Falling in the Mire

A while back, I was talking to a friend about besetting sins. You know those struggles against which you are constantly striving? In our total depravity, we’re going to sin. Genesis says “every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood.” There’s no getting around it. But my question is why couldn’t God give us an absolute victory over a sin. Why couldn’t we move to the next mud puddle? Why do we have to keep falling back into the same stagnant, smelly pool? I mean, wouldn’t it be great if we could just move on to another sin? Like the levels in Mario Brothers. Well, therein lies the answer.

How do you feel when you climb up the little Mario Mountain and jump on the flag at the end of Level 1? Proud, of course. You’ve accomplished something! So if Cristi were to overcome the sin of selfishness forever, she would only look at the triumph as something she’d done. Though she knows her salvation comes from Christ alone, she would forget the filth from which her Beloved rescued her. She would try to make the victory her own. The danger of any success is that it breeds independence.

So, brothers and sisters, that’s why we fall back into the same putrid mire. Because without the grace of Jesus we are abominable muck. Besetting sins remind us from where we come. They send us back to the foot of the Cross. Prostrate, face covered in grime, I know my need for dependence. How poignantly strong is the reminder of my depravity in my recurring failure! And how blissfully sweet the aroma of Christ’s amazing grace!

I waited patiently for the LORD;
And He inclined to me,
And heard my cry.
He also brought me up out of a horrible pit,
Out of the miry clay,
And set my feet upon a rock,
And established my steps.
He has put a new song in my mouth—
Praise to our God;
Many will see it and fear,
And will trust in the LORD.
Psalm 40:1-3


Author’s note: I know this isn’t an exhaustive reasoning behind besetting sins. Nor is the topic itself developed to its fullest potential. Another day, another note.

Purpose to Praise

Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.
1 Thessalonians 5:16-18

At the GBC women’s retreat in March, I was given the precious jewel of a really practical way to pray through the Psalms. Since then I have been in the Psalms almost daily, and what a blessing it has been to soak up the Lord’s goodness there! One thing I have realized with great conviction is David’s intentional act of praising God regardless of his circumstances. Whether he is in the valley of despair or on the mountaintop of joy, he determines to praise his King.

Growing up in the church, I have heard 1 Thessalonians 5 many times. I have always known the concept of “rejoicing always.” But only recently has my heart grasped the life-giving implications of purposing to praise.

So what does it mean to purpose to praise? It certainly does ­not mean putting on a cheerful façade even when your heart is breaking. It does not mean disregarding spiritual dry spells like you’re always a Super-Christian. Bottom line: purposing to praise is not a license for pretense. In fact, I would argue pretentious praise is not really praise at all.

Joshua commanded the Israelites to “incline [their hearts] to the Lord God of Israel.” Paul implores the Colossians to “set [their] mind on things that are above.” This is what it means to purpose to praise. Focus your attention on the King! That focus will manifest itself in worship. If I have set my face like a flint towards God…if I am captivated by His goodness -even when I’m in the midst of loss or sorrow or pain, Satan can't distract me with the world or myself. But I'm starting to learn that this is a choice. I have to choose to incline my heart, set my mind…purpose to praise. Let me give you a personal example…

I was lonely and depressed my first weekend back in Manhattan this summer. Many of my best friends were gone, and I kept thinking how miserable the summer was going to be without them. God was like, "Cristi, what happened to all this purposing to praise stuff? You're not even kind of doing it right now." So, by His grace, I confessed my crappy attitude and thought of my reasons to praise God in that situation. The results were blessed –I have not been lonely since. The Lord mercifully helped me to walk in obedience that day, and I have seen the benefits of doing so.

What about when I don’t want to praise God? I have been in seasons where it has seemed impossible to lift up my head to look at God’s face. There was a reason David called our Lord the “lifter of my head.” When I am too weak to reach for Him, He is glorified by my attempt. The attempt becomes an act of praise. Committing my insufficiency to the capable hands of Christ is a way to worship. I know this language may sound ambiguous, but do you see this is still an inclination to God? Think of these two postures: sitting on the back of your heels and bowing with your forehead on the ground. In which position is your head and heart further forward?

I feel like I’m running around all over the place. This was probably too big of a chunk for me to try and break off. Let me just close by outlining a few of the ways David purposes to praise God:

• He remembers God’s faithfulness in times past. (Psalm 106)
• He meditates on truth. (Psalm 119)
• He preaches to himself. (Psalm 43:5)
• He considers creation. (Psalm 8:3)
• He worships in music. (Psalm 150)

This is the short list, but it serves as a good reminder for me…and for also, I hope. Purpose to praise God, brothers and sisters. In joy. In sorrow. In frustration. In persecution. In all things, incline your heart to the LORD, the God of Israel.

