God of Metaphors

Our God is a God of metaphors. Whenever you can’t understand something about His nature, character, choices, actions, etc., it’s fairly likely that you will be able to find a metaphor in the Bible or in His creation, Earth, to help you grasp that part of God.

Metaphors are pretty unique because they excel at turning the abstract into concrete, along with other forms of comparison, such as similes and analogies. And when it comes to God, you can find millions of concrete existences that serve to reveal a small part of the picture of who God is.

My favorite is the marriage/family metaphor because the further you dig into it, the more it reveals of God’s nature. You can literally go as far down the rabbit hole as you like, and you’ll always be finding revelation after revelation. And I loved it even more when I discovered how it applies to free will.

To start from the top, let’s acknowledge and prove that marriage is an earthly representation of the divine relationship we are to have with God.

God, through Paul, states this in Ephesians 5:23, 25. “For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the savior of the body. (25) Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for her.”

There’s a reason marriage is a holy institution, and that is solely because it is meant to represent a holy relationship on Earth. When you apply the selfless love of Christ in the context of marriage, you get a godly relationship in which a man sacrifices himself to provide and care for his wife, and a wife sacrifices herself to love her husband and follow him.

This is the ideal relationship of Christ and church. Christ sacrificed Himself in fully selfless love for his bride, the church, and He provides for us, taking care of our needs. In exchange, we need only sacrifice ourselves and wholly commit ourselves to following Him.

Let’s move beyond marriage, then, and turn to the family structure. The family structure flows from the divine marriage structure, and it then becomes an example of something divine as well. The relationship of parents to kids is literal inasmuch as it is figurative.

In the literal sense, children are just that, children. They are the children of their parents, and they are also children of the church. In both manners, they are meant to be raised and taught about Christ as they grow. A community of believers is meant to come together and train and teach children (Deuteronomy 6:4-9).

But the figurative begins to stretch and define the relationship we are to have with God. When we become believers, we become children of God, and our relationship with God then functions like a child’s relationship with his/her parents does.

When we examine it from the side of faith, we are to look to God as children look to their parents. Like children view their parents as having no ability to do wrong, we are to look to God. Children have the utmost faith in their parents; it’s practically unshakable. We are to have that same faith in God, as Jesus implies in Mark 10:13-15.

From a discipline point of view, we can gather how God disciplines us for doing wrong and rewards us for doing what is right. I think this one is one of the simplest because it’s fairly clear. When a child breaks a rule, the parent provides a consequence, and especially when the child is young, teaches them something in the process. The parent provides this consequence, not out of anger, but from love so the child does not do something they may regret later.

To put the metaphor into another metaphor, let’s say a parent tells their four-year-old not to touch the stove. The child doesn’t listen, touches the stove, and nearly burns their hand after turning it on. The parent, then, stops the child from touching the stove, and puts the child in timeout after explaining what they did wrong and why it was bad. The parent doesn’t take this action just to punish the child, but to keep the child from getting hurt.

Sometimes, even, God allows us to experience the consequences of our own actions to teach us rather than do it Himself. Some parents may choose, in lieu of punishing the child afterward, to allow the child to briefly touch the stove while it’s hot. They do this not to cause the child pain but because they know that’s the only way their child will truly learn the lesson. We’re stubborn people, and sometimes the only way God can be sure we learn to avoid sin is to let us experience the consequences of sin.

If we take the parent/child relationship yet another way, we can discover how free will works in alignment with God’s plan. Typically, parents have plans for their children when they are born. Whether their plans are just as simple as a name or as complex as having everything they want their child to do planned out through high school, parents don’t wing it when it comes to their children. They’re too precious to do that to.

Likely, parents plan out where their kids go to school, what sports they play, who they interact with around home and with family and family friends, where they go to church, what they get to do at home, etc. I think you get the point. But kids are not perfect little angels who are willing to do everything at their parents’ behest. As they grow into their own person, there will be times they go against the will of their parents. They’ll make friends they shouldn’t, do things they shouldn’t, skip church a few times, skip school just as much.

Likewise, God has a plan laid out for each of us before we are born. He knows who He wants us to know, where we should go to school, what friends we should make, what career we should choose, who we should witness to, everything. But we’re not perfect little angels, either. As we go through life, we’ll inevitably choose to go against God’s plan sometimes. We’ll make friends with the wrong people, not witness to someone we needed to, skip church a few too many times, choose the wrong career for us.

See how perfectly that fits? There’s a ton more, too, but I don’t have space in this post to fit it in. God is incredibly complex—He is literally more than our minds are able to comprehend in so many ways—but when you take a look around, you can turn parts of Him into simple, easy to understand ideas so that you can get to know Him better.

I challenge you to look around the next time you find yourself struggling to understand God or why He would do something one way or the other. You may find that the answer is in something as small as the flower by your front porch or as convenient as your best friend.

Where You Belong

Election day is tomorrow. I don’t really want to touch politics more than I have through mere references in other blog posts. This morning, I woke up not knowing what I was going to write about today, but I prayed and asked God to give me a message to deliver while I was listening to music, and the song that came up shortly thereafter immediately gave me something worth writing to Christians about.

I know I’ve touched on this before, but last time I meant it to teach a lesson. This time, I’m here to pass on some hope to you with a reminder that this is not where you belong. This life and the things that infect it are merely a temporary dwelling leading up to a fabulous eternal life.

Whenever I feel down thanks to the struggles of this life, the first thing I jump to is good, healthy, Christian music because it speaks to me, and one of the songs that hits me harder than most when I’m feeling depressed and anxious about where things in my life are going is “Where I Belong” by Building 429.

Sometimes it feels like I'm watching from the outside

Sometimes it feels like I'm breathing, but am I alive?

I will keep searching for answers that aren't here to find

I sometimes dwell too deeply on things that I can’t change, questions I can’t answer, experiences I go through yet feel no control over. I know that right now a lot of others are doing the same things. It’s easy to look at the state of the nation we live in—no matter where you are—and despair over the past, wonder about the future, and worry for the current situation, which seems so bleak.

In the United States, specifically, many Christian ideals, biblical ideals, and their implementation in our society, are being decided over and over again as elections come every four years, and as we so desperately cling to what we know is right by the Bible, it becomes so easy to feel like we’re losing the presence of God in our nation. We have questions for God about why he would allow leaders in charge who condone the ruthless murder of unborn children, about why he would allow His people to be persecuted when He could protect them.

So when the walls come falling down on me

And when I'm lost in the current of a raging sea

I have this blessed assurance holding me

And sometimes, we feel so hopeless, like the world our God set up is falling in on itself, preparing to crush us. We’re outnumbered and in over our heads. We’re not capable of doing what must be done on our own. But here’s the hope.

All I know is I'm not home yet

This is not where I belong

Take this world and give me Jesus

This is not where I belong

When it feels like it’s too much; when you think you have no hold, no influence, on the situation, remember these things. Here—this Earth—is not the end. There is more to come; there is better to come.

We sometimes try to grasp the world and hold on for dear life as we work to finagle and wrangle it around to God’s way of thinking. We try to take the whole world in our arms at one time and wrestle it into submission. But we don’t have to.

Sometimes—all the time—we need to step back and stop trying to take the world. We need to let God take it, the only one who can hold it all in a single hand. The third line of the chorus in this song is so simple, yet so profound. “Take this world and give me Jesus.” When you feel overwhelmed, keep that in mind, too. When you chose to follow Jesus and love the Lord your God, you made a trade.

We think of salvation as a gift, and it truly is, but it’s a trade just as much. You get to trade the weight of the world for the help of Jesus. You get to say to God, “take this burden from me,” and be carried by Jesus to the place you belong, because you don’t belong here. I don’t belong here. You and I belong with the Father.

So, no matter what happens tomorrow, no matter who becomes president or senator or representative or governor, remember that your time here is temporary. The lease on your home here is short; soon you won’t have to pay that rent anymore. When all’s said and done, you’ll have a wonderful, permanent home waiting for you. And there, you will be at home forevermore.

Listen to Where I Belong on Spotify. Building 429 · Song · 2011.

A Peacemaker's Peace

Do you have peace? Do you truly know what peace even is? I thought I did, and then I started doing a little digging into the Hebrew word for peace, into the Biblical definition of peace, and I found that my understanding was far too humanistic, much like my understanding of love was until I truly found the meaning of the Gospel.

There’s no better time to be thinking about this than now, when peace in the world is threatened. I’m glad my pastor taught about it this past Sunday because it’s relevant, and it led me to my own ideas I want to portray.

The King James Version of the Bible has the word “peace” written more than 400 times. Even the NIV, which substitutes more contextual English words in place of peace fairly often, has it written 263 times. Clearly, the word, and more importantly, the idea behind it, is integral for believers to understand and apply.

So, what do we understand about peace? In most English dictionaries, you’ll find the definition of peace to include things such as tranquility, freedom from disturbance, a period of no war, etc. Typical synonyms include harmony, safety, silence, tranquility, calmness, amity, etc.

And yet, these definitions haven’t even begun to scrape the surface of peace as the Hebrew word, shalom, describes it. To take from the definition provided in another’s blog post, which I have linked down below, shalom means “to be safe, sound, healthy, perfect, complete.” It “signifies a sense of well-being and harmony both within and without.” It also “includes the idea of vigour (that’s vigor, for us Americans) and vitality in all dimensions in life … shalom speaks of holistic (‘holy’) health for our souls and spirits.”

I want you to pay close attention to this next description of shalom, though, because this is how it’s best described in totality biblically: “shalom is the gift of precious well-being … it is the establishment of a lasting, righteous, good.”

A couple things to break down here: the first is that peace is something that starts within you. You cannot effectively have a peaceful life if your inner turmoil is not settled. Your life is not performed within a vacuum; anything that causes troubles in your heart and mind will cause trouble in visible character. As I wrote two weeks ago (nathanielgevans.net/blog-1/controlling-your-character) the things that create your character are not what you take in but what you give out.

In the worldly vision of identity, we become what our surroundings make us. Metaphorically, the world believes us to be like a sculpture that is carved out and chipped away at by forces around us until we assume the shape we were forced to become by those forces. But God tells us differently. He says that we are more like extremely intricate balloons. We shape ourselves from within using the breath of God to provide form and pressure, and as we grow, we exert ourselves on the world around us, carving out our own unique space to influence our surroundings.

That’s why peace must start within you. You cannot apply peace to the situations and people around you if you have no inner force of peace to exert upon them. We see this consistently described in the Bible as those with wisdom, joy, peace, knowledge, etc. influence and inspire those around them to have the same qualities. You can even see this in the world at large now. Leaders with confidence inspire confidence. Happiness is infectious.

Peace, like joy, is not something that comes from circumstances. It’s something that comes directly from your relationship with God. I think that’s why one of the things Jesus says to the disciples at Passover before He goes to the cross is about the peace He was leaving them with.

John 14:27 says, “Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.”

The disciples are about to go through quite the rough time as Jesus is crucified; clearly it was going to impact them considerably. Jesus doesn’t say, “have faith,” or “be strong.” He says, “you will have My peace.” And that peace is something that they had to have to get through the ordeal of losing their teacher. It’s something Paul had to have to survive his imprisonment as long as he did.

Speaking of Paul, the influence of inner peace from Jesus has no better example than when he calmed the Roman guard who was planning to kill himself when the doors to the prison shook open in Acts 16:25-34. In fact, the peace that he inspired was so strong, the man immediately rushed to him asking how to be saved, how to have the peace that Paul did. And Paul went on to introduce the man’s whole household to Christ. Just from a little peaceful influence.

Okay, now I get to my real point, and one that my pastor stressed in his sermon briefly. Peace is mentioned often in the Bible, but the ability to make peace is, though highly praised, minuscule in its comparative presence. Peacemakers are mentioned but one time—in the Sermon on the Mount. And that’s intentional in a couple of ways.

The first is that there is a lot of peace to be made but few peacemakers to actually make it. As I said before, peacemakers can only be those who have true peace from God; therefore, only believers can be peacemakers, and we’ve got a lot of peace we need to inspire. The whole world relies on us to be the ones to confront that which causes anger, pain, injustice, and fear, and make things right; we’re the only ones who can.

