THE PATH

How often do you come across a verse in the Bible and you know you've read it before but this time around it strikes you as unusually profound or challenging or beautiful? 

And then you think, "How did I overlook this before?"

Here's a verse in Proverbs that I used to close my sermon this morning. It is a simple and beautiful image, especially when you consider that Jesus described Himself as "the Way": 

The path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day. (4:18)

INVESTIGATING THE DIVINE CONSPIRACY

I recently came across a quote from Dallas Willard which I thought might be relevant to my dissertation project about habit formation and spiritual disciplines:

"Your system is perfectly designed to yield the result you are getting." 

Although it was credited as coming from his book The Divine Conspiracy, no page number was cited.

So I checked it out on Amazon, read a sample, and thought it might be worth buying - so I did.

The book has me intrigued so far and might prove to be useful to me beyond my project.

In assessing the current weakness (as of 1997) of American Christianity, Willard writes:

"[Jesus] is automatically seen as a more or less magical figure - a pawn, or possibly a knight or a bishop, in some religious game - who fits only within the categories of dogma and of law. Dogma is what you have to believe, whether you believe it or not. And law is what you must do, whether it is good for you or not." (xiii)

Willard sadly nails the contemporary definition of "dogma" here!

I am anxious to keep reading - I am not terribly familiar with his work in general but I have found the first few chapters insightful. 

RIGHT RELATIONSHIP

It is Dr. Tim Mackie - who knows his Hebrew - who defines the word "righteousness" as "right relationship". But he points out that the "rightness" for a relationship will differ one to another.

A right relationship with your own child is going to have very different entailments than a right relationship with your boss.

You might be able to rank the importance of your various relationships. Perhaps a spouse would rank at the top and children just below that, followed by parents or siblings and then relatively distantly by a friend, a boss, a co-worker, and all the way down to the stranger who changes your car's oil. 

A relationship with the God of the universe - your Creator - should be by definition THE key relationship in your life. And if He is pure and holy and good and wants you to call Him "Father", then a right relationship with Him is going to be very much in line with the sort of things we traditionally associate with the word "righteousness". Especially since He commands you to love everyone, even the stranger changing your oil. 

But remember that Mackie combines "right" with "relationship" - and both are essential to biblical righteousness.

You can do what might otherwise be right in God's eyes - feeding the hungry, standing up for the voiceless, giving money to a charity - but do it all for the wrong reasons. Maybe you're simply virtue signaling or trying to impress somebody or trying to earn a place in Heaven. 

In any of those cases, the relationship is not actually right. In fact, our good deeds might involve zero relationship with our heavenly Father. And then they are just going to backfire.

"Get your sins forgiven so that you can go to Heaven someday" is the anemic version of the gospel. The full, true gospel is really only available to those who desire to be right with God. 

NOAH: A RIGHTEOUS MAN

Gen 6:9 These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God.

I don't know that I have ever heard a Calvinist truly challenged regarding all the Old Testament references to righteous individuals.

If all humans are totally depraved, steeped in Adam's guilt and born into sin, how can the Bible ever describe any human being as being "righteous", "blameless", or "walking with God"?

But Noah is clearly described that way.

Twice.

And he manages to maintain his righteousness even as everyone around him is on the broad path to destruction.

And it seems pretty clear that Noah is chosen to be the remnant through the flood because he is righteous. He is not made righteous after being chosen. 

Gen 7:1 Then the Lord said to Noah, “Go into the ark, you and all your household, for I have seen that you are righteous before me in this generation.

Tim Mackie says the Hebrew for righteousness simply describes a "right relationship". 

Noah had a right relationship with God. 

How did he manage that?

PRAISE FOR THE BIBLE PROJECT

Since I became aware of The Bible Project a year ago, my admiration for the work and the people behind it has only grown exponentially. 

If you aren't familiar with The Bible Project, it is a free online collection of videos, podcasts, articles and other resources designed "to help people experience the Bible as a unified story that leads to Jesus."

Dr. Tim Mackie is the scholar behind the information shared - and that information can range from foundational to obscure but it's always in-depth and fascinating. 

The Bible Project's home base is bibleproject.com, but the podcasts can be found everywhere and YouTube has a lot of great videos of Tim Mackie's preaching and teaching.  

It is worth checking out.

I dare you to open even a single video without getting sucked in and wanting to know more.

SHADOW SENTENCES

I was listening to a Chris Williamson podcast today and he put a label to an all too common phenomenon which reeks havoc on relationships. He calls it "speaking in shadow sentences". 

Williamson illustrates the concept with this scenario: You've been dating someone and you haven't spent time together for a week and you ask what they are doing tonight and they reply that they are hanging out with friends. 

What you want to say is, "I really would like to see you soon and it makes me worried when you spend time with your friends but not with me - that it's because you don't actually want to be with me."

But what you end up saying instead is "Oh, it must be a very important night to see your friends again this week, is it? I'm glad that you've got so much spare time to catch up with them."

The passive aggressive thing we actually say is what Williamson calls a shadow sentence. It's the dark shade of what we desire to communicate. 

Given enough time, the habit of speaking in shadow sentences - especially if all sides in a given conversation are doing it - has the potential to maim or even destroy marriages, families, friendships, workplaces, and churches. 

At the very least, the practice will frustrate the heck out of those relationships and keep them unstable. 

It is tragic. And it happens every day.

But I do believe with a little awareness, we can at least catch ourselves before a shadow sentence escapes our lips so that we aren't contributing to the miscommunication. And ... sometimes ... perhaps we can even coax real sentences out of others. 

(Here's the episode. The stuff about shadow sentences starts around the 44 minute mark.)

ON MEETING A NEIGHBOR

The power went out at the church this morning in the middle of our Breakfast Club Bible study. It was about 9:00. 

By 10:00 everyone had left and I had the chance to investigate. It wasn't a single breaker or fuse - the whole church had gone primitive.

It was a perfect summer morning - blue skies, no storms.

No branches had fallen on any wires.

No transformer had exploded. 

Since the day was bright and I couldn't just look down the street for darkened windows to judge if neighbors were also without power, I decided the only way to know if the problem was limited to the church would be to knock at a house close to the church.

As an introvert, it's not really like me to go knocking on strangers' doors, but the power outage gave me a good excuse to meet a neighbor and, honestly, I thought God might be disappointed if I passed. 

After all, how can we love our neighbors if we've never even met?

So I strode up to the door of the house just on the far edge of our gravel parking lot and knocked as confidently as I could manage. Out came a genial young man named Jacob who works third shift at Toyota and loves to fish.

We must have chatted on his porch for 20 minutes or more. Jacob turned out to be a super pleasant guy. At one point he asked if I was the one who "owned" the church and that made me chuckle.

Anyway, he confirmed that the power was just fine at his house. I returned to the church, happy that I had not shrunk from the opportunity to meet a neighbor.

When I walked through the door and stepped inside the building, the power came back on.