faith alone, but when grading my students, I practice justification by works alone.”

"I see it in Christian ministries—we think that because we’re in Christian ministry, we do not have to be concerned about productivity.  On the contrary, our calling as Christians is the highest calling there it, and the idea of being productive is not the invention of capitalism, it is the mandate of Christ.  He saves us in our futility can calls us to be fruitful.  He makes it clear that if He were to leave us to ourselves, we would be completely impotent.  We would produce nothing worthwhile, because, as our Lord says in I John 15:5, “without me you can do nothing”.

"What is the fruit Jesus is concerned to see in our lives?...The fruit of a changed life, a changed character, a character that is strengthened and nurtured by the source of holiness, Christ Himself…So Jesus said, those who are in Me and do not bear fruit are cut off; those who do bear fruit are cleansed, purified, nurtured, and pruned, so that they may become even more productive….

Abide in Me, and I in you.  And as the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me.  John 15:3-4

"Here Jesus introduced that rich word abide, which has to do with remaining close to Him.  Jesus declared that our productivity, our fruitfulness, is directly linked to our abiding in him.  As Christians, we will bear fruit, but it will vary in degree.  The closer we stay to Christ, the more fruit we will bear.  The more we wander out from the center and neglect the means of grace that He has given to us, the less fruit we will produce."     –RC Sproul, Commentary on John

Good reasons for staying in the Word every day in memorizing, reading, meditating.  The other day I took a shower in the bathroom one of our children uses, and saw she had taped several 8x10 pages of Scripture she was memorizing in rows just below the ceiling, 14 or 16 font.  We all have pockets of time.  Thinking back on the discussions about the pressures young mothers face, if the fruit of these exhausting laboring years is the formation of the lifetime character of our children, can we afford that fruit to be stunted, not ripe, full and flourishing, because we did not stay close in daily fellowship with our, their, Father?  We export what we import.

all photos courtesy of Thistledown Cards

Good Friday Gifts

Jesus’ legacy, His last will and testament: “ Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you.” (John 14:27)

O sinner, you are in the most perilous situation any human being could ever be.  You are at war with God, estranged from Him.  It is a war you cannot win.  I urge you as strongly as I can to flee to the cross that you might have peace with God; that your name might be in this last will and testament.  Christ gave Himself on your behalf and took upon Himself the just wrath of the Father against you.  If you trust Jesus for this substitutionary work, you will have the unspeakable inheritance of peace with God.

O Christian, you know what it means to sin, to displease Christ, to feel a wedge in your relationship with Him.  We all go through that when we are brought under conviction.  Christ chastens us, but at no point after our redemption is He ever at war with us again.  When we are reconciled to the Father through Christ, the war is over…

“Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid…”(John 14:27)

“In the multitude of my anxieties within me, your comforts delight my soul.”  (Psalm 94:19)

“And I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter, that He may abide with you forever.”   John 14:16

Here, the word comfort comes from two Latin words that meant “with strength”.  Thus a comforter was someone who came to strengthen you.  It wasn’t the one who came to wipe your tears after the battle; it was the one who came to give you strength for the battle…

-all notes from RC Sproul, Commentary on John 14 

Secrets of Our Lord

I think one of the most startling things about the stories coming in from our daughter’s trip is how everyone she meets has an almost unbelievable story they’ve lived through in this torn country;  those who lived through the Killing Fields, and the persecuted believers over the border  where to be a believer is a sentence of death, loss, bereavement. 

One thing I have been struck with continually in my life, and have often spoken with the children for them to understand in others, is how every person has a profound story, were it known.  We so seldom get below the surface to even know well the people we worship with every week.

The most important thing, however, is that we are known, and known perfectly, by God, and interceded for perfectly by the Son, and guided and led perfectly by the Holy Spirit.

I love this, from In the Secret Place:  

“The secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him”.  Psalm 25:14

There is something individual and incommunicable about the blessings which the God of salvation gives my soul.  Not one of my sisters and brothers in the family has received a boon which is quite the same.