The second is that few peacemakers are able to inspire a lot of peace. Just like Paul’s peace was enough to inspire a whole family to Christ, so, too can the peace of one person make a difference in the lives of many. You may have even noticed this if you’ve paid attention. It’s likely that, when people close to you struggle, they come to you for help because they know they’re going to find some form of solace in your advice and companionship.

The affect of even one peacemaker can be incredibly significant, as expressed with an image I’ve provided below. If hostility is like fire and people are like matches, there is a massive chain reaction that occurs when one person steps away from inspiring conflict. The actions of that one person can save hundreds, thousands, even hundreds of thousands from being burned uncontrollably.

You’ll find that the peace of this world is brittle, taut, and actually nearly as peaceless as full out war. The tension in the air in times of worldly peace is so thick it can be cut with a knife, but the true peace of God is malleable, flexible, and able to be applied at all times without breaking. It can lift any weight, stop every flood, calm every fight, drown every fire.

As believers, we are the only ones capable of being peacemakers; it’s important that we step up to the task and provide what so many are seeking but cannot find. We must be the voice of completeness to the incomplete, the level-headed tranquility to explosive hostility. It’s just one more way we are meant to live out the Great Commission.

https://www.preceptaustin.org/shalom_-_definition

The power of just one peacemaker can show true peace to many, saving them from so much pain.

Full Sprint Commitment

How committed are you to following Christ? Don’t just read through that question without genuinely putting your mind to task in figuring out your answer. Don’t read any further until you’ve come up with an answer that is genuine. Don’t cheat yourself to pretend you’re more committed than you are, and don’t sell yourself short. But truly analyze exactly how much of yourself you commit to following Christ.

I’m somewhat breaking from my typical Monday lyric breakdown blog post to discuss this topic because we went over it in Sunday School yesterday, and I wanted to approach it from a different way than the book we’re using did.

We started discussing with Mark 10:13-16, which says, “Some people were bringing little children to Him so He might touch them, but His disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw it, He was indignant and said to them, ‘Let the little children come to Me. Don’t stop them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I assure you: Whoever does not welcome the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.’ After taking them in His arms, He laid His hands on them and blessed them.”

Often, we approach these verses from the faith perspective: You should approach God with the unquestioning, confident faith of a child. And that’s a perfectly fine way of interpreting these verses. But I also challenge you to view this through the lens of commitment.

When kids choose to do something, they rarely, if ever, do it halfway. If a kid finds a perfectly breakable vase in the house, he’ll smash it into minuscule pieces. If she scatters 10 Lego bricks, she’ll scatter 1,000. If a kid wants to be obstinate… well, there’s nothing you can do to break through the stubbornness. It’s a neat thing about children, but they don’t truly understand the concept of limiting how they apply themselves and their energy to tasks. Whereas adults tend to jog through multiple things a day, kids sprint full out through one thing until they’re exhausted.

Y’all know it’s true; I know it’s true, and I don’t even have kids. I know this idea seems out of context with those verses, but keep that idea of childish commitment in mind until the end. I promise I’m going somewhere, starting with verses 17-20.

“As He was setting out on a journey, a man ran up, knelt down before Him, and asked Him, ‘Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ ‘Why do you call Me good?’ Jesus asked him. ‘No one is good but One—God. You know the commandments: Do not murder; do not commit adultery; do not steal; do not bear false witness; do not defraud; honor your father and mother.’ He said to Him, ‘Teacher, I have kept all these from my youth.’”

Scripture lends itself here to a few ideas. Firstly, that the man was looking for affirmation of his own beliefs. He likely wasn’t looking for a real answer to apply to himself. There’s no guarantee this is the case, but Jesus telling Him the textbook Jewish answer to his question, reciting the Ten Commandments, is pretty good context.

The second, though, comes first, and it points to the fact that this rich young ruler wasn’t paying attention at all. When Jesus says, “No one is good but God,” and the man follows the Ten Commandments with, “I have kept all these,” it’s clear that he missed the point. Jesus is telling him that the affirmation he’s looking for won’t be found because the man was convinced the way to Heaven was keeping himself in the lines of the law.

Here’s where the important bit comes, and where I differ from the textbook interpretation of scripture. Verses 21-22 say, “Then, looking at him, Jesus loved him and said to him, ‘You lack one thing: Go, sell all you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow Me.’ But he was stunned at this demand, and he went away grieving, because he had many possessions.”

Rightfully so, many people attribute this to greed. And I won’t deny that greed is contextually what is being referred to, as confirmed by the following verses, which you can read on your own. But even more than greed, I think Jesus is referring to selfishness, which breeds a lack of commitment. Why? Because, up until this moment, everything the man obeyed was easy for him to do because it was selfish in nature.

I think it’s important that Jesus doesn’t mention all 10 of the Ten Commandments in verse 19. He only lists six. The interesting thing about those six commandments is that they’re all designed to protect the person who abides by them. Committing any of the actions these six commandments advise against could lead to genuine real-world, legal/cultural punishment.

These are the selfish six of the Ten Commandments because living them out can only benefit the one who adheres to them. This rich young ruler followed them not because he wanted to do as God commanded but because he knew that doing so would benefit him, keep him out of trouble. He was following these laws out of pure selfishness.

We know this because he didn’t follow the commandments that were hard. He didn’t follow the first two commandments, and we know this from his reaction to Jesus’s command in verse 22. It was clear to Jesus that this man was greedy and his idol was money, so He commanded the ruler to give up his idol. He had the idol of money because he was selfish and benefited from it; it was easier to make money his first god and God his second. He wasn’t truly upset at losing the money; he was upset at having to be selfless when, his whole life, he had been selfish. He was upset that he couldn’t continue trying to serve himself and God simultaneously and make it to Heaven.

Now bring back the idea about a child’s commitment and that metaphor about jogging and full sprinting. Commitment is something that can’t be parsed out to multiple things simultaneously. You can’t commit yourself to a round of golf and a church service at the same time. Likewise, you can’t commit yourself to yourself and God at the same time.

When we talk about commitment to God, we must commit everything in a full out sprint to God, like little children, else we risk selfishly holding back parts of ourselves from Him, and that’s no way to enter the kingdom of God. He wants all of you, and He’ll settle for nothing less.

Today's a Gift

Are you enjoying your life? Or is it something you just muddle through because you have responsibilities you feel you must attend to? Do you live in the moment, or are you constantly attacked by the problems that may arise in the future?

I rather like this quote (it’s been attributed to various people in various forms, but I like this version best), and I think it fits perfectly with the ideas conveyed in Ecclesiastes 9:1-10: “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift from God, which is why we call it the present.”

Solomon begins to tackle the ideas presented in this quote from verse 1. “Indeed, I took all this to heart and explained it all: the righteous, the wise, and their works are in God’s hands. People don’t know whether to expect love or hate. Everything lies ahead of them.”

He skips the history because it’s not relevant to his point, but he tackles the mystery of tomorrow with “People don’t know whether to expect love or hate. Everything lies ahead of them.” This is fairly clear. We don’t know what’s coming next, so we have no way to determine the outcome of our actions until we live through them. And then Solomon qualifies this further while relating back to chapter eight’s themes.

Verses 2-3 say, “Everything is the same for everyone: there is one fate for the righteous and the wicked, for the good and the bad, for the clean and the unclean, for the one who sacrifices and the one who does not sacrifice. As it is for the good, so it is for the sinner; as for the one who takes an oath, so for the one who fears an oath. This is an evil in all that is done under the sun: there is one fate for everyone. In addition, the hearts of people are full of evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live—after that they go to the dead.”

See, while you can’t know a lot of what’s coming, there is one thing that comes for us all: death on this Earth. As we discussed last week, the consequences of sin affect everyone, even if you feel like you’re a good person, even if you follow closely the commands of God. The product of being in a sinful world is sinful consequence. So, the one thing about your future that is not mystery is death. You won’t know the time or hour, but you know it’s coming.

So, for many, it’s difficult to not live for the future, to plan and prepare in hopes that they can determine what’s coming. In doing so, they often forget to live for today. But God gives us three gifts if we choose to live in the present. The first is the ability to hope.

Verses 4-6 say, “But there is hope for whoever is joined with all the living, since a live dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they will die, but the dead don’t know anything. There is no longer a reward for them because the memory of them is forgotten. Their love, their hate, and their envy have already disappeared, and there is no longer a portion for them in all that is done under the sun.”

I think this points directly to salvation and the ability of people to pursue God and find His salvation while they are still alive. We know, for a fact, that once you’re dead, your chance is gone for good, so it only makes sense that this is what Solomon’s referring to.

The comparison between a live dog and a dead lion is striking in this case for a number of reasons, but mainly the position of each animal in a food chain. A dog is one who relies on a master to feed and care for it, while a lion is a top predator in its habitat. Once a beloved dog is dead, its body is cared for and it lives on in the memory of its master. But once a mighty lion dies, its body is torn apart by scavengers and memory of it, its loves, hates, whatever, is gone. Similarly, a believer who is taken care of by God is taken care of and remembered after death by God, but a predator of sin who chooses no master but herself dies and is torn apart by other predators. That’s a pretty clear image of humanity’s treatment of the dead. If given the chance and the provocation, a dead man’s reputation will be torn down without hesitation just because he’s no longer around to defend himself. There’s no place for the dead among the living. In essence, the gift of hope God is providing is for safety, both in life and death.

The second gift God provides is a reward. It comes with having your name listed in the Lamb’s Book of Life—the Lord your God will remember you and care for you, just like a master would his dog. Your reward is undying loyalty, love, and care that only God can provide.

The third gift God promises for today is joy from peace, from verses 7-9, which say, “Go, eat your bread with pleasure, and drink your wine with a cheerful heart, for God has already accepted your works. Let your clothes be white all the time, and never let oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife you love all the days of your fleeting life, which has been given to you under the sun, all your fleeting days. For that is your portion in life and in your struggle under the sun.”

This is also fairly cut and dry. God grants us the ability to enjoy the days we have in this life in the moment with the pleasures of good food, drink, and companionship. These are all things we are granted by God, knowing that He had already planned out the days, weeks, months, years, decades, and centuries ahead. He has already accepted us into Heaven when we become His children, so we are granted the peace to enjoy the gift of today.

But the real power of these verses becomes apparent when we reverse the gifts and apply the consequences to nonbelievers. While believers are granted the gift of hope, nonbelievers are not. Hope disappears with worry, and for many nonbelievers, all they can do is worry about tomorrow, next week, next month, etc. That’s not to say worry isn’t a problem with believers, but the stress that comes with the belief that you are fully in control and responsible for everything in your life reduces the chance of hope being alive and well.

Straight from verse 5, we know that they don’t receive a reward because they declare themselves to have no master. When they do well, they have no one to whom they can turn to be rewarded except themselves, and when they’re dead and gone, their only reward is to be devoured by scavengers.

Finally, they can have no joy, no pleasure, because they aren’t capable of living in the present. Their circumstances are always monitored, always important to them. In the same way worry blocks hope, worry blocks joy and pleasure because worry is a distraction to what is good.

This works with the quote, too. For believers, our yesterday is history, as God has removed our transgressions from us, freeing us from the past. Our tomorrow is a mystery, but not to the God who has it planned out. And we are truly able to enjoy the gift of the present because we have no need to despair over the past or future.

But for nonbelievers, their yesterday is no history because they must account, and face punishment, for their transgressions come judgment day. Tomorrow is a mystery, but one they believe they must work tirelessly to uncover and change. And because they are so obsessed with tomorrow, they are incapable of living in the gift of today. The worst part is that these beliefs set them up for a rude awakening come time for them to pass on from this life.

Verse 10 says, “Whatever your hands find to do, do with all your strength, because there is no work, planning, knowledge, or wisdom in Sheol where you are going.”