Rumors of Glory: Serendipity

The following is an article written by Alan Jacobs for Christianity Today's "Books & Culture":

Recently, for a book I was writing, I needed to track down a statement that I believed came from John Henry Newman. And I knew just what to do: I googled it. I typed in the key words from the quotation and immediately got confirmation that the author of the statement was indeed Newman, though I had misremembered it slightly. But now, if I was going to quote the statement in my book, I needed to get a proper source for it—a particular volume, its publisher and publication date, the page number the quotation is on—and websites rarely provide that sort of information. But no problem: I could simply turn to Amazon.com's "Search Inside the Book" feature. Once I figured out which of Newman's books could be internally searched, it took me two or three minutes to find the one the quotation came from, to make note of the page number, and to copy the publication information and paste it into my book manuscript. Task accomplished.

But what the satisfaction of finding, immediately, "just what you're looking for" hides from you is the simple fact that you have not found anything you weren't looking for. That is, the technologies that enable such unerringly direct access to the object of your quest depend for their success on a simultaneous concealing of everything except that object. Google in particular is so good at this that it offers an "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, which takes you directly to the URL that—according to Google's algorithms—best matches your search terms. And it is truly extraordinary how often "I'm Feeling Lucky" indeed takes you right where you want to go.

But Google is just an exceptionally well-honed example of this kind of technology, which is becoming pervasive. For instance, in writing that last paragraph I needed a synonym: I had used "hides" in one sentence and didn't want to use "hiding" in the next, but couldn't immediately think of a similar word. Thanks to my Mac's built-in thesaurus, a couple of mouse clicks led me to "concealing," which seemed to work well enough, so there it is. And I moved on. Why not? I have work to do.

Perhaps there was no reason for me to do otherwise. But it occurred to me to see what my old hardcover thesaurus might offer. This required me to find my old hardcover thesaurus, which, because I had not used it in so long, had migrated to one of the least accessible shelves in my office. When I got it out and looked up "hiding," I was led again to "concealing"—but also to a couple of hundred related words that my computer's thesaurus didn't suggest. And I noticed this: that the major term preceding "concealment" in the thesaurus is "secrecy," and the major term succeeding it is "falseness." The thought that concealment stands somehow between secrecy and falseness is provocative and cautionary. But I would never have seen it if I had not taken the trouble to consult a book which did not return instant results, and which almost forced my eyes to scan information that I was not looking for.

I did not take that trouble when I was looking for the Newman quote, largely because that would have required me not to walk two feet but a hundred yards, to my college's library—where I would have had to undergo the staggering burden of looking up call numbers, trudging to the stacks, and lugging a pile of books to a table where I could spend who knows how long looking through them. But if I had taken up such a Herculean labor, I would certainly have—however inadvertently and even against my will—learned a lot more about Newman than I now know, and perhaps could even have found other passages in his work that would have illuminated the quotation that I had slightly misremembered, or even have served as a replacement for it. And perhaps I would have discovered that I was taking the quotation out of context and that, far from supporting my argument, it actually undermined it. And there's the rub, or one of the rubs anyway. Now that the possible shortcomings of my online Newman-searching have entered my mind, I'm just going to have to go to the library after all. Exposing oneself to the fortuitous has its dangers, and perhaps a subliminal awareness of those dangers is one of the factors—along with sheer laziness—that keeps us focused on what we already know, or already think we know, we want. (This is a familiar strategy in many of life's venues: it's the reason that national restaurant chains position themselves at freeway exits. Why should we drive past the familiar to take a risk on the wholly unknown?)
In effect, we adjust to the overwhelming variousness of our social world by closing off the possibility of surprise—by eliminating the fortuitous, which also means eliminating the serendipitous. The two terms need discrimination. "Fortuitous" derives, obviously, from fortune, in Latin fortuna, that is, chance. So aware were the ancients of the power of fortuna in human life that they elevated it to divine status: the Goddess Fortuna is the subject of innumerable discourses, pious and otherwise, and portraits of lucky or unlucky (fortunate or unfortunate) men strapped to her Wheel litter the surviving pages of old books. Dante even conceives of her as having been given—by God himself—the task of ruling the course of human affairs. I used to know a man, fierce of aspect but kind of heart, who at church helped take care of children, and would invariably distribute cookies or cupcakes without regard to personal preference: when one of the kids would complain that she preferred chocolate chip to peanut butter, or white icing to pink, he would snap, "Ya get whatcha get," and move on to the next kid. There spoke truly the voice of Fortuna. Indeed, that's the only thing that Fortuna ever tells us: Ya get whatcha get.

Serendipity is different. The word was coined by that curious man Sir Horace Walpole, known today (if at all) as one of the founders of the "Gothic" tale of suspense and terror, but more famous in his own time as an especially elegant and proficient writer of letters. In a 1754 letter to a friend he describes his discovery of some curious Venetian coat of arms, and pauses to say that "This discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity." And then he explains that "very expressive word" of his own invention: "I once read a silly fairy tale, called 'The Three Princes of Serendip'"—Serendip being an old name for Sri Lanka: "as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of … (for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for comes under this description)." The finding of what one is not looking for will be the element of the letter most obviously relevant to what I've been saying so far; but equally important is the phrase "by accidents and sagacity," or, as Walpole puts it later in the same letter, "accidental sagacity."