It is a secret at birth. The regeneration of hearts that were formerly far from Him is accomplished in innumerable modes.  At times it comes in the stillness, at other times in the storm.  It may be a gradual process, for which the preparation has been going forward through many years; or it may be an instantaneous revolution that has no preface and no explanation…as multiform as the sunsets of a golden summer that do not repeat themselves two evenings in succession…

It is a secret through life.  Because I have my special temperament, which regeneration marvelously ennobles but which even a change so radical cannot destroy, my Lord’s training of me assumes a certain form and pursues a certain course.  If I am a sanguine soul, He will teach me the patience and quietness that I need.  If I am dull and phlegmatic, He must rouse me into action and zeal.  If I am brooding and melancholy in my surmises and thoughts, He will bid me be of good cheer.  I may trust Him, who read my heart, to guide me, to chasten and sober me, to cleanse my sinfulness, to quicken my lethargy, after a fashion he does not observe with my neighbor, whose necessities are different from mine.

It is a secret in death…When I arrive at the brink of the River and feel its chill, the God who has led me thus far, will have His own revelation of helpful comfort and his own whisper of satisfying peace…--Alexander Smellie

And from Ann Voskamp, on the meaning of the Cross, as we come into Good Friday:

He stretches open His arms on that Cross and cries, “For you. For all your regrets and for all your impossibles, for all that will never be and for all that once was, for all that you can’t make right and for all that you got wrong, for your Judas failures and your Peter denials and your Lazarus griefs, I offer to take the nails, the sharp edge of everything, and offer you myself because I want you, to take you, you in your wild grief, you in your anger and your disappointment and your wounds and your not-yet-there, you, just as you are, not some improved version of you, but you – I came for you, to hold you, to carry you, to save you.”

Photo courtesy of Thistledown Cards 

Because He has Set His Love Upon Me

Indeed, the Lord has His gallery of heroes.  Our daughter met, these last few days, men who have been imprisoned, tortured, threatened and otherwise persecuted for their faith.  But all they really want to talk about is the glory of what the Lord is doing among them.

She's sat on the dirt floors eating with men and women who have given up who-know-how-much to provide loving hospitality to this visiting group, from the meager bit they have— “Definitely one of the poorer villages we visited, but they were overflowing with love and just beamed at us.  They were overjoyed to serve us a meal, even though it had probably cost them a lot.”

And I read Psalm 90:  Because he has set his love upon Me, therefore I will deliver him…I will set him on high, because he has known My Name.  He shall call upon me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him and honor him…”

When we set our hearts on something, how do we act?  Think?  What do we then do?

And Psalm 89:  Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands for us….the footnote reads, “Wanderers in the desert leave no monuments, but God can give eternal significance to the deeds of hands that serve Him…”   

Wanderers in the desert…Men in Cambodia who killed under the Khmer Rouge, who killed just to eat, and now pastor several churches; men who have given all they have, and barely eat every day so they can proclaim the gospel to just one more village, just one more person.  Women who raise up families in barest poverty but surrounded by love.  Or women out on the mission field who invest every gift they’ve been given, into their husband’s work and in raising their family joyfully, amidst beating back the jungle and the paganism. 

The heavenly monuments will encase some remarkable stories.  In our own sphere, shall we set our hearts on the eternal significance of our work, serving Him with what He has put in our hands to do? 

 Capturing Barefoot Photography, in Cambodia

Gifts of Intercession

Of the sweetest gifts I’ve been given, knowing someone is praying for me, interceding for me, is among the very best.  I find that many conversations can take place, and I can inquire into the lives of others with genuine interest over many exchanges.  But rare is the time when someone asks, How are you?  How can I be praying for you?  Yet we are blessed with the opportunity, every day, to pray for those we love.  And to pray for those we struggle to love.

Bonhoeffer again has wise words for us:   “Intercession is a gift of God’s grace for every Christian…Because intercession is such an incalculably great gift of God, we should accept it joyfully.  The very time we give to intercession will turn out to be a daily source of new joy in God and in the Christian community…

“Intercession is a daily service we owe to God and our brother [sister].  He who denies his neighbor the service of praying for him denies him the service of a Christian.  It is clear, furthermore, that intercession is not general and vague but very concrete: a matter of definite persons and definite difficulties and therefore of definite petitions.  The more definite my intercession becomes, the more promising it is…

“I can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me.  His face, that hitherto may have been strange and intolerable to me, is transformed in intercession into the countenance of a brother for whom Christ died, the face of a forgiven sinner.  This is a happy discovery for the Christian who begins to pray for others.  There is no dislike, no personal tension, no estrangement that cannot be overcome by intercession as far as our side of it is concerned…

“To make intercession means to grant our brother the same right we have received, namely, to stand before Christ and share His mercy…..”  --from Life Together

Intercession is something Christ consistently does for us.  Do we allow this to encourage us?  It ought to make us sing inside.  Intercession is a way we can become more like Him. 

