The Value of Daily

“And day by day, from the first day to the last day, he read from the Book of the Law of God.” – Nehemiah 8:18

Why read the Bible daily? Why, for example, ration out Proverbs verse-by-verse over the course of a year, as our plan does, when we could sit down and read the entire book in a matter of hours? Why not just read it in occasional chunks?

Put simply, this is a case where efficiency and productivity are not the same thing. There is a kind of growth that can only happen when we read the Bible inefficiently, one day at a time, every single day, and it’s as mysterious and mundane as our need to eat every day. There’s nothing wrong with occasional special meals, but the fact remains that our bodies are created to require food daily—if we go too long without that, we become weak and sick. The same thing is inescapably true of our spiritual lives. As Dean said in the sermon last September that launched this reading plan, “We may not be able to remember what we had for breakfast, but here we are—it sustains us.” It fills our tanks, and “when the storm hits, all that you’ve got is already in the tank.” You cannot grow as a Christian, he said, without regular Bible reading—it just doesn’t happen.

The truth is, most of us have consumeristic tendencies when it comes to reading the Bible. We want to be fed by someone else. We want it to be easy and convenient, tailored to our needs, like a fast-food drive-through. But reading the Bible daily on our own teaches us to self-feed. It allows us to encounter God on our own and not through the spiritual lives of others, and this over time produces a slow but sure growth that cannot escape notice. “When you miss your devotions one day,” James Cordeiro writes, “you notice. When you miss them two days, your spouse and kids notice. And when you miss them three days, the world notices.”

The point of my life when I was challenged to take this seriously was when I started learning about the lives of Christians like Hudson Taylor, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Jonathan Edwards, Amy Carmichael, John Calvin, Charles Spurgeon, George Whitefield, William Tyndale, George Mueller, Adoniram Judson, William Wilberforce, John Bunyan, Martin Luther, William Cowper, David Brainerd: the one thing all of these people had in common was daily time with God, both in Scripture and in prayer, often extensively. “I have so much to do today,” said Martin Luther, “that I must spend at least three hours in prayer.” Do I take my spiritual growth seriously? Then I must read God’s word, day by day, from the first day to the last. 

Repentance

“But David’s heart struck him after he had numbered the people. And David said to the Lord, ‘I have sinned greatly in what I have done.’” – 2 Samuel 24:10

“Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” – Martin Luther, first of the Ninety-Five Theses

We hear about not just one, but two episodes of explicit sin in David’s life, and both times, his response is striking. After Nathan confronts him about the episode with Bathsheba, David’s first and only words are, “I have sinned against the Lord” (2 Samuel 12:13). He says the same first three words to God after doing the census. He does not make excuses. He does not blame others, or the demands of leadership. He does not point to norms within the surrounding culture. He doesn’t use passive language, or reframe his sin in nicer terms. He sees his sin nearly exclusively in the vertical dimension.

Repentance can be self-centered or God-centered. Self-centered repentance happens when we are sorry for the sin because of its consequences to us. Our main aim is to avoid punishment, to keep God happy so he will continue to give us what we want. The repentance itself becomes a form of self-atonement; the self-oriented misery or self-flagellation we experience becomes a reason we deserve to be forgiven. This kind of repentance becomes harder and harder as we come to rely more and more upon our own moral goodness for salvation and change.

God-centered repentance is sorry for the sin because it displeases and dishonors God. Its aim is to avoid anything contrary to God’s heart, anything that would keep us from tapping fully into the joy of our union with Christ. The repentance itself becomes a form of grief: and like the promise “blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted,” there is close on its heels an experience of grace, a feeling that forgiveness is not earned through our own suffering, but received through Christ’s suffering. This kind of repentance happens more and more in our lives, in an ongoing and dynamic cycle: the more we see our sins, the more we experience grace, and the more aware of that precious grace we are, the more we’re able to drop our denials and self-defenses to admit the true dimensions of our sin.

When it says “David’s heart struck him,” the verb used is nakah, meaning “to slay or kill.” This is no mild word. This is not intellectual regret, or a calculating correction. David felt slain by his own heart. He was completely smitten by the realization of his sin, and he doesn’t go speak to Joab or the people: he speaks to God, against whom only he has sinned (Psalm 51:4). We see this word again in verse 17, when the angel strikes the people as a consequence of sin, and David offers himself instead. God doesn’t take him up on that, but years later there is one man who is “stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted” (Isaiah 53:4) for his people. We also read on the same day these words from Peter: “Repent therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Christ appointed for you, Jesus” (Acts 3:19-20). May we experience God-centered repentance that leads to true change and times of refreshing within God’s presence.