Fortuity happens, but serendipity can be cultivated. You can grow in serendipity. You can even become a disciple of serendipity. The elevation of Fortuna to the status of goddess is a way of shrugging: an admission of helplessness, an acknowledgment of all that lies beyond our powers of control. But in the very idea of serendipity is a kind of hope, even an expectation, that we can turn the accidents of fortune to good account, and make of them some knowledge that would have been inaccessible to us if we had done no more than discover what we were looking for.

Indeed, it may be possible not only to cultivate the sagacity but also the accidents. It may be possible, and desirable, to actively put yourself in the way of events beyond your control. Thus, just as I was completing this essay, I—serendipitously?—came across these comments by the historian Timothy Burke: "there are many contexts where I have very constrained expectations about what I expect to find through search, where serendipity or unpredictability is not at all what I want. Then I expect to be King User, and woe betide the peasant interfaces and authority-category churls that try to get between me and my goal. But there are other times where I want search to be alchemy, to turn the lead of an inquiry into unexpected gold. I'm hoping that the rush to simplify, speed up, demystify and digitize search doesn't leave that alchemy behind."

The cultivation of serendipity, of this alchemy, is an option for anyone, but—so I wish to argue—for Christians living in conditions of prosperity and security and informational richness it is something vital, perhaps even necessary. To practice "accidental sagacity" is to recognize that I don't really know where I am going, even if I like to think I do; that if I know what I am looking for I probably don't know what I need; that I am not master of my destiny and captain of my fate; that it is a very good thing that I am not master of my destiny and captain of my fate; that the more often I succumb to the temptation to say "I am my own" the more completely I close off the possibility of a blessing that comes from beyond my own desires and self-love. The cultivation of serendipity is at once a self-abnegation, a disciplining of technological power, a form of trust in God, and an expression of solidarity with the vast multitudes of Christians from all generations whose poverty and powerlessness made it impossible for them to think even for a moment that they could control their own lives. An accidental sagacity is the form of wisdom I most need, but am least likely to find.

Alan Jacobs teaches English at Wheaton College in Illinois, and is writing a book about original sin.

You Have Shown Your People Hard Things

Psalm 60:3-4

You have shown Your people hard things; You have made us drink the wine of confusion. You have given a banner to those who fear You, That it may be displayed because of the truth. Selah

Last week, an F2 tornado, nearly ½ mile wide, went through my home community in Northwest Kansas. Thankfully, no one was hurt, but the loss was still great. Whole farms were destroyed. Equipment ruined. Homes annihilated. For most, the damage threatens to choke their livelihood. It is impossible to feed cows and plow fields without the necessary tractors and implements.

It’s typical human nature to ask why these things happen; but it’s good to remember Elihu’s words in Job 37:

From its chamber comes the whirlwind,and cold from the scattering winds. By the breath of God ice is given,and the broad waters are frozen fast. He loads the thick cloud with moisture;the clouds scatter his lightning. They turn around and around by his guidance,to accomplish all that he commands them on the face of the habitable world. Whether for correction or for his land or for love, he causes it to happen.

Bottom line: God is sovereign…even over the hard things. The definition of a sovereign God demands it -limited sovereignty is not sovereignty at all. In our human finiteness, we cannot understand all the ways of God. We cannot understand how He can be good and allow tragedy. May I submit we do not really know the true meaning of good? As with all of God’s attributes, our minds can only skim the surface of His goodness. But His Word declares He is good. In the storms of life, we must trust in His goodness and sovereignty equally and fully even when we don’t understand. As Al Mohler quoted Charles Spurgeon: “When we cannot trace God's hand, we must simply trust His heart.”

So back to Northwest Kansas… I said it is impossible to feed cows and plow fields without the necessary tractors and implements. It is impossible for MAN -but not for a sovereign, good God.

The little community of Bird City and McDonald is extremely supportive. Neighbors used their own tractors and equipment to farm my dad’s fields when my parents had to be in Denver, for nearly a month after my older brother was severely burned. So when Mom called to tell me the damage, I never doubted that the families who experienced the loss most directly would be helped. What I didn’t count on was people coming from all over Kansas (and probably other states) to assist in any way they could to all who had been affected.

One of my uncle’s fields needed to be cleared of debris so the crops could grow. He and my cousins were out picking it all up by hand, prepared to be there for hours. The wind was blowing 40 mph against them, so they couldn’t really hear. Finally at one point, my cousin turned around, and there were at least thirty people behind them helping pick up the debris. Most, if not all, they didn’t even know and some had come as far as 70 miles away.

God has used the people in that corner of Kansas to declare His goodness. He will make His glory known. At least two of the families affected by the tornado are families who fear the Lord. He has shown His people hard things. I don't know all of His purposes in this, but it is my prayer that He uses this time as a banner, "that it may be displayed because of the truth."

Desire to Please

I desire to please,

My Lord and Savior,

For your wrath appeased,

And your undue favor.

Yet answers are not near,

Even when I read your Scripture,

The details are unclear,

Like an abstract picture.

I seek the answers,

But you say, “seek my face,”

For this truth endures,

No matter the case.