Further Up and Further In

Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God -- Hebrews 6:1

Those of us in American Protestant Christianity, in particular, like to be egalitarian in our thinking.  We often call one another brother or sister and consider church services as the “assembling of the saints”.  Romans 12:3 advises us thusly:  For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.  Meanwhile Galatians 6:3 also warns us, … if anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. 

Humility within the Body of Christ is essential, as is a loving regard for the gifts unique to those around us.  The rule is to humble oneself while exalting and encouraging our fellow believer, whatever his or her state and position.  A person does not have to be a great intellect to be a great saint.  The love of Christ is not dependent on our cerebral capacity or how much we know or can know.  Wisdom transcends intelligence.  The wisest among us are not always the most glib or articulate or knowledgeable. 

There is a place in the Body of Christ for all.  Some of us are not going to reach great heights, but we are still in Christ.  We are accepted in the Beloved.  There is a basic level that anyone can reach.  Have faith in God.  It’s not hard.  It is John 3:16, whoever believes in the Son.  For some of us, that’s about as far as we can go.

However, there are those whom God is going to challenge and call to higher understanding and greater insight into the truth.  The truth goes beyond those elementary doctrines to which we all can and must adhere.  If we have the capacity, we can go on.  In The Last Battle, the call comes to go “Further up, and further in.” 

We can go to a place where we are “safe”, and we can stop.  The Lord, though, has a place for us where we are not just safe but fulfilled.  Like I was saying yesterday, that may mean we are called to let some things fall by the wayside because there isn’t room for them where we have to go.  They are OK where we are now, but they are not going to be right when we reach that new level.  So, by faith, we lay them down and leave them behind.  It may be habits or thought-patterns, sometimes a relationship.  It’s not necessarily bad in and of itself; it just can’t go where we are being called to go.

Going on to maturity means that we follow on to find our ultimate satisfaction, contentment, and joy.  As Hosea 6:3 says (KJV), Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the Lord. 

Those elementary doctrines – they are the foundation on which we build, the Rock on which we stand.  You have to have a foundation, but you only have to lay it once.  You don’t have to go back and rebuild it every day.  You’ll never get to the roof that way. 

Twisted Threads

Behold, it was for my welfare that I had great bitterness; but in love you have delivered my life from the pit of destruction, for you have cast all my sins behind your back. -- Isaiah 38:17

King Hezekiah was stricken with a disease to the point of death.  In affliction, as might be expected, he despaired.  No matter how harsh and hopeless we may find life from time to time, the thought of its cessation can be frightening and overwhelming.  There is an interesting metaphor in Job 7:6 -- My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle and come to their end without hope.  Matthew Henry comments on this verse, saying, “Our days are compared to the weaver's shuttle … passing and repassing very swiftly, every throw leaving a thread behind it; and when finished, the piece is cut off, taken out of the loom, and showed to our Master to be judged of.”

I had never thought of the “finished product” but always focused on the swiftness of the passing.  Each day, though, is a strand added to the tapestry of our lives.  Some are bright, others dark, forming a pattern and telling a story that can be seen and comprehended now only by the Weaver, the one who knows the pattern He follows. 

Hezekiah longed to live and for good reason:  that he might faithfully lead his people and serve the God of Glory.  The love and mercy of the Lord spared his life, yet there is a twist to this story.  Hezekiah lived fifteen more years, during which time the son who would inherit the throne was born.  His name was Manasseh, and he may have been the most wicked of Judah’s kings.  It is the sin and abominations of Manasseh that led to the eventual fall of Jerusalem and the deportation and dispersion of the Jews by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar.

 A lot of my days are composed of black threads.  Many, many years ago, I was still a relatively young man, and I had a dream or perhaps a vision.  In it I saw a man clad all over in dark brown leather standing on a road.  His hands were gloved and balled into fists.  He extended his left hand and opened it to reveal something white and bright, like a large diamond, or a star.  The vision had a specific meaning for me at the time that doesn’t matter anymore.  I think there was also another interpretation in the longer term, that no matter how dark and muddy and colorless my life may appear, there is always some light.  It may illuminate my own path, or it may help someone else find their way. 

I don’t know.  I can’t know, any more than Hezekiah could know what his life or death would mean.  God responds to our cries and to our faith and makes that part of the picture.  Maybe He is making a rug that pulls the room together.  Hezekiah’s healing, by itself, was a good thing because Hezekiah was a righteous king.  Manasseh and his apostasy, taken in isolation, were unholy and unrighteous and evil.  But what are those threads laying side by side, the black mark on the white paper?  What is that message and what does it say?   In love you have delivered my life from the pit of destruction, for you have cast all my sins behind your back.  Or, as the final and ultimate Heir of the throne of David (and Hezekiah and Manasseh) said, For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

Bold Talk For a One-eyed Fat Man

Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. – Romans 5:20-21

October 31^st is Reformation Day.  So, if you don’t feel like celebrating Halloween, dress up as Luther and scare some Catholics.  Like Luther, Paul was accused by his opponents of saying that Christians should sin in order to increase grace.  Luther famously said to sin boldly.  This was hyperbole contrasting sin with the greater salvation and grace in the Cross.  Paul does not end on the above statement but immediately goes into what we call chapter 6 of Romans saying, “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?” 

Grace is not license, not a permit to permissiveness.  Grace is the answer we give when we are accused.  Yes, I am everything you say and worse, yet God loved me so much that He offered His only begotten Son to die in my place.  Jesus did not go willingly to a cruel death because I am such a wonderful, perfect person, but because I am broken and sick and hopeless and utterly wretched.  He doesn’t stick with me and try to help me now because I’m good but because I need Him. 