Sheol refers to, basically, death. Its meaning is complicated and somewhat confusing biblically, but it’s pretty much just the land of the dead, a euphemism for the afterlife, if you will. The depth of the frustrations of nonbelievers in life will become apparent in death because nothing they’ve lived for will prepare them for what death is like and the things that come from it. Work, planning, knowledge, wisdom, none of the things that matter to a nonbeliever on Earth will matter in death.

And that takes us back to verse 4. There remains hope for any who are still alive to turn from being a proud, dead lion to become a living, loved dog. The life of a nonbeliever, the mindset of a nonbeliever, will not prepare anyone for death and eternity. Only God can do that, which I think is a key point of these verses. The other is a reminder to believers to have faith and take the gifts that God gives you.

How's Your Prayer?

What’s it like for you to pray? I don’t think we ponder that enough, at least, I don’t. And that’s a shame because prayer is one of the things that believers should do the most, right along with reading your Bible, so it’s something that should be heavily considered.

A few years ago, I had a non-Christian friend who I spent quite a lot of time around suddenly ask me why I prayed over my food before eating, and what I prayed about. It was an odd question, so I told her, then asked why she brought it up, and her response kind of struck me a little dumbfounded. She said, “It looked like you were in pain, and a little angry.”

Three years later, that hit me. In the place I was at the time in my relationship with God, that facial expression could only have been revealing how I felt about prayer, about God, and about myself. That’s why I think it’s important to reflect on how we approach prayer and the other necessities of a relationship with Christ, it provides a good example of how our relationship is progressing or stagnating.

To put it in a human perspective, it’s like finding yourself dreading to speak to your best friend, your boyfriend/girlfriend, or your spouse. The feelings that come along with the actions you’re meant to take in a relationship are indicative of the health of that relationship. But it’s not the feelings you get that are the problem, it’s when you don’t try to fix them that issues arise.

Before I go too much farther, I want to clarify a few things because one of the things that bothers me about bloggers and podcasters is when they discuss a deep and difficult subject like this but only from one angle, leaving readers and listeners confused about what’s right and what isn’t. I do not mean that you should not pray or read your Bible just because an emotional desire to do so is not there, or because your emotions are in turmoil. Regardless of your feelings, pursuit of a relationship with God is a choice that must be made—I’ve mentioned this before and have a whole blog post on it here: nathanielgevans.net/blog-1/when-motivations-gone.

I’m not even talking about the mindset we must approach prayer and Bible study with, though the Bible does discuss that in many places, and I’m willing to analyze both of those topics. I’m talking about an introspection regarding your emotional and mental health that should be ongoing as you pursue God. I’m talking about self-counseling, and therapy if necessary, like you might do if you’re struggling emotionally with your spouse in your marriage. I’m talking supporting your choice to follow God with the emotions that come from loving the God who loves you.

Okay, now we can jump into things. It’s a fact of the matter that we devote energy to the things we desire; we even impart some of our emotional wellbeing into those things. An athlete puts energy and emotion into his/her sport. That’s why it’s devastating when they lose a tournament. A reader puts energy and emotion into stories—that’s why they are able to empathize with fictional characters. A musician to music, an artist to painting, etc.

The Bible does confirm this in Matthew 6:21, “For where your treasure lies, there will your heart be also.” You devote your heart to the things you consider treasure. With devotion of the heart comes emotion. When you give your loyalty to someone or something, your heart and mind work together to establish rewards for your actions and punishment for your inaction. That’s a really brief and simplified version of how hormones are expressed via brain rerouting.

There are a million ways to describe how that works, but it’s most easily done in a relationship context. When you devote yourself to a person, to making them happy, to enjoying time with them, your brain secretes hormones that support those actions, your emotions follow along with the loyalty and love you give them. That’s where the idea of heartbreak comes from: when you’ve spent time and energy into developing pathways for those hormones to be secreted, suddenly being in a position where you’re no longer experiencing those feelings due to a breakup creates pain from that loss.

There’s so much truth and wisdom in Matthew 6:21, just that short sentence, that I could probably break it down and explain it out over a novel length, but I’ll keep it short by breaking down the reverse. If your heart’s not in it, it’s not something you treasure.  If you’re only doing something just to do it, because you’re supposed to, required to, expected to, you don’t care about it.

That’s going to hurt some people. But it’s true, no matter how much you rebel against it. There are a lot of people out there who have a relationship with God but don’t treasure it. There are a lot of people who go to church, read their Bibles, pray every day, but don’t really mean it. There are people who can talk the talk all week long, but their feet just don’t move. I know. I was one of those people. I was one of those people for so long that I never truly experienced what a relationship with God was until I was 22 years old.

Here’s the big breakdown of the point I mean: do you truly appreciate, love, and desire your relationship with God? Do you know the emotions that were likely running through the minds of people when Martin Luther oh-so-dangerously declared that people don’t need to go through a priest to speak to God, to learn from God? I don’t know them, but I can imagine: there was likely unbridled joy. I’m sure many stopped to pray without ceasing knowing that God could hear them. I bet many tore up their Bible translations they were suddenly allowed to read from how much they studied it.

In that regard, how do you treat your prayer time, your Bible time? Is it something you rush through because you need to do it? Are you merely performing the physical acts out of an obligation? Or are you devoting your heart to it like it’s something you treasure?

Gambling with Satan

I love being able to take something that isn’t Christian, or is only Christian-adjacent, and use it to teach a Christian message. Not only does it freshen up whatever lesson I’m using it to teach and potentially reach more people, but it also serves to affirm that the things of this world point back to the God who made it, even if they’re not always intended to by the person who idealized it.

So, today, let’s take a look at the popular country song by Charlie Daniels, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”

I think most people look at this song in a pretty positive light, as in “Wow, Johnny faced down Satan and won. I can, too!” If they took this song that deep in meaning, that is. I, however, want to use it to explain why you should not try to face down the devil in a challenge of skill, wit, endurance, guts, or what have you, because the outcome is the same no matter the result. If you lose, you lose, and if you win, you lose. It’s best not to do battle at all if you don’t have to.

So, let’s detail the story of Johnny’s fiddle showdown with Satan. It starts with Satan doing what he’s always doing: trying to steal souls and cause people to experience eternal suffering. And let me pause for just a minute because the imagery from “He was lookin’ for a soul to steal” is so potent. It should serve as a reminder that your soul doesn’t belong to the devil. You and your soul belong to God; Satan’s trying to steal you away from Him.

When Satan appears to Johnny and challenges him to a duel, he appeals to two different sins. In fact, if you’re familiar with some Roman Catholic church teachings, you’ll note that they happen to be two of the seven deadly sins: greed and pride.

Now you play a pretty good fiddle, boy, but give the Devil his due.
I'll bet a fiddle of gold against your soul 'cause I think I'm better than you.

The first thing he does is appeal to greed. Look, I’ll give you a shiny fiddle made entirely of gold! Do you know how much a solid gold fiddle would be worth? Well, I did the research so you wouldn’t have to guess. A solid gold fiddle would weigh around 30 pounds and be worth $251,520 in 1979 when Daniels released this song. In today’s money, that’s $901,730.38.

Next, Satan appeals to Johnny’s pride. He basically pulled the, “Anything you can do, I can do better” card. So, not only does he have the hook into Johnny on the value of the fiddle—despite the fact that Johnny clearly has a perfectly good one in his hands—he also suckered him in on claims that he wasn’t good enough.

So, what does Johnny do in response? He sins, and he knows it, too.

The boy said, "My name's Johnny, and it might be a sin,
But I'll take your bet
And you're gonna regret 'cause I'm the best there's ever been.

He admits that what he’s doing is wrong, but he’s been so thoroughly ensnared by his greed and his desire to prove his superiority that he jumps right into boiling water without thinking twice. There’s also something incredibly dangerous in the last line above, but hold off on that in the back of your mind until I get through the next two verses.

Johnny, rosin up your bow and play your fiddle hard.
'Cause Hell's broke loose in Georgia and the Devil deals the cards.

Have you heard the saying, “The house always wins?” In gambling, it’s a poorly hidden allusion to the understanding that even when you win you lose because, at the end of the day, no matter how much money you make, the house always makes more. The house always comes out better than the people gambling in the casino—how else do you think a casino manages to run itself if it doesn’t win more money than its patrons?

That’s the case here, too. It doesn’t matter if Johnny comes out on top in the fiddle duel because the devil’s victory is so much larger than Johnny’s. That’s why you don’t gamble with Satan/sin. When you do, Satan always deals, and the dealer always wins.

When the Devil finished, Johnny said, "Well, you're pretty good ol' son, But sit down in that chair right there and let me show you how it's done."

If you’ll refer back to the idea I wanted you to keep in mind earlier, here’s where the devil’s plan all falls into place. In the context of the song, the “let me show you how it’s done” from Johnny right here sounds like he’s talking about playing fiddle. However, if you take it in the context I’m providing, he’s actually claiming hierarchical superiority over Satan, and even over God.

We know that Satan’s biggest wrongdoing was when he tried to claim himself as God’s equal. One of the things about pride is that it makes you believe you’re superior to your own position. If you apply what Johnny says in the context of his pride and the theme of sin, you don’t get an uppity boy claiming to be better at fiddling than Satan. You get a boy claiming to be better at sinning than the devil. You get a boy saying, “Satan, this is how you challenge God. Clearly, you’ve been doing it wrong.” Because what else is sin but challenging God as if you’re equal to Him?

The Devil bowed his head because he knew that he'd been beat.
And he laid that golden fiddle on the ground at Johnny's feet.
Johnny said, "Devil, just come on back if you ever wanna try again,
'Cause I've told you once--you son of a gun*--I'm the best there's ever been.

Bear with me; there’s a lot left for me to unpack to wrap this up, but it’s fairly simple. When the devil bows his head here, I can guarantee to you that he’s not doing it to admit defeat but to hide the ear-to-ear smirk on his face. Because even though the song says the devil was beaten in the fiddle battle, he didn’t lose the war.

Here’s how he won: to start with, Johnny’s prize is meaningless. He’s a fiddler, but he receives a useless fiddle. How on Earth are you going to play a fiddle of solid gold? You wouldn’t be able to hold it up, and even if you could, the strings wouldn’t reverberate. Even if they did, though, the acoustics would be horrible. It’d never work. Sure, he could sell it, I guess, but that’s like throwing away the prize from the story he could be telling everyone.

Real quick metaphor time because I know that reads a little awkward. Selling the fiddle would be like trying to hide the sin in your past and acting like you never messed up. It doesn’t do justice to your story or the story God’s working in your life when you repent.

Goal 2 in Satan’s winning plan is that Johnny’s pride is still intact. He still firmly believes himself to be above Satan and above God because he thinks he fought off sin and won on his own.

The final phase of Satan’s winning outcome stems from the third line when Johnny says to Satan, “Come on back whenever you want now.” He’s given the devil free reign to continue inviting sin into his life. And you know what that means? It means that Satan walked out of Georgia one soul richer. That line was enough to indicate that Satan won Johnny’s soul in the battle. Why? Because the way the devil gets your soul is by you continuing to act against God’s will and grace by sinning against Him.

Johnny thought he won by gambling himself against Satan, but Satan had two pocket aces the whole time. In the end, when we try to beat sin by wagering ourselves against it, we only lose. The only way to win against Satan is to walk away from the table, to not be dealt a hand at all. Because even if you’re walking away from the cards with a couple extra dollars in your pocket, Satan’s walking away with your sinful soul.

The Fallen World

Anyone who’s been reading and keeping up with the series on Ecclesiastes should know by now that the world we live in is a wicked, fallen place full of sorrow, sadness, anger, pain, hatred, and more, and it is only by the good will of God that we have the good, kindness, peace, love, and joy that we have. But a fact that believers try to avoid thinking of sometimes is that the presence of the goodness of God does not mean that evil disappears while we are still living in imperfection.

We hear it all the time in questions like, “Why do good things happen to bad people?” and “Why do bad things happen to good people?” We don’t like coming to terms with the fact that imperfect life on this Earth is a dichotomy of good and bad. We don’t get one in a vacuum. Having both is a futility of this world that we just have to live with, as Solomon details in Ecclesiastes 8: 11-15.