So, pray for those you love today.  Pray for those with whom you struggle to love, today.  Let people know you are praying for them; some of the darkest days I have known, were those in which I wondered if anyone prayed for me.  Pray using Scripture, the power of God’s words and promises back to Him.  Be assured that many of you reading this, I pray for often.  (Even, on occasion, my unknown friend in Russia? -whom I will one day meet.)

When the Surreal is Real

I woke in the middle of the night Friday, thinking, “She’s in China.  This is the most bizarre thing.  She’s not just down the hall, like she’s always been.  She’s across the world right now.”  It was surreal.  I couldn’t even imagine it.  I tried to imagine what she was seeing, waiting in the Shanghai airport, attempting  to sleep through the layover.

It reminded me of how surreal seems our heavenly home.  My growing up years blur together now into a fairly meaningless small patch of history.  What will our time here on earth seem, when we are dazzled by His Home?  Our Home?  Do we get this?  “In my Father’s house are many mansions.  If it were not so, I would have told you.  I go to prepare a place for you…”  We navigate so many joys and sorrows here, as if it were the time of importance.  And it is, insofar as we are sowing and harvesting according to our calling.  But it isn’t insofar as what we work toward is There, not here;  a place, a time, we cannot begin to fathom.

We also can note the context.  Jesus had been having a most disturbing conversation with His disciples.  RC Sproul points out, “The words fell like a thunderbolt on the ears of those assembled in the upper room.  In short order, they had been told that Judas was going to betray Jesus, that Jesus was about to leave them,  and that Peter was going to deny Him.  Can you imagine how these men felt upon hearing this series of dire announcements?  Their hearts were troubled beyond description, and it was in that context that Jesus said to them, “Let not your heart be troubled.” (Commentary on John 14)

Let not your heart be troubled...

And then He tells them to believe in Him.  Believe in His character, which does not change.  Believe in His promises, which are always what He says.  Believe in His love for His people, which we cannot begin to fully grasp.

And then, then…He tells them He has prepared mansion rooms for them… in a different world, a world beyond their imagination, but nonetheless exceptionally real.  Real for them.   And real for us.

Photos courtesy of Capturing Barefoot Photography

Taken in Cambodia, March, 2013

The Daily Unexpected

Each new day brings the unexpected.  We can’t write our days and how they will go any more than the ant can do something so simple as write a grocery list.  We’ve been reveling in small signs of spring—a froth of crocuses, birdsong, and the best, the frog choruses starting again.  Then, this morning, we woke unexpectedly to a couple inches of snow to welcome spring.  Our younger daughter went out on the deck and started throwing snowballs in her brother’s open window, up a story, to wake him up.  He wasn’t pleased.  It’s quite beautiful, but it certainly wasn’t what we expected.  And we just heard that one of the travelers to Cambodia, leaving today, discovered his passport was three days expired.   

Recently I read a small post on how young mothers lack the time to be in the Word, to have devotions.  Yes, I remember the exhaustion and the demands;  I regret thinking I did not have the time every morning to lay the dailyness of my way before the Lord.  Did I actually think I would be equipped for the day, for whatever it did bring, without first having even a few moments with Him who ordained each hour?  We take our daily food for granted; we often think we can go without our daily sustaining power.

Deitrich Bonhoeffer has a good word on this.  He talks in Life Together about the importance of hard work in a day, following the time of coming before the Lord, and the words of Paul to pray without ceasing as a unity of our particular work with the presence of God:  