Entitlement

“So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.’” – Luke 17:10

During a physician training session at Stanford, the head of a surgical department shared about the challenges of clinical care in this area. “They basically see me as a technician,” he said. “They come in and say, ‘I’ve read about this. I want you to cut here, radiate here.’ I have to tell them, ‘well, I’m actually the expert here…’” Patients tell their doctors what tests they want ordered, what visual acuity they expect after surgery. This rises beyond optimization and control into a kind of entitled consumerism: a belief that we do not only know what is best for ourselves, but we deserve to have it. I see this in myself, when I lapse into self-pity about not having what I want, or complain about some first-world problem. I see this in my children, who expect food or laundered shirts or packed bags to be provided when they want it, and wonder if my good intentions to care for them have backfired. I see this in the consumerism of the holidays. We are like Sally in the Charlie Brown Christmas special, when she dictates her endless list of toys to Charlie. “All I want is what I have coming to me,” she tells him; “all I want is my fair share.”

These verses in Luke seem offensive to the modern reader: and if anything, the English translation has softened the original Greek, in which “unworthy servant” means literally “unprofitable slave.” We ought to understand, though, that slavery in Jesus’ day was different than slavery in the United States: slaves were not distinguished by race, could become highly educated and work in many sectors of the economy (as accountants, professors, physicians, chefs, craftsmen), and could be freed to become Roman citizens through several means of manumission. In fact, freedpersons would sell themselves into slavery knowing they could later regain freedom, and for this reason the word for slave (doulos) is sometimes translated “bondservant.” 

Slaves in that context were not worthless or of no value, but they were not owed anything. They were not indispensable; their service did not merit thanks or favor. And Jesus is saying that this is our spiritual reality. How easy it is for us to become spiritually entitled, to forget that God does not owe us anything. He does not “need” our aid, the grace to do his will comes from him alone, and we do not through our service deserve any favor. We have merited nothing.

Martin Luther was recorded to say once in response to the Church dispensing the merits of the saints: “Merit! What merit can there be in such a poor caitiff as man? The better a man is, the more clearly he sees how little he is good for, the greater mockery it seems to attribute to him the notion of having deserved reward.” I find the rest of his diatribe a bit humorous: “Till we are seven years old, we do nothing but eat and drink and sleep and play; from seven to twenty-one we study four hours a day, the rest of it we run about and amuse ourselves; then we work till fifty, and then we grow again to be children. We sleep half our lives; we give God a tenth of our time; and yet we think that with our good works we can merit heaven. What have I been doing to-day? I have talked for two hours; I have been at meals three hours; I have been idle four hours! Ah, enter not into judgment with thy servant, O Lord!”

Jesus came into this world in a manger. The king of all kings, laid in a feeding trough for animals: a far cry from the sterile fields and personalized birthing plans of our day, or even what was normal in his day. I can’t think of anything less entitled than that. The one to whom everything was due did not demand it. Neither should I.

The Golden Calf, Part One

“So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf.” – Exodus 32:3-4

The story of the golden calf merits regular reading: it’s one of those events that is completely different to hear about versus actually read about. Each time I read it, I feel a sense of incredulity and horror. Aaron called this calf YHWH? The sound of their feasting and play was such that Joshua’s first thought was that they were at war? Moses made them drink gold dust? All Aaron could say was, “out came this calf”? The Levites killed 3,000 of their own men in cold blood? God sent a plague upon them? So many details that get left out of Sunday school class.

If I think about it, though, it’s not all that unimaginable. They hadn’t heard from Moses for forty days, no texts, no updates: that’s a long time. They had grown up under a Pharaoh-god who surrounded himself with gold and gods with bovine heads. Perhaps it is not such a surprise that this was what their imaginations turned to in their newfound autonomy and wealth; it was something they had been excluded from, and perhaps lusted after, in their past. They wanted something visible and immediate. They wanted worship they could get something out of. And so, this grotesque parody: a self-made, self-serving, culturally-relevant idol that they inserted into their newfound identities and stories—giving it God’s name, crediting unto it the feasts and the exodus. 

Don’t we all do that? Don’t we so easily turn our worship to what is immediate, visible, or culturally advertised, and feed it with our imaginations, energies, or thoughts? Jobs, romantic partners, children, fitness, money—any good thing made the ultimate thing, what Augustine called “disordered loves.” The gold in their ears was meant to be a reminder of God’s unexpected grace (Exodus 12:35), not melted down into idols, and when they left the scene, the Israelites no longer took ornaments with them (Exodus 33:5-6).

All of life is a gradual growth in learning to enthrone God, and dethrone idols, in our lives. Martin Luther wrote, “I must take counsel of the gospel. I must hearken to the gospel… that He suffered and died to deliver me from sin and death. The gospel willeth me to receive this, and to believe it… Most necessary it is, therefore, that we should know this article well, teach it unto others, and beat it into our heads continually.” Tim Keller elaborates: “So Luther says that even after you are converted by the gospel your heart will go back to operating on other principles unless you deliberately, repeatedly set it to gospel-mode.” How do you do this in your own life? How do you continually beat the gospel into your head? How do you identify and root out the idols in your life? These are recurring questions for all of us, because it is so easy—like the Israelites, when Moses turns his back, when nothing seems to be happening—to look back to the golden calf.