Verse 11 speaks directly to our fallen human morals. “Because the sentence against a criminal act is not carried out quickly, the heart of people is filled with the desire to commit crime.”

We’re a people who take a mile when given a foot. It’s a disturbing symptom of life after the fall that we do not adhere to the law of morals, but the moral of laws. In other words, we live within the letter of the law and not the spirit of it, such that if something is not expressly prohibited, we often act as though it is inherently allowable.

Think about it this way, if you will: Say a teenage boy’s parents expressly forbid him from having a party inside the house when they leave for a weekend anniversary celebration. The boy understands the rule, so the parents leave and come home expecting to not have the house destroyed from a party. When they return home, the front yard looks as though a tornado went through it, and the back yard is filled with trash from what was clearly a party. The parents find the boy to punish him for breaking the rule, but he proudly exclaims, “You said I couldn’t throw a party inside the house, so I threw one outside!”

Here’s the thing about that situation; even though the rule did not expressly forbid parties outside the house by letter, the spirit of the rule was that there should be no parties that would destroy the house. What’s saddening about it all is that punishment must still be meted out for the breaking of the rule, and this creates a separation because the punished does not feel as though he did anything wrong.

Okay, I’m getting really wordy about this, but the point I want to make is that we treat the rules God wrote for us the same way. We pretend as though His laws apply by the letter and not the spirit, and if that doesn’t work, we stretch the letter of the law to “allow” ourselves to sin. And then we pretend that we’ve done nothing wrong, that we’re good people, and we deserve Heaven and not punishment for our wrongdoings. And falsely believing we’re good is what got us into the mess of good things happening to bad people and bad things happening to good people.

Verses 12-13 say, “Although a sinner commits crime a hundred times and prolongs his life, yet I also know that it will go well with God-fearing people, for they are reverent before Him. However, it will not go well with the wicked, and they will not lengthen their days like a shadow, for they are not reverent before God.”

If you’re not paying really close attention, these verses seem like they contradict each other, but they don’t. First, let’s settle the good versus bad debate here. It’s Paul in Romans who tells us that no one is good, but Solomon kindly settles what qualifies as the standard for character judgment: God-fearing. Notice that “good” doesn’t exist in these verses, but that we have the separation of being “reverent before God,” and “not reverent before God.” But there’s a third distinction: sinner. Note that one who is a sinner and one who is reverent before God are not mutually exclusive. They can exist in the same person (because we all sin).

So, the first thing Solomon says is that a sinner commits crimes and prolongs his life. How does that work? Well, he doesn’t say that sinners prolong their lives by committing crimes or because they commit crimes. It just says that both can exist: a sinner could live a long time or a short time. We know that objectively: people can die before they are born, sadly, or they can live to be over 100. So, in this way, there is little distinction between the Earthly length of life belonging to a sinner who is reverent before God and a sinner who is not reverent before God, affirmed by Solomon’s qualifying statement, “yet I also know that it will go well with God-fearing people.”

And now I’m about to get giddy because the imagery in verse 13’s metaphor is astounding. Take a moment to just think about how shadows work; as the day goes on, they grow longer and longer until, eventually, everything is covered in shadow, making it, for all intents and purposes, infinite. (You may have to finagle with your understanding of nighttime to reach this conclusion, but remember that the darkness of night is effectively the shadow of the Earth.) So, how does this really cool image of shadows apply?

Think of it like this: one who is not reverent before God counts down the time on his life. Each day he lives, his lifetime grows shorter by a day. But for the God-fearing, life is measured additively. For every day they live, their life is lengthened by a day, exactly like a shadow, which, for every moment it exists, grows longer. Eventually, the life of one who is reverent before God becomes like the shadow of night, all-encompassing. In other words, eternal!

Since I’ve gotten you all excited about cool imagery and eternal life like me, it’s time to come back down to Earth because, even though this ultimate truth of eternal life is the case, we still live in a fallen world that hurts sometimes, and Solomon knows this, too.

Verse 14-15 say, ‘There is a futility that is done on the earth: there are righteous people who get what the actions of the wicked deserve, and there are wicked people who get what the actions of the righteous deserve. I say that this too is futile. So I commended enjoyment because there is nothing better for man under the sun than to eat, drink, and enjoy himself, for this will accompany him in his labor during the days of his life that God gives him under the sun.”

It’s sobering to remember that bad things are going to happen to those who love God and good things will happen to people who choose to be evil. Sometimes, it may even seem like the world is attacking believers, and Satan will try his best to make it seem that way. He wants fearing God to look as unappealing as possible.

But I, along with Solomon, encourage you to avoid dwelling on the punishments and rewards other will receive. Instead, focus on what the Lord has given you to enjoy here and do what He has called you to do. Life is so much more enjoyable when you don’t constantly wonder about the effects of the fall and instead just strive to do all you can for the kingdom.

Controlling your Character

Last week, I wrote about character and the importance of maintaining a lifestyle that is focused on God to both protect yourself from persecution and show the light of Christ to the world. I wrote about what makes up that character, but this week, I want to talk about how that character is formed.

 I left you with a saying, “You can’t control what happens to you, but you can control how you react.” What I mean by that is based on Matthew 15: 10-20, but I’ll start you off with a well-used analogy first.

There’s a story about two brothers, we’ll even say they’re twins for the sake of genetic similarity. These twins grew up under a drunkard of a father who drowned away every moment he should’ve spent teaching his boys how to be men. When they grew up, the first twin became a drunkard and never amounted to anything more than his father did. The second twin grew up and never touched alcohol once in his life. People talked about them frequently. About the first twin, they often said, “Who can blame him? Look at his father.” And about the second twin, they often said, “Who can blame him? Look at his father.”

Neither of those boys had control over how they grew up, but they could control what they did in response to their far from ideal childhood. They both had every chance to succeed at escaping the alcoholism of their father, and they both had every chance to fall into it just like their father. But the key is that the way their lives ended up didn’t come from the things that happened to them outside of their control, but from the things they chose to do because of what happened.

To give you a biblical example, let’s talk about Jonah. I’m sure everyone remembers how Jonah was called to preach in Nineveh but decided to run away because he didn’t want to. The calling was something out of his control; God said, “Go preach in Nineveh.” Jonah’s choice to run away, however, was very much in his control. He had two options: do as God said or run away. The characteristic that we know Jonah by was not determined by his calling but by his answer to that calling. We can determine that he was either incredibly selfish or full of cowardice. Take your pick.

In a similar way, he had another choice when storms appeared to assault the boat he was running away on. He could continue to build a character of selfishness/cowardice by refusing to speak up when they drew lots, or he could speak truth and be cast overboard selflessly to save the crew and the others on the ship. He couldn’t control the storm, but his character was built by the choice that he made when confronted with an event out of his control.

This is what Jesus is speaking about in Matthew 15. My Bible subtitles verses 10-20 as, “Defilement is from Within.” I quite like that because it stands true to what I’ve been saying: your character is defiled by the things within you, what you control.

In this moment, Jesus was speaking to the Pharisees, who had again confronted Him because of His teachings in yet another time of Pharasaical big-headedness. The context provided in the first 9 verses of chapter 15 set up the explanation of defilement Jesus serves to them in 10-20 as he confronts the Pharisees’ hypocritical nature as ones who say they worship God but do not live out their lives in obedience to the Law.

Verses 10-11 say, “Summoning the crowd, He told them, ‘Listen and understand: It’s not what goes into the mouth that defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man.’”

When you understand the Pharisees and how they get to be Pharisees, you come to understand this a little more. Pharisees were pretty much the top of the intelligence line in the Jewish community. Like Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates were to the classical Greek community, so were the Pharisees to the Jewish. They knew a lot, were incredible thinkers, and were rather intelligent. There’s a decent chance they had all of the Old Testament memorized and studied it deeply and consistently. When it came to religious practices, there was no one’s advice you’d want more than a Pharisee.

But therein lies the problem that Jesus is speaking to. This group of people knew so much about the Old Testament and the practices, morals, and lifestyles taught within it. If there was any group that should be expected to be model believers, it would’ve been those guys. But even though they were fed the Bible constantly, what came out was hardly of God’s Word at all.

Verses 17-20 say, “’Don’t you realize that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and is eliminated? But what comes out of the mouth comes from the heart, and this defiles a man. For form the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, sexual immoralities, thefts, false testimonies, blasphemies. There are the things that defile a man, but eating with unwashed hands does not defile a man.’”

Okay, so if you’re catching on, you’re likely thinking that Jesus was actually talking about literal food, and He was. Make no mistake that Jesus was directly confronting the Pharisees on their beliefs about unclean foods and ritualistic handwashing practices. But in verse 15, Peter indicates that he believes this is a parable, and it’s important to note that Jesus does not say it isn’t.

Verse 19 would seem incredibly out of place if Jesus was only talking about pears and chicken, but He’s not. He’s also talking about character, as He often did when the Pharisees reared their heads. If you’ll refer back to what I said about the Pharisees earlier, you’ll remember that I mentioned their incredible education in the Old Testament—that’s the food they ate in this parable.

Now, let’s do some rewording of verse 11 to show you how this really becomes a parable: It’s not the things you learn that determine your character, it’s the things that come from what you learn that determine your character. Like I said before, ideally, the Pharisees should’ve been the ideal believer, but they weren’t. They were full of hypocrisy, anger, pride, and entitlement. What they learned from the Bible was not that they were people in need of God, but that, by following enough laws, they could effectively become like God as rulers of people. They were wrong, of course, but that’s what they learned, and it was that which became their character.

In other words, what made the Pharisees the Pharisees wasn’t the spiritual nourishment they received, but what they did with the knowledge they held. And that goes for everyone. You can’t control what happens to you in this life, but who you are is determined by what you do because of, or in spite of, the things that occur. People can’t see everything you’ve eaten, but they can see the effects the food has on your body. In the same way, people can’t see everything that has happened to you, but they can see how you’ve let it affect you.

Work Goes On

What are the things that keep you from sharing the Good News? When you feel the need to speak to someone about Christ, what causes you to say no? I can’t speak to the exact thoughts of every person reading this, but I know for me, and for many others, it’s selfishness. It’s the selfish desire to protect yourself on this Earth fighting against the desire to protect someone else’s eternity.

Think about that: if you don’t share the Gospel because you’re more afraid of the consequences you might face in this life than you are of the consequences of an eternity in Hell for the person you’re speaking to, that’s really selfish, at its core, don’t you think? And more than that, it’s misguided selfishness, in most cases, because you’re valuing life on Earth more than you’re valuing life in Heaven with the Father. (There’s a bit of gray area where a father/mother might be less selfish if the consequences are death because they have children to care for, but that’s rarely the case.)

Philippians 1:21 says, “For me, to live is Christ, to die is gain.” For you, to die should be gain. So why, then, do you avoid sharing the Gospel if the consequence is death? Or even less, what if the consequence is just to potentially lose a friend here or make things a little awkward at work for a while? Because the consequences for sharing the Gospel are rarely death for most of us.

That’s why it’s a desire for me, and it should be for you, to live with the same fervor for Christ that those like Stephen, Peter, James, Paul, and many others lived for when they died for preaching about Jesus. A good song to hear to get your heart and mind into this living ideal is “Bury the Workman” by Unspoken.

An old hymn writer, Charles Wesley, was quoted saying, “God buries His workmen but carries on His work,” which some allege is the inspiration for this song, and it makes sense because the chorus practically quotes Wesley.

Cause you can bury the workmen but the work will go on
And you can silence the voices but you can't stop the song
When the Spirit's moving, His will will be done
And you can bury the workmen but the work will go on

And while these lyrics should move you significantly, it’s important to keep in perspective why the work goes on when the workmen are dead and gone. Work doesn’t get done without men/women to do it. So, the important follow-up is that when one workman is buried, another must come to fill his place, and that’s the key.

The thing that motivated all those who were martyrs for Christ was their love for Christ and their love for others, but, at least in small part, there was hope in their death that those they discipled would carry on the work they did. You can see the evidence of this idea in most of Paul’s letters, and Peter’s, and James’s. It’s almost implicit in the system of discipleship: one teaches a student who then becomes a master and teaches his own student and so on. One of the clearest examples is Jesus, who said to his disciples, “I’m leaving now. Go and teach what I’ve taught you.”