Thus the prayer of the Christian reaches beyond its set time and extends into the heart of his work.  It includes the whole day, and in doing so, it does not hinder the work; it promotes it, affirms it, and lends it meaning and joy,  Thus every word, every work, every labor of the Christian becomes a prayer; not in an unreal sense of a constant turning away from the task that must be done, but in a real breaking through the hard “it” to the gracious Thou.  Whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus” (Col 3:17).  Then from the achieved unity of the day the whole day acquires an order and a discipline.  These must be sought and found in the morning  prayer and in work they will be maintained.  The prayer of the morning will determine the day.  Wasted time, which we are ashamed of, temptations that beset us, weakness and listlessness in our work, disorder and indiscipline in our thinking and our relations with other people very frequently have their cause in the neglect of morning  prayer.  The organization and distribution of our time will be better for having been rooted in prayer.  The temptations which the working day brings with it will be overcome by this breakthrough to God.  Decisions which our work demands will be simpler and easier when they are made, not in the fear of men, but solely in the presence of God.  “Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily as unto the Lord, and not unto men” (Col 3:23).  Even routine mechanical work will be performed more patiently when it is done with the knowledge of God and his command.  Our strength and energy for work increase when we have prayed to God to give us the strength we need for our daily work.

The Deepest, Sweetest Water

Psalm 84 has always held a place of joy and comfort for my heart.  I opened to it for this morning’s Psalms reading, and it once again felt the touch of an old friend.  I wrote some verses from it into a card for our eldest daughter, who leaves today for some time in Cambodia.    I didn’t realize until I sat down to write this, that this Psalm had become meaningful to me when I was exactly the age she is now, finishing up her senior year of high school.  Our assignment, 30 years ago, was to study a Psalm through commentaries and write a paper for our senior thesis.  Everyone groaned and leaped to the shortest, easiest, most familiar Psalms.  Late, I chose recklessly and randomly a more obscure Psalm.  Late, and home sick from school, with the paper due all too soon, I cracked open the commentaries I’d amassed, and set to work.

This assignment became the most meaningful, enjoyable several-dozen hours I spent in my entire school career. 

Understanding the obscure imagery, reading what people like Matthew Henry and others said to make the verses come alive, realizing the depth of meaning in the verses, it was like going snorkeling in tropical waters for the very first time – a whole new world come alive.  How often are we skimming above the waters thinking we “see”, and missing the colorful world underneath the surface?

Blessed is the man whose strength is in You, whose heart is set on pilgrimage.

From Abraham to Frodo, since Adam and Eve were sent from the garden we all have been captivated somewhere in our hearts by the longing of pilgrimages – the longing to arrive at a place we dimly know is the ultimate of our desires.  “Pilgrimage always orients the believer toward an anticipated goal…a life of traveling for an eventual place of rest…one senses it also encompasses broader implications for the pilgrimage of faith and trust that characterizes God’s people at all times…they are people of the way, journeying rather than settled…”

As they pass through the Valley of Baca they make it a spring; the rain also covers it with pools.  They go from strength to strength; each one appears before God in Zion.”  (KJV)

“Passing through the valley of Weeping (Baca)they make it a place of springs; the early rain also fills [the pools] with blessing.  They go from strength to strength [increasing in victorious power].  (The Amplified Bible)

Valleys can reference hard times.  I’ve passed through some of the dark wilds in those valleys, where the sun went early behind the hills.  Valleys are places where battles are often fought, for the topography is “right”.  The arrows above and stones underfoot can stumble us wearily.  But valleys are places where rivers are found, where things can grow verdant.  The valley in Psalm 84 is the Valley of Weeping.  The Psalmist tells us it can be made a place of oasis for others weary along the way.

And the promise of those who do?  Increasing in victorious power.

Our girl will, no doubt, be blessed far more by those in poverty, in dry and weary places, whose faces shine with their new-found life and hope in Christ, than she brings to them from her western comfort.  She knows she goes to walk among brothers and sisters in Christ who will be rewarded in their heavenly home.  We pray she, wearing the clothing of His Spirit also, will make the places she travels, springs—pools of blessing and refreshment.   But those she’ll meet, some who have been persecuted for His sake,  who have sacrificed that He be made known to many, draw the deepest, sweetest water for others.

An Interview with the King

Mary Winslow has become a dear friend and mentor to me through just such passages as this, though I will not meet her ‘til the other side:

How sweet is close, confidential communion with Him!  How fully we can then unveil all our hearts to him – disclosing every secret, and making known every want; and bring our hidden enemies—our corruptions-- to Him, that He might slay them before our eyes.