Bad company corrupts good character.  Anybody will tell you that.  Does the Lord corrupt Himself by hanging around with us?  No, He lifts us up.  If we are afraid of God, afraid of the Holy Spirit then who will we end up hanging around?  Don’t think about it too much.  It’s scarier than Hillary Clinton in a negligee. 

We don’t have to be afraid.  We don’t have to hide what we are.  John says if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all righteousness.  How can that be “just”?  Because the price was already paid in full.  

Nothing is between us and the Father.  Christ has broken down all the barriers and given us direct access to the very presence of God.  None but the high priest could enter the Holy of Holies, and that only once a year on the Day of Atonement, and only bearing the blood of the demanded sacrifice.  It was terrifying.  It is still to be recognized with respect and humility and awe, but the veil was torn in two from top to bottom.  We are the sanctuary. 

Yes, I am going to mess up.  Yes, things are going to cross my mind that I would be better off without.  Yes, when I smash my finger on the John Deere, I am probably going to say some things I should not.  Yes, I am a sinner.  No, I will not accept the condemnations and denunciations of the Accuser.  I won’t sin boldly, but I will boldly tell it to the Lord when I fail, and I will boldly cry to the Cross as my Savior cried from it, “It is all paid up.” 

A Better Place

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life – John 3:16

This has to be the most famous (can a verse be famous?) verse in the Bible. This is the reference on the homemade endzone signs. It’s the Billy Graham closer. It contains within it the secret of man’s creation, fall, and redemption. I would be willing to wager that more Christians know this verse by heart than any other – not counting “Jesus wept”. The nearest contender would likely be the initial lines of the Shepherd’s Psalm. “Judge not” seems to have an edge among non-believers who never bother to finish the sentence: “that ye be not judged”.

I am thinking of this well-known quote because one of my older cousins, D.A., passed away Sunday. He is what they call a double cousin. Our fathers were brothers and our mothers were sisters – not much genetic variation there. My mother once mistook a picture of my brother for one of the other set about the same age. We lived only a few miles apart, went to the same school, the same church. D.A. was, unlike some of the rest of us, a mild-tempered, easy-going man. I mostly picture him in his younger days with the stubby remains of a well-chewed cigar sticking out of his mouth. He had a distinctive drawl – I would say exaggerated but he spoke the same way when he was a small child. It was perfectly natural for him. He did a stint in the Army, but mostly he just lived out in the country and worked and raised three boys. And that’s where the verse comes in.

His oldest son was named Mike. My cousin was a few more than twenty years my senior. I was only three or four years older than Mike. I remember. Mike was a big, blond, blue-eyed, perpetually happy kid. He had just crossed over into puberty and started to stretch in height when he began to have unusual pains in his legs. No one took it seriously at first. When they did, the results were grim. It was bone cancer. His right leg gone to his hip, he shaved off the hair that didn’t fall out right away and hobbled around the yard at fourteen calling himself ‘Kojak’, while gleefully proclaiming that he had an organ longer than his leg. We knew that no one so young and otherwise healthy, no one with such a positive outlook, with so much love and support and prayer surrounding him could possibly be beaten by cancer. Before school started in the fall, Mike died.

D.A. was shattered. He had done all the right things. He had gone to church, served his country, married the girl next door. He was not a drinker, not a womanizer, not a cheat or a thief. As far as I know he never did any harm of any kind to anyone. It was impossible to imagine him doing so. But Mike was gone. D.A. did not want to hear words of comfort. Especially, he did not want to hear that Mike was “in a better place”. There was no better place for a boy than with his father.


The years dragged on. D.A. went to church and even served as a deacon. He was mostly in charge of keeping up the cemetery – a job to which he was appropriately devoted. I don’t suppose that he ever ceased to be a Christian. That would have been to him unthinkable – doubly so for he thought as little as possible of God.

Death did not cease its harvest. D.A. saw this one pass on, and that one. His older brother, very much unlike D.A. in most ways, was diagnosed with cancer himself. Tough and unrepentant to the end, the brother refused treatment, buying whiskey by the gallon to help him endure the pain. I don’t know if D.A. got a chance to talk to him. What would he have said? Yes, God is cruel and merciless, but at least you can go to heaven to live with Him forever when you die. I’m sure the hardened skeptic would have bought that ticket.

Still his brother’s passing and possible descent into hell must have gotten D.A. to allow some thoughts in, or rather out, that had been locked down in the hole for forty years. The thoughts were bent and pallid, rat-gnawed, weak, and filthy, but they were there and they lived. Their existence was an accusation against him, against his years of living in rebellious obedience to a Master who had the right to refuse service not rendered in love. D.A. realized that, and he realized, moreover, that the Master had not rejected and punished his hateful rituals. Those thoughts had not been locked in a dungeon but in a temple. D.A. had closed the door and bolted it against them, but he was the one denied access. He began to see that what he was denied and what he denied ruled him nonetheless. The doors had to be thrown open, the windows uncovered, the floor swept, and the altar restored. He’d taken good care of the graveyard, but the sanctuary had been neglected.

I don’t know if he would have had the courage or the heart to begin except for the first ray of grace shooting through a crack somewhere to light the temple’s dusty floor at the base of a cobwebbed column. To his eyes, the column ignited into a tower of fire with a voice crying out from the midst: The one who gains the victory, him I will make a pillar in the Holy of Holies, and he shall go no more out. D.A. was stunned with revelation. All along Mike had been there, standing tall and glorious in the inner sanctuary with God’s own unutterable Name written upon him. He had not gone down in defeat; he had not been beaten. A boy’s place was with his Father.

David wept and fasted when his son was ill, but when the boy died the king rose up, ate, and resumed his duties. The people around him were confused. David replied, “He cannot return to me, but I will go to him.” A man’s place is with his Father.