If you’ve ever read a great battle in a fantasy novel, you’ll have read the expression, “for every one enemy they killed, two more took his place.” It makes the army the hero is facing look to be unending. That’s the impression we ought to be giving to this world; for every Christian they take down, we should have two more stepping into the hole that formed from his/her death.

And it’s important, too, to remember that we do have a job that needs to be finished. If you picture our work as believers as mining souls, which is pretty much what it is, there will come a day when the mine will run out. That’s our goal. The work will go on until that moment, so the more of us working, the faster it gets here, right? (Don’t take that as me trying to rush the day and hour the Lord returns, but it’s a good sentiment we need to work towards. The more souls we can save faster, the better!)

Look, I know it’s hard to step out and do the work when you’re afraid but remember that the Lord is with you when you go to fulfill your responsibility, and when the Spirit moves, His will is done. If you are hurt by this world, what does it matter? If you are alive, you become more like Christ. If you die, you go to be with Christ in perfection for eternity. It’s a win-win situation.

Listen to Bury The Workmen on Spotify. Unspoken · Song · 2014.

Battling the Unknown

What does the future hold? That’s a question a lot of people have, and no human has the specific answer to. Yet, many still question the one who actually knows the answers, who guides life in the right direction. Many worry fruitlessly about the things that have yet to come, even knowing that the only thing they can do is live through it and choose how to react.

Anxiety: it’s dangerous and terrible and altogether a thorn in the minds and lives of people everywhere, but especially to believers who know the one true God who has all of time in His hand. I know it’s hard to live with, through, and around, but I hope the message Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes 8: 1-9 will help you a little in tackling and overcoming anxiety.

Ecclesiastes 8:1 says, “Who is like the wise person, and who knows the interpretation of a matter? A man’s wisdom brightens his face, and the sternness of his face is changed.”

I think, and I think psychology backs me up on this thought, that how we choose to think overrides how our brains actually think, given time. Solomon, at least, seems to agree with me. In this first verse, he details something similar, if you can get past the weird phrasing he used. One of the things that helped me battle my own anxiety was the knowledge of, not only my own thought process, but what my thought process should be.

Let’s translate verse 1 into some more common English: who is wise enough to know what everything means? Who knows exactly what will happen based on what has already happened? A man’s wisdom enlightens his mind, and the strength of his mind is changed.

If we finagle with the words a little bit, we can adjust a brightening of the face to an enlightenment of the mind. (The Hebrew word “panah” used here has a whole paragraph and a half of possible translations. One of them is mind. Whether that’s more correct than face, I don’t know, but it does fit the idea.) And there is some sense to this: the brain works by establishing neural pathways to memories, actions, emotions, and more, and it is fully possible to override and rewrite pathways that have already been constructed. Thus, it is fully possible that coming to terms with your thoughts, knowing how you should think, and changing how you think could strengthen your mind against anxiety.

Knowing is half the battle, and with the mind, it’s even more than that. I think it’s important to note that, in verse 1, the verb is “changed” not “increased.” In this case, the strength of your mind isn’t increased to handle anxiety, but it is changed to rely on God, who does know what will happen, instead of yourself.

Verses 2-4 say, “Keep the king’s command because of your oath made before God. Do not be in a hurry; leave his presence, and don’t persist in a bad cause, since he will do whatever he wants. For the king’s word is authoritative, and who can say to him, ‘What are you doing?’”

I think the thing to take from this verse is the fact that you don’t have control. Part of the problem with anxiety is that you can’t control things you want to control, specifically, our lives. As believers, God has full control over our lives, just like a king would have full control over his subjects. There’s no point arguing or railing against it because we promised to follow what He says. And there’s no point in running away to do whatever you want, either, because He is an authority. He knows all that was, is, and is to come, so asking God what He’s doing as if He doesn’t know is silly.

And Solomon writes all this to point it out: you wouldn’t say or do these things to an all-knowing human king, so why would you do the same with God? It’s important to come face to face with this thought process, to know, unequivocally, that the one who guides your life has everything under control, and you don’t need to do anything but follow his plan. And it’s important to know because, again, knowing that is half the battle to changing your mind to have reliance on God.

Verses 5-6 say, “The one who keeps a command will not experience anything harmful, and a wise heart knows the right time and procedure. For every activity there is a right time and procedure, even though man’s troubles are heavy on him.”

Part of verse 5 is a promise from God: if you do as I say, I promise that evil will not come to you. And we can take God at His word for this because, even things that seem evil will come to good if we follow His plan. The rest is an assertion and a reminder that you can’t rush things. In God’s plan, there is a time for everything. Even when it feels like the world is weighing so heavily on your shoulders you feel like you’ll be crushed, there is not a moment of your life that the Lord has not looked over and prepared personally for you. He knows what you need and when you need it even better than you do, and he knows just how to give you what you need in the right time for good.

Verses 7-9 say, “Yet no one knows what will happen because who can tell him what will happen? No one has authority over the wind to restrain it, and there is no authority over the day of death; there is no furlough in battle, and wickedness will not allow those who practice it to escape. All this I have seen, applying my mind to all the work that is done under the sun, at a time when one man has authority over another to his harm.”

You can take thoughts like those expressed in verse 7 as either good or bad. It’s kind of like one of those: which animal you see tells you about your personality quizzes on Facebook, but this verse actually does something useful. Verse 7 can either be assurance or fear. You can read it as “Despite not knowing what will happen, I know God knows, so I have no need to worry,” or you can read it, “I know God knows, but I still don’t know what will happen, so I worry.” I think the way you first interpret this verse is an indication of your battle with anxiety.

But look, another key thing to know in the battle against our own minds is that, even if you had all the knowledge, you still would have no power to control things; therein lies the crux of the anxiety problem: part of the cause of anxiety is that we believe we have power to change things. But as verse 8 says, we don’t. It would be like trying to restrain wind or stop death. It’s just something we cannot do. You can’t control others without harming yourself, just like a soldier in war can’t be sent home unless he’s injured. And those who do try to control others will only harm themselves by the wickedness they practice.

I know this is a hard battle to fight. Anxiety is a beast that does not let its prey slip from its claws with ease, but you can escape it. There is much power in knowing God has it all under control; you can rework your brain to be dependent on Him rather than yourself, to trust Him, even when your mind tells you to fear. I don’t say this to just be optimistic or lessen the struggles, but I know it helped me, and I know it can help others.

Character Above Reproach

Let’s talk about character, because it’s something that a lot of people tend to struggle with. Honestly, I think “Christians” struggle with good character more than any other group of people. Not because Christians are bad or because there are a lot of “Christians” out there whom I worry are not actually followers of Christ, but because even those who are truly devoted to Christ have a tendency to hide their character.

Integrity was one of the core values pushed on me by my school as I grew up. I say pushed as if it’s a bad thing, but I’m actually glad for it, even if the lesson didn’t seem to stick for a lot of us kids. Integrity involves this idea that one must act the same alone as they do/would around others. And the idea of good character works in, generally, the same way.

A lot of Christians struggle with good character because they don’t actually have integrity; they act one way with a church group and act totally different alone. They’re pious around other believers, but raunchy around non-church friends. And, I know that’s a generalization, but honestly, if you take offense to this assertion, you’re likely one of the ones acting this way, and I want you to know that I love you, but this post is meant to rebuke you. Because I wish someone had done it for me many years ago.

In the Bible, Paul twice calls for leaders in the church to have “character above reproach.” In 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1. But, newsflash for all of y’all: this applies to every Christian, not just those who want to be pastors and deacons. Why? It has to do with what “character above reproach” means.

To have character above reproach means that no one can look at your character and find hypocrisy within it. A person whose character is above reproach has actions that match with their words. They have nothing to hide because they have done no wrong. It’s the characterized antonym of the phrase “Do as I say, not as I do.” What they say and do are the same, and they are good.

To take a few things from today’s world, if you tried to “cancel” them, you would find absolutely no dirt on them. Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram users could search for months and never find something out of line online or in person that has not seen the light of day and been atoned for. A person whose character is above reproach is not above reproach because they’ve never done wrong, but because they owned up to faults and mistakes, expressed repentance, and received forgiveness.

Does that sound similar to anything else? It should, because that’s an integral part of the process of giving your life to Christ and choosing to follow Him. You have to own up to being a sinful being, express your repentance, and receive Christ’s forgiveness. And from there, you’ve set up the process to become a person whose character is above reproach.

As you become sanctified by the Spirit, your goal is to become blameless, not in the eyes of God, who already sees you as one without fault thanks to the cover of Jesus placed over you by your salvation, but to the people around you. Not because you don’t still make mistakes here and there, but because your idea of quality character is new, and you adhere to it. You’re looking to be set apart from others by who you are, how you act, and what you say.

Now, I know Paul was specifically referring to leaders here, so I’m sure there are a number of people still arguing, “Well, this clearly doesn’t apply to me; I don’t want to be a pastor or deacon!” Well, think again! We are all called to be leaders, showing the blind to Christ so that they may see. And whether or not you believe it, all of what Paul says about the character of church leaders applies to every believer.

So, what are some characteristics of a person who is above reproach? Paul kindly lists them off for us in Titus 1:7-9, “For an overseer, as God’s administrator, must be blameless, not arrogant, not hot-tempered, not addicted to wine, not a bully, not greedy for money, but hospitable, loving what is good, sensible, righteous, holy, self-controlled, holding to the faithful message as taught, so that he will be able both to encourage with sound teaching and to rebuke those who contradict it.”

These are the qualities that you must aspire to. It’s these things that serve to make you above reproach. It’s these qualities that let leaders like Billy Graham speak life into millions of people and have no one question his character: there were no scandals that could pick up fuel against him, no insults that could stick, no evil labels that could ruin his ministry. Why? Not because he didn’t sin, because he assuredly did at some points, but because his character, despite his mistakes, was so full of God that no one could even begin to find something evil within him.

And it’s important to be that clean when it comes to your character because of what Paul says in Titus 1:10-11, “For there are also many rebellious people, full of empty talk and deception, especially those from Judaism. It is necessary to silence them; they overthrow whole households by teaching what they shouldn’t in order to get money dishonestly.”

And this is why the message of blameless character is even more important, because not only do you have to have character that is markedly different from the average nonbeliever, but you must also have character that is above that of even those who profess “Jesus is Lord,” know the tenets, and speak half truths about the Word. You have to distinguish yourself from false preachers and fake Christians so that nonbelievers may see the real truth.

Just as a short example, the difference we’re looking for is the difference between one who teaches the prosperity gospel and one who preaches the Gospel. The prosperity gospel, when taught well, sounds just close enough to be true Christianity. With the right words, you can convince people it’s true and right. But if you look at the pastors at prosperity gospel churches, you see a disconnect between what they say and what they do: their lives are so unclean. They talk the talk but can’t walk the walk, whereas a Gospel pastor follows the same tenets he teaches to his congregation.

And there are too many people who are fooled by false Christianity because it’s so difficult to distinguish between true Christians, near misses to Christianity, and even nonbelievers. That’s why you aim to have character above reproach; not only is it protection for you in a world that hates you, but it serves as another way for us to be a city on the hill, shining light for all to see.

And here’s a final reminder about your character to think about until I cover the full topic next week: You can’t control what happens to you, but you can control how you react to it. And that’s what really matters for character.

Where's Your Allegiance?

To whom do you owe allegiance? Where do your loyalties lie? For a lot of Christians, I genuinely wonder about this question because I can’t tell whether they are loyal to Jesus or something else entirely. And I’m not necessarily referring to sin here, though sin can be something you choose to be your master over Christ.

Every day we face decisions that indicate to whom we give glory as our master, and far too often, we try to split our loyalties to give a little glory to Jesus, a little glory to ourselves, a little to our state, our country, our sin.

I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot recently, and the idea for this little lesson was brought to mind again thanks to two things. The first is an image with a quote that’s going around the Internet right now relating to politics that says, “Some of y’all are too busy being Republican or Democrat to notice you stopped being decent a long time ago.” The second is the song “20:17 (Raise the Banner),” by Audio Adrenaline.

The saddest part about that quote is that it is disturbingly and apparently true, especially of Christians. There are so many Christians I’ve heard from who are trying to corrupt the Word of God to make it match their politics—on every side of every issue. There are “Christians” who put more of their identity in being Republican or Democrat than they do being a follower of Christ. And they’ve stopped being decent human beings and they’ve stopped being Christian. Their master is no longer Christ; it’s Donald Trump or Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or Mike Pence or George Bush or whoever else they happen to like in the political spectrum.

Now, I’m not going any farther into politics than this: stop that. Stop following any of those people like they’re your master. Did any of them save you? Do any of them rule your life because they created it? No. So you’d better stop serving them as if they did what Christ did. I’m saying that so clear cut because it is crystal clear in the Bible.

Matthew 6:24 says, “No one can be a slave of two masters, since either he will hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot be slaves of God and money.” And you can replace money with literally anything else: sex, career, politics, games, books, sports, your country. It’s that simple: if you choose to serve God, you cannot serve anything else lest you tell God you despise Him.

Now, before I go farther, I need to clarify so no one will jump on my case thinking I’ve said something I didn’t. What I’m saying here does not mean you are exempt from following the rules of the government you live under, or that you can’t like a politician or the country you live in, or that you can’t/shouldn’t serve in the military. All I’m saying is that you cannot make them an idol. You cannot make them so important in your life that you end up following and serving them with fervor. That position belongs solely to God. That glory belongs solely to God. See, your master is the one to whom you give glory

The Church is a nation without borders temporarily encapsulated by Earth. Instead of picturing ourselves as Americans, Europeans, Australians, Germans, Canadians, etc. it’s time we remember that we are Christians living in America, Europe, Australia, Germany, Canada, etc. with a Visa. Our home here is temporary; as soon as we are done with our work, we will return to be with our Lord, Jesus, in our own place in His house.

While you’re here, your job is to give Him glory so that the inhabitants of the nations you temporarily live in say, “I like this Lord you serve; can I move to where you live?” And that’s where the Audio Adrenaline song comes in.

In 2 Chronicles 20, Jehoshaphat was set to lead the inhabitants of Jerusalem out to battle an opposing force much stronger than their own army. He prayed about what he should do, and the Lord told him to face them even though they were weaker. When it came time to do battle, Jehoshaphat had his warriors lined up and ready to fight, but God ordered singers to be sent in front of the warriors to shout praises as they marched.

Jehoshaphat had two choices: he could choose to ignore God and march out with his warriors in front to gain glory for himself, his people, and Jerusalem, or he could listen to God and give Him the glory for routing the opposing army and securing the victory.

Let’s think of it like some of the song lyrics:

Raise the banner high march with I and I
Lift your voices up loud and high
Strength and unity, faith and victory
Let the battle rage on we cry

In medieval times, major lords had minor lords who swore allegiance to them, called vassals, but for the sake of my metaphor, we’ll call them “bannermen.” I’m stealing a fantasy term here, but rest assured the concept existed in medieval reality. One of the ways to tell who served who in battle was to see the banners each army marched under. Each lord had someone in his troops carry a banner that depicted his house in some way that was easily identifiable to friend and foe alike. Those troops would sometimes rally together under a central banner, the lord to whom their individual lords owed allegiance. Then, each house was seen as inconsequential because all the armies would be directed by the major lord. Instead of multiple separate armies, they would become one massive army under a single banner.

See, like those troops, we march around with a banner held over our heads. The key is to make sure we’re holding up the right one or else our allegiance comes into question. If we walk around with our own house banner over our heads, we take the glory that belongs to our Lord for ourselves. If we walk around with our country’s banner over our heads, we take the glory that belongs to our Lord for His enemy. And rest assured that the things that do not explicitly state they are with God are against Him (Matthew 12:30). But if we accomplish all that we do with God’s banner over our heads held high, He receives the glory due to Him.

So, don’t forget that you owe your ultimate allegiance to God, not your county, not your high school or college, not your state, not your country, and not your political leaders. But to God and God alone.

Flirting with Sin

Last time in Ecclesiastes, I discussed the importance of realizing that you cannot escape sin, so instead of beating yourself up when you do, you should seek forgiveness and repentance, and continue to chase after God. This time, I’m covering the other end of the spectrum: don’t flirt with sin and temptation or you’ll end up in over your head.

I hear things like this a disturbing amount these days: “it’s okay to sin because God will just forgive me.” Or “I’m just going to try it once, just to see what it’s like, then I’ll never do it again.” Or even, “This is the last time I’ll let myself do this sin, then it’s on the straight and narrow for me.”

And y’all, that’s an incredibly dangerous line of thinking, as Solomon says in Ecclesiastes 7:23, “I have tested all this by wisdom. I resolved, ‘I will be wise,’ but it was beyond me.”

We are incapable of just dipping a toe into sin. You may think it’s possible, but if the wisest man to ever exist failed at it, you will, too. Over and over Solomon says that he was testing all the things he could on this Earth to find satisfaction. Just testing. It’s very likely that he had no intention of having as many wives and concubines as he ended up with or falling into as many other traps and temptations as afflicted him. His goal was to learn, to experience. It was a mindset that is perpetuated in those examples I gave earlier.

In for a penny, in for a pound. This saying references a penalty for owing money in Great Britain. At the time of its first use, the penalty for owing someone a single penny was the same as owing someone a whole pound. So, if you were prepared to be in debt by one penny, you should be prepared to be in debt a pound. Sin is the same way. Not only is the penalty for sinning once the same as sinning multiple times, but if you’re prepared to dip one toe in, you should be prepared to jump in.

So, don’t even try it. Better yet, don’t even entertain the thought of trying sin.

Verses 24-25 say, “What exists is beyond reach and very deep. Who can discover it? I turned my thoughts to know, explore, and seek wisdom and an explanation for things, and to know that wickedness is stupidity and folly is madness.”

The thing you’re looking for in sin when you just give it a try is not there. To go back to the pool analogy, if trying sin once is dipping your toe in, what you’re trying to find in doing it is at the very bottom of the pool. And it’s not just any pool. It’s dark, murky, and incredibly deep. So deep that, even if you dove in, you’d never find the bottom. It’s unknown, out of reach, and dangerous. It would be madness, stupidity, to jump in and swim for the bottom, not knowing if you’ll even come close to making it.

You can even devote all your skills, everything at your disposal, and you’ll never find a way to get to the bottom. But, if you’re thinking to yourself, “I won’t know until I try,” stop it. Solomon is about to show us exactly what happens when you dive into the pool.

Verses 26-28 say, “And I find more bitter than death the woman who is a trap, her heart a net, and her hands chains. The one who pleases God will escape her, but the sinner will be captured by her. ‘Look,’ says the Teacher, ‘I have discovered this by adding one thing to another to find out the explanation, which my soul continually searches for but does not find: among a thousand people I have found one true man, but among all these I have not found a true woman.”

Now, first, before people start hopping on Solomon for saying women are horrible, this is part of what happened because of his sexual sin and having one thousand wives and concubines. Solomon became incredibly jaded against women because he dove into the pool labeled “women over God” and was trapped in it.

When sin traps us, it changes how we see everything around us. That murky water from the pool gets in your eyes and makes it hard to see things as God intended them. And a result is that you start blaming the wrong things for the consequences you face for your decisions.

An alcoholic in the middle of alcoholism rarely blames the drink for his problems. A poor woman in debt and out of a house because of one too many shopping sprees rarely blames her greed for her lack of money.

Solomon used women as his example because it was likely easy for him to do so, and because he was writing for other men at the time, but let’s change this back to our pool comparison to bring the ladies into this, too. More bitter than death is the pool that is a trap, its murky depths in actuality a mire of quicksand waiting to suck you in and hold you down.

The one who pleases God, the one who ignores the call of the pool and runs away from it, will escape danger. But the one who sins, the one who desires to dive in and does so will be caught. When your goal is to please God, you’ll find it far easier to ignore whatever it is about the pool that calls to you and tells you to dive in.

If you think of it as two voices calling out to you, it’s much harder to hear a second voice if you spend all of your energy focusing on making out the first and listening to its directions. It’s like when you’re on the phone and you tune out all the noise around you. If you focus on God’s voice, you’re far less likely to hear, and thus entertain, the voice of sin that calls out to you.

Verse 29 says, “Only see this: I have discovered that God made people upright, but they pursued many schemes.”

Remember earlier how I said getting in the pool of sin makes it hard to see things as God intended them? This is kind of what I mean, and in a way, it’s Solomon acknowledging that his statement on women is because of his sin, the sin of women, and not because of God, how He made the world, or how He made women.

God made people “upright.” He made us to be righteous in His image, yet we pursued many sins. You know, a lot of people like to blame God for the things that are wrong in this world. Many people even reject Him because of this, but that’s because they are blind. If you see and know that God made everything good, you’d see and know that what’s messing things up, what’s wrong with this world, is the way we act.

When we sin, we see the world as Satan intends and all the good things God made we either cannot see, or we see differently. But make it your goal to see this: that God made this Earth, and it was good. When you see that, you can see what you should do, what is right, and avoid what you shouldn’t do, what is bad.

Life-altering Power

Words are powerful in the mouth of anyone who speaks, as I wrote on Monday. But words are even more powerful in the mouths of those who teach and lead because they have a responsibility to guide correctly with the things they say. The wrong word can ruin your life or someone else’s. And that’s why, as Christians, how we teach the Gospel is incredibly important.

James 3:1-2 says, “Not many should become teachers, my brothers, knowing that we will receive a stricter judgment, for we all stumble in many ways. If anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a mature man who is also able to control his whole body.”

I know that James 3 is talking specifically about teachers, but we can spread this verse out to apply to all who teach. That means it applies to every believer who teachers others about the Gospel (which we should all be doing, by the way). But let’s apply it to teachers first.

I think it’s fair to say that teachers are judged more strictly by society. And I feel confident that every elementary, middle, high school, and college teacher will agree with me there. That’s because judgment typically goes hand in hand with responsibility: the more you are responsible for, the more people look up to you to always do the right thing, the harsher you are judged.

A teacher in a school will have their every action monitored and critiqued by other teachers, administrators, and parents of the children in their classes. Some children likely do some critiquing of their own, as well.

It’s the same for teachers in the church, too, especially pastors. Every word they say is critiqued by the congregation, other pastors, and anyone else who happens to hear their message. And actually, that is as it should be. Never hear a message preached without checking what is said by what the Bible says. That’s why James says that not everyone is fit to be a teacher.

Being a teacher requires constant monitoring of your heart and actions to make sure they are good and showing the fruit of the Spirit. It means constantly analyzing your lessons to make sure they are God-inspired and spoken so that you do not say anything careless, nor anything that is not backed up by scripture.

I say all this to say that you will be judged by what you say just as much as by what you do. Matthew 12:36 says, “I tell you that one the day of judgment people will have to account for every careless word they speak.”

Why is this the case? Because, as I’ve said, words are important. The tongue has the power to direct the body and soul. One of the reasons why teachers are judged more harshly is because they must give an account for every soul they directed through the lessons they’ve taught. I take this idea from Hebrews 13:17, which says, “Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they keep watch over your souls as those who will give an account.”

But, indeed, as Matthew 12:36 says, we all must give an account for what we say. This rings true for those of us who go out to act on the Great Commission and speak the Gospel of life to those who need to hear. If we say the wrong thing, we must give an account for it. If we speak unbiblically, we must give an account for that.

James 3:6 says, “And the tongue is a fire. The tongue, a world of unrighteousness, is placed among the parts of our bodies. It pollutes the whole body, sets the course of life on fire, and is set on fire by hell.”

I want to focus on “sets the course of life on fire.” With what you say, you have the ability to guide someone to Heaven or send them on a crash course to Hell. And this is my whole point. If God tells you to show someone the Gospel and you don’t know it well enough to speak the truth of life into them, you have to give an account of that. If you say the wrong thing and they turn away from God because of that, you have to give an account. You have to tell God when you approach the judgment seat what happened there.