I have just been favored with a most precious interview with the King of kings.  He admitted me, even me, into His royal presence-chamber, and encouraged me to open my mouth wide, telling Him all that was in my heart; and you may be sure that I did presume to make large demands upon His goodness, His well-known benevolence.  How condescendingly did He seem to listen to all I called upon Him for!  My heart was dissolved into love and my eyes into tears.  I wept that ever I could sin against such a God, grieve that blessed Spirit by whom I am sealed unto glory.  But such an interview!  Oh, believe that God is near you at all times.  Cultivate a close acquaintance.  Let Him not be out of your sight.  If we walk at a distance from a friend, and see him but seldom, our knowledge of him is but limited;  but if we live with him, dwell in the same habitation, we learn His character.  Now this is a case in point.  God unfolds Himself to us in Jesus.  This is His habitation—God in Christ reconciling us to Himself.  If we dwell in Christ, we know what God is to us; and as we make His habitation our secret dwelling place, so we know more of the character and love and dealings of our God and Father…

--Mary Winslow, Heaven Opened

Since Mothers Weary Not of Their Children

Some peculiar discouragements have assailed me the last few days, and last night one of our daughters felt low in spirits as well, she who is the sunshine ray and the servant heart who blesses and serves as a favorite hobby, yet feeling the necessities of life pressing in and shutting out the ability to do thus.  This is the girl who cleans her brother’s room for sport, brought us tea and flowers on a platter as one of her daily subjects like math, most of her elementary years.  Yet she shows that we do not know how many blessings we leave trailing behind us when our hearts are given to loving others, even when we feel that we have done nothing.

We had a good heart to heart talk and she rose feeling lightened, and I, deeply glad that I could encourage her.  So then, reading this from Spurgeon this morning had even more meaning:

“As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.”  Isaiah 66:13

A mother’s comfort! Ah, this is tenderness itself.  How she enters into her child’s grief!  How she presses him to her bosom, and tries to take all his sorrow into her own heart!  He can tell her all, and she will sympathize as nobody else can.  Of all comforters the child loves best his mother, and even grown men have found it so.

Does Jehovah condescend to act the mother’s part?  This is goodness indeed.  We readily perceive how He is a Father; but will He be as a mother also?  Does not this invite us to holy familiarity, to unreserved confidence, to sacred rest?  When God Himself becomes the comforter no anguish can long abide.  Let us tell out our trouble, even though sobs and sighs should become our readiest utterance.  He will not despise us for our tears; our mother did not.  He will consider our weaknesses as she did, and He will put away our faults, only in a surer, safer way than our mother could do.  We will not try to bear our grief alone; that would be unkind to someone so gentle and so kind.  Let us begin the day with our loving God, and wherefore should we not finish it in the same company, since mothers weary not of their children?

Regarding the Inheritance as Mine

My first thought when I read the following (first paragraph) was that I do not deserve this, and so I shrink from embracing it as my reality, somehow as if it lacks humility to think on these things.  My second thought was the realization that this is the Story God has written, already revealing it in Scripture; and so I dishonor Him by not accepting it, rejoicing in it, and living in a way that befits it – with overwhelming wonder, joy, and gratitude infusing every thought and action of my day.

   

The sight of Jesus is the joy awaiting me.  My hope is set on Him.  I shall walk with Him, and talk with Him.  I shall share His glory.  With my own lips I shall tell Him how much I owe Him.  With His own lips He shall answer me, "To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in My throne".

Those are some elements in the beauty and excellence of the inheritance towards which I am a traveler.  I am emboldened to regard it as mine, because One who is my Savior and my Elder Brother has taken possession of it for me.  In the days of heaven which come to me on earth, I have foretastes of its victory, its holiness, its peace; and these whet my appetite for the banquet within the veil.  But I would not miss the practical influence which such soul-filling prospects ought to wield over me.  They are not accomplishing their proper mission unless they are purifying the whole circle of my beliefs, my motives, my decisions, my words, my activities.  The anticipation of the world to come should be a constant and supreme incentive to patience, to separation and consecration, to courage and endurance, to seriousness and yet to gladness, in the world that now is.  The poet delineates the grammarian of the Renaissance, who went on conjugating his Greek verbs with deliberate care..  He refused to hurry, for haste would merely mar his work; and had he not all eternity before him?  It is what I should feel:  I have all eternity before me, and let me behave myself as an heir of God and a joint heir with Christ.

And thus the everlasting tomorrow will cast its light and glow across the evanescent today.

--Alexander Smellie