Fruitfulness vs. Success

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.” – Galatians 5:22

What is the difference between success and fruitfulness? They are not the same thing, at least in the way our world defines success. You get to success by striving, trying, making. You get to fruit by receiving, waiting, and growing. Success by definition usually involves visible and immediate results. Fruit is often hidden from you as it is happening and may not be fully recognized in your lifetime. Success deals in quantifiable currency like money, prestige, and influence. Fruitfulness deals in unmeasurable qualities. With success, the ends often justifies the means, whereas with fruit, the end exists as an indication of the means. Success leads to more and more success, in an ongoing cycle. Fruit exist to deliver the seed and die so that new fruit can grow. 

The Bible doesn’t talk much about success. But it speaks a great deal of fruitfulness: every healthy tree bears good fruit (Matthew 7); Jesus is the vine we abide in to bear fruit (John 15); the wisdom from above is full of good fruits (James 3); blessed is the man who yields his fruit in season (Psalm 1); walk in the fruit of the light (Ephesians 5); receive fruit that leads to sanctification (Romans 6). The story began with fruit taken when it should not have been (Genesis 3) and ends with the twelve kinds of fruit on the tree of life (Revelation 22).

It takes some learning, I think, to value fruitfulness over success in your life. To learn to point your life in the direction of fruitfulness rather than success, and to have the eyes to see the joy and reward that it brings. 