1 Peter 3:15-16 says, “But honor the Messiah as Lord in your hearts. Always be ready to give a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you. However, do this with gentleness and respect, keeping your conscience clear, so that when you are accused, those who denounce your Christian life will be put to shame.”

Look, you can’t control other people’s actions, but you sure can influence them. If someone is going to turn away from God and Heaven, you can’t control them. But you can make sure you are not the reason they do so. When it comes to teaching the Gospel, make sure you’re ready to speak life into the person the Spirit directs you to share with.

Don’t let what you say be a stumbling block for someone else. I write all this because we talk about not letting what we do be a stumbling block for others, but it’s equally as important to watch what you say with the same fervor. True, sometimes actions speak louder than words, but often, a misplaced word is enough to make your actions meaningless.

Guard your tongue, guard your mouth, speak the Gospel backed by scripture. Speak carefully and exercise caution when provoked to answer, and don’t let what you say be the reason for someone turning away from the way, the truth, and the life. You have the power to change someone’s life; use it wisely.

Words are Powerful

“Actions speak louder than words.” “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” “Words may show a man’s wit, but actions his meaning.”

“The pen is mightier than the sword.” “I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” “Not many should become teachers, my brothers, knowing that we will receive a stricter judgment; for we all stumble in many ways. If anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a mature man who is also able to control his whole body.”

We were, at least I was, raised in a society that repeated the first paragraph over and over again, that perpetuated this idea that words spoken by the tongue and mouth were somehow less important, less impactful, than actions done with the hands and feet. And I hate to break it to you, but that’s just so wrong. Words are just as impactful, just as meaningful, as actions are. Not more so, and often they need to be backed up by what you do, but words are important. And even more so now that we live in an age where we can bandy them back and forth without ever revealing our own actions to others via social media.

Personally, I heard “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” frequently as I struggled to get over the mean words and insults spoken to me by students and even a few teachers who were not my biggest fans. From as early as 1st grade I was taught to repeat this phrase to myself whenever someone insulted or bullied me to attempt to stop it from hurting so much. And I know millions of other kids are likely taught the same thing.

But you know what? Words do hurt. Words are powerful. They can build and break people, cities, countries, ideals. They can incentivize a rebellion or quell one. They can speak through high-strung emotions and broken hearts and minds. They can drive a person to the edge of a cliff and convince them to jump, and they can pull up someone who’s hanging by their fingertips about to let go.

But we don’t talk about that enough, especially now. With the advent of social media, words have become tantamount to actions in our society. You can impact someone across the world through a pair of screens without them ever seeing your face or watching you live. Just a few words can hurt or heal someone you might never meet. And that, and more, is why you need to take the song “Words” by Hawk Nelson and memorize it, hide it in your heart, and let everything you say flow from the understanding that your words are powerful.

They've made me feel like a prisoner
They've made me feel set free
They've made me feel like a criminal
Made me feel like a king

Honestly, this song is fairly straightforward in its lyrics, so I’m just going to provide examples to fit the lyrics so you can more easily apply them.

A child might feel like a prisoner in his/her own mind if a parent doesn’t take time to converse with them daily about what they think and feel. When you tell your kids, “because I said so,” you tell them that their thoughts are not important to you.

A healthy parent/child relationship is one where the child is encouraged to freely share what he/she thinks because the parent talks and explains actions, decisions, and the world that the child is so inquisitive about.

A child might feel like a criminal for everything they do when they are constantly berated for mistakes but never praised. But the right compliment at the right time puts them on top of the world.

Parents, sorry for picking on you so much, but I’m just using some of my life examples as inspiration.

Words can build you up
Words can break you down
Start a fire in your heart or
Put it out

Another way I realize the power of words in my own life comes from myself and how I used to speak compared to how I try to speak now. If you knew me even two years ago and got on my bad side, you’d know just how much words could hurt because I was an expert at making them sting. And while I’m not proud to say it, I’ve broken down plenty of people with my vocabulary and proficiency with the written and spoken word. You can turn a confident individual into a stuttering mess when you know what to say and how to say it.

But you can also turn the shiest mouse into a lion roaring with confidence. Sometimes, just one compliment is enough to start off a career or a passion. The right word about someone’s singing or playing could create the next Casting Crowns or Matthew West or Francesca Batastelli.

And I’ve seen this happen a thousand times, but you can start fires in people’s hearts for their passions or end them entirely with a careless word. I’m here, writing this today, because a few people took the time to tell second and third grade me that I could be a good writer. But there are also millions of people out there who never pursue their passions because a parent, teacher, friend, or significant other never told them that. Their passion was never realized because someone told them, “that will never work out.”

I look at words kind of like the Butterfly Effect. One small word in the right place at the right time can change the course of someone’s life. Their changed life could impact millions or billions of other people. Even though they seem small and insignificant, words can make huge waves just like actions can.

The Bible tells us that the tongue is powerful. Proverbs 18:21 says, “Life and death are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit.” And it’s important to know this, and that you have no power to stop the tongue from speaking. The only thing you can do is guide it to speaking the right things. Whatever comes from your mouth is what is in your heart, so make sure to only feed good things to your heart and tongue so that you only speak good.

So, let your words be life, truth, healing, fixing, complimenting, and pointing people to Jesus. Don’t hold back that compliment because you’re afraid it would sound awkward. Or for whatever reason you might hold back a good word. Compliment endlessly and unashamedly. Tell people how much they mean to you. Lavish people with praise about their skills. Learn about your friends’ passions and talk to them about them. Tell people about Jesus, even when you feel like you can’t.

Listen to Words on Spotify. Hawk Nelson · Song · 2013.

Knowing the Plan

What’s in store for you and me? What’s ahead of us in our futures? Which choice should I make? Which option should I pick? These are thoughts that likely run through any given person’s mind fairly often. I know I think about them, probably more than I should. And I decided to write about this today because it’s recently come up in my church community.

Without getting into the specifics of other people’s lives, there are a couple people in my church who don’t really know the details of what’s ahead of them in their lives. It’s likely that a lot of things will be changing for them. To paraphrase, the individuals said, “We don’t really know what we’re going to do next. We don’t really know the plan.”

I spoke to my worship pastor about it after service, and I said, “I think it’s okay to not know the plan. When we know the plan, we tend to get in God’s way and mess it up.” He said I should probably write about that subject, and I at first kind of dismissed it because I wasn’t sure how to tackle the subject, but I heard a song on the way home from church by Avicii that hit me. It’s not even a Christian song, but it had just the words I needed to inspire this:

These are the days we've been waiting for
Neither of us knows what's in storeYou just roll your window down and place your bets
These are the days we won't regret
These are the days we'll never forget!

Think about that for a minute. Really, from the moment you give your life to Christ, you should be waiting for the day He says, “Go, it’s your turn to make disciples. Here’s what you’ll do.” I think that comes in the moment you’ve grown in Christ enough to spread the Gospel, because there is a certain level of spiritual maturity you need to reach for that, in my own opinion.

It’s kind of like how we all grow up. You spent a majority of your younger years being cared for, fed, and nurtured by your parents, ideally, and then, once you’re grown in maturity, you go out on your own. As Christians, we must be fed by the Spirit and nurtured until we are capable of going out and spreading our faith. So, really, you should be spending every moment you are being nurtured by the Spirit preparing and waiting to be sent out into the unknown.

I’ve talked about not knowing what’s in our future before, briefly, when I wrote about Tenth Avenue North’s song, “What You Want.” But I want to expand on the not knowing. I think all throughout the Bible we have examples of all the things that happen when we know God’s plans for us, and very few of them are good. We often end up causing problems for ourselves due to our own unbelief and prejudices.

Moses, for example, when told that God wanted him to free the Israelites by speaking to Pharaoh, was so worried over his own oratory skills that he tried to avoid going through with it. He tried to stop God’s plan because he was worried he couldn’t do it. Jonah tried to run from God because he knew His plan for Nineveh and didn’t think the people could be changed. The Israelites got themselves banished to wander the desert for 40 years because they knew God wanted them to wage war against the peoples in the promised land to uproot them and thought they couldn’t do it.

But when people didn’t know exactly what God had in store for them, they were able to rely on God rather than be discouraged by what they saw in front of them. I think of the disciples shortly after Jesus returned to be with the Father. They didn’t know exactly what they had to do. But they did know which direction they had to go in. Would, perhaps, Peter have been too scared to go to Rome if he knew ahead of time that he would die there? Would Paul have gone to all the places he went if he knew how he would be received?

Perhaps even the most telling story about this is Joseph, who was sold into slavery by his own brothers. Do you think he would have trotted out to them as carefree as he did if he knew what they would do to him? If he knew the pain that would come from it? Even if Joseph knew it was God’s plan for him? I wouldn’t have.

And therein lies the problem: when we know too much, we come up with regrets. We bring up all the things possible we can to convince ourselves that the upsides to our choices will be far less significant than the downsides. Our fear often outweighs our faith and our lives are unbalanced. The more we know about what’s ahead, the more courage we need, and that is something we sadly lack.

To put it in more concrete terms, it’s kind of like asking someone out on a date and being rejected. The first time you go to ask a girl or guy out on a date, it might not be that hard, especially the younger you are. You’re either confident he/she will say yes, or you’re sure you can handle the pain that comes from rejection. Why? Because you don’t know what that feels like yet. But each subsequent time, asking that question becomes harder and harder because you know how much it hurts to be rejected, and you fear that pain. Since you know it hurts, you’re less likely to do it.

But what I urge everyone to do is to not focus on the pain, which is why I think it’s beneficial for us to know less rather than more about what God has in store for our lives. When we hear from older, wiser folks about their lives, it’s not often that we hear about the hurts as they reminisce. It’s far more common for them to retell the good things.

But one thing I’ve noticed as I have matured is that even when you have to tell about the pain in your life on the way to big things, you rarely end up saying you regretted making that decision. In fact, I don’t know anyone who has regretted getting the courage to ask their now wife on a date. I don’t hear anyone say they regret taking the chance on asking their boss for a promotion for all the hard work they’ve been doing when they’ve made it to the manager position. I don’t hear anybody who stepped out into the unknown on the word of God say they wish they’d never done it.

Why? Because they didn’t allow themselves to get in God’s way and mess things up. They didn’t let their fear or pain control their lives. They didn’t let sorrow or shame make their choices. They let courage and faith step out for them.

Do you think Peter regretted walking on water? Do you think he would have regretted it if the rest of the disciples picked on him as Jesus told him he had little faith? No. I’m sure he regretted doubting as he stood on the water, but I know in my heart that he didn’t regret taking the step out of the boat for a single second after all was said and done.

And it’s likely something he remembered doing for the rest of his life. It was something he could share with others thousands of times as he preached the Gospel and showed them who Jesus was and why they needed him. That one small act of faith when he stepped into the unknown, not knowing what would happen, could have impacted thousands of lives. Just like you stepping out in faith when you don’t know what’s in store could do the same for thousands more.

You don’t need to know the plan. In fact, I still say it’s better you don’t. Lean on your faith in the one who’s writing the story, the one who holds your tomorrow, and know that He will work everything together for the good of those who love Him.

Listen to The Days on Spotify. Avicii · Song · 2014.

Life in Moderation

I’m typically a proponent for the idea that extremism is almost always bad. I say “almost always” because, invariably, there will be something that my thoughts on the subject do not account for and requires extremism, but for the most part, an extreme reaction or thought pattern is incredibly inferior to actions taken in moderation.

Take exercise for example. Too far to one extreme leaves you in bad shape: too little exercise leaves you obese, but too much exercise can be a ridiculous strain on your body. When you try to lose weight, it’s important to maintain a difficult workout, but one that’s not so difficult you can’t do it multiple times a week. If you work out too hard the first time, lactic acid builds up and the pain of overly sore muscles ensues.

For those still in school, excessive laziness when it comes to studying means you won’t know your material, while excessive cram studying last minute leaves the information jumbled and unable to stick in your mind. Both leave you without having the knowledge you need to pass your tests.

Religiously, extreme devotion to correct actions leaves you living life like a Pharisee, while extremism on the other end results in failure to do what God has asked of us.

While many parts of the Bible encourage believers to extreme actions in some cases, such as when it comes to separating ourselves from the world and the things of it, Solomon reminds us that there are times when we need to remember that the extreme answer isn’t always the right answer.

Ecclesiastes 7 verse 15 says, “In my futile life I have seen everything: there is a righteous man who perishes in spite of his righteousness, and there is a wicked man who lives long in spite of his evil.”

This can be equated to questions people often have: why do good things happen to bad people? And why do bad things happen to good people? The answer, of course, is that we live in a fallen world of sin, and the bad things that occur are a result and a consequences of the place we live. Bad things often happen indiscriminately simply because they are bad things and Satan loves to cause as much pain as he can. And sometimes, that pain comes in the form of horrible people living lives with less pain than those who are good.

Solomon merely uses this well-known principle to point out that being good will not save you from the evil of this world while you live in it. No matter how righteous you are, no matter what good you do, you will hurt, you will cry, and you will die on this Earth.

Another way to think of it is like risk assessment. Skydiving is a good example of this. The “wicked” don’t even think of the risk of jumping out of a plane. These are like the people who ignore the safety instructions and do what they think is best. The “righteous” obsess over the safety instructions to the point they drive themselves nuts in doing so and don’t enjoy the experience. The moderate, on the other hand, follow the safety instructions to the letter, but do so in a rational way. When they jump out of the plane, they know they are likely safe from the parachute failing, and so they can enjoy the thrill of skydiving.

Here’s the thing to realize, too. Unlike most risk assessments, which determine whether you should make a choice to do something based on the relative risk of the action, you don’t have a choice on taking an action or not. You only get to choose which action you take. You’re already on the Earth. You’re already alive and you didn’t get to choose not to be born. So now, the choice is not between doing and not doing, but which form of doing things your life will take: either wicked, moderate, or righteous.

Verse 16 says, “Don’t be excessively righteous, and don’t be overly wise. Why should you destroy yourself?”

This can be easily paralleled with the Pharisees of Jesus’s time. They were so bent on appearing righteous that they destroyed who they were as a person. As Solomon says later, there is no person who can live without sin, so don’t rip yourself apart trying to follow every law and rule to the letter. You can even compare this to the idea that you can work your way into Heaven. People who believe this will ruin themselves by trying to do enough good deeds to earn their salvation, even though that’s not how salvation works.

Verse 17 says, “Don’t be excessively wicked, and don’t be foolish. Why should you die before your time?”

Put simply, don’t go around doing things you know will get you in trouble, either. Something that can be rationalized about sin is that many of them can put your very life in real danger. Get angry at the wrong people? They might kill you. Have sex with enough people and you’re likely to catch and STD, possibly even HIV/AIDS, which is deadly. Get greedy and rob a bank at gunpoint? You might get shot. It’s possible to drink your blood alcohol content so high you die, or you could drive drunk into a tree and die. I could go on forever if I needed to. But the fact of the matter is that doing bad things likely comes with a pain/death sentence, so it’s best to avoid as many bad things as possible.

Verses 18 and 20 say, “It is good that you grasp the one and do not let the other slip from your hand. For the one who fears God will end up with both of them. (20) There is certainly no righteous man on the earth who does good and never sins.”

Verse 20 is likely one of the most concrete verses about this subject in the Bible. If we take it at face value, with the knowledge we have from the rest of the Bible, we know that we are made righteous by Jesus’s death, resurrection, and our trust in Him as our Lord and Savior. Not a single one of us only does good. We are incapable of not doing some evil in the sight of God because we will sin as long as we live on this Earth. So, it is inevitable, then, that the one who trusts and fears God will have the goodness of God living in him while also still doing evil acts in the sight of God as we fall short.

I think the note I wrote in my Bible near verse 18 fits the idea and imagery pretty well, if I can toot my own horn for a minute. It says, “We can’t escape sin in this life, so all we can do is hold on to God and drag our sin behind us.”

Listen, I know that the goal is to become so much like Jesus that we no longer sin, just like He did not sin. But let’s all be realistic and realize that we’ll never get there. We’re not good enough. We’re not perfect. We will not be while we live here. Only when we reach Heaven will we be made perfect. Until then, let us live our lives for Christ, but let’s not beat ourselves up when we make a mistake here and there. Just go to God, be forgiven, and continue to live the live the Lord has given you as well as you can.

Earth's Flavor Enhancer

Let’s talk about salt. Salt is a peculiar substance created by combining a volatile alkali metal that explodes when it touches water and a poisonous gas that can also serve as a purifier. And yet, we eat the stuff—often way too much of it. Because when we combine these two extremely dangerous substances with the right ratio, we get something that is incredibly useful for a variety of purposes, not just flavoring your food or making it easier to float in the ocean.

I want to talk about salt, not because I like adding it to my fries, but because it’s been heavy on my heart that it appears to have become tasteless. Okay, you got me. I’m not talking about table salt here. I’m talking about the genuine, bona fide salt of the earth, the shining light of the world, the city on the hill. Us. We’ve lost our taste. And it’s about time we start fixing that.

Matthew 5:13 says, “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt should lose its taste, how can it be made salty? It’s no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled on by men.”

First of all, why are we, believers, salt? Well, that’s a fantastic question, and it breaks down so nicely into a wonderful metaphor.

To begin with, nonbelievers are not salt, they are one half of salt: Sodium. Much like the element, the unsaved are unstable because they do not have a firm foundation. Sodium, when isolated, is a highly unstable and reactive material; if it touches water, it explodes rather violently. I think it’s fair to say that, without Christ, people are very much the same. With the slightest disturbance, they can be thrown off balance and explode as the world crashes in around them.

The other half of the salt equation is Chlorine. You probably know this one from your local pool. It purifies the water and kills germs that can cause infection and death. Interesting that those two verbs can be used to describe God, right? He purifies our souls and kills sin, which leads to death.

Now, I’m not that great at math, but even I can do this simple equation. If nonbelievers are Sodium and God is Chlorine, when you put the two together, you get a believer: AKA salt! The chemistry, as I understand it, lends to the idea that the Chlorine atom serves to stabilize the Sodium atom, and in the reaction as the two mix, salt is formed.

It’s incredible how easily that lines up with our understanding of how God works with us when we choose to follow Jesus. He purifies our souls, kills sin, and stabilizes us as we interact with Him. Even more interesting to me is that when Chlorine combines with Sodium, it changes form to Chloride as it mixes with the Sodium. Chloride, then, fits the bill as the Holy Spirit, the person of God who lives within all believers.

Now that we know why we are salt, let’s discuss why it’s important. Why must we be the salt of the earth? Why salt, specifically? What is our job?

I can break this down a million ways, but the simplest answer is this: we are here to enhance what has already been made. Salt doesn’t really produce flavor of its own, it merely enhances the good things that are already there. It suppresses bitterness and adds punch to sweet, sour, and umami (meaning savory, it’s a flavor often found in broths, gravies, soups, and more. I liken it to that heartwarming feeling that comes with the thick, rich flavor of a good potato soup.) flavor types. At even higher concentrations, it suppresses everything but the umami type.

So, in relatively low concentrations, we, as believers, are meant to enhance and suppress. We are meant to be an additive that helps remove and eliminate bitterness—and I’ll spread out the metaphor here to include all evil—and bring out things that are sweet, sour, and savory. Our job is to stop evil and enhance the good things that life brings to the table for all of us.

But in a low concentration, there is still something not so great—sourness. And most people don’t like sourness. In this metaphor, sourness is not necessarily evil, but sadness, horrible things that happen, not because of someone with ill intent, but because the world is fallen, and consequences come from that.

But in high concentrations, we are meant to lessen the impact of even sadness, of even the consequences that beleaguer a fallen world. We are meant to reduce the reliance on a sickeningly sweet happiness that does not satisfy and enhance the satisfactory savory taste of a world that feels the love of the one true God.

We are here to show that this life experience we have been granted does not have to be one that is filled with pain and sadness and sorrow and hatred and evil. We are here to show that there is satisfaction in life, that there is love, that there is good. We are meant to enhance all the things that God said were good while simultaneously showing that the impact of evil can be lessened. We are meant to make things different.

But what if we’re not doing that? What if our food tastes just the same as a meal without salt? If we lose our taste because we are not relying on God as we are supposed to, how can we make the world salty? How can we improve it? What good are we? To nonbelievers, especially, we have this goal to be different because being different is how we show them who God is and what He does. If our food tastes the same as theirs—if our lives look the same as theirs—why would they need what we have? Why would they need God?

They wouldn’t. If we, as salt, are not making our lives salty, are not making our lives different, then we appear to be no good. What we stand for appears to be no good. Who we stand for appears to be no good. Who we stand for appears to be useless because it looks like it is the same as that without salt. And what happens then? We are thrown out and trampled on. Our God is thrown out and trampled on. And nonbelievers won’t recognize who God as and what He does.

That’s why we must continue to produce flavor. We must continue to rely on God. We must continue to be different, to make the world different. Because if we don’t, how can we show others that they need the God who saves?

Free, Different You

Sanctification is a process. That’s probably something we don’t mention enough in the church, but it is something that we acknowledge nonetheless. You don’t choose to follow Christ one evening and then wake up following His will perfectly. The chase after Christ is a progression of tiny, yet radical, steps designed to make large changes overall.

But we’re impatient, faulty. We seek clear, unique, and massive changes in our lives and our actions because of Christ, and sometimes we try to engineer those things when they don’t need to be done. We try so hard to be others because they look like they’re doing it right, or for whatever other reason we concoct in our hearts and minds. But that’s not what we’re supposed to do. You are called to be uniquely you, doing what God has called you to do, changing how God has called you to change, and being different from the way you used to be.

I’ve touched on this subject in the past briefly, but I felt the need to reiterate it today. It’ll be somewhat of a running theme across today’s and Wednesday’s post. Here it is: Your job is to be different from the worldly you, not like other believers. Your job is to be salt of the earth, bringing out unique flavor from where you are, not where others are.

I think people get this idea that they have to be a pastor, a teacher, a worship leader, or a missionary in the Congo to make an impact for the kingdom, and they try so hard to make themselves into one. And I don’t fully blame this on the church, but I somewhat do, because we have stopped being the salt of the earth.

We don’t look any different from nonbelievers. We don’t act any different. And worst of all, individual members of the church are not doing their jobs of going and making disciples. And we’ve created this false dichotomy that only church leaders can spread the gospel, not because it’s true, but because they’re the only ones who are actually doing it.

And we dig deeper and find that younger Christians see this happening, and whether they fully understand it, they’re basing their faith on that. And now, instead of modeling their life after Christ and seeking what He has planned for them, they’re fixated on becoming pastors and teachers and worship leaders and missionaries in the Congo because “being a stay-at-home mom can’t further the kingdom. There’s no way that’s what God wants for my life,” or “working a 9-5 office job won’t allow me to spread the gospel. That can’t be what I’m called to do.”

The song of the week comes in with this theme: God makes you free to be you not someone else. It’s time we stop modeling our faith after the faith of others and start modeling our lives after Jesus and let the faith come along with that. Stop trying to live like your pastor or your mentor and start trying to live like a you who knows Jesus.

See, the way that this works is actually a pretty simple equation. Without God, you are unable to be who you are supposed to be. Why? Because you are made in the image of God, and without Him being Lord of your life, you can’t live up to everything you are, only part of it. So, when you come to know God, you are enabled to be fully you. When you become fully you, you enable God to be fully Himself in your life. If part of God’s character is being Lord of your life, then when you know Him, you give Him this part of His identity.

The equation is thus: a broken you + God = Fully You and Lord God. Because all of you is equivalent to a you who follows God’s plan. A you who chooses to follow someone else’s life is not fully you. Who you are is dependent on who you follow. So, stop trying to be other people. You’re free to be you only in Christ Jesus, only when following His will. So be you.

Listen to Free to Be Me on Spotify. Francesca Battistelli · Song · 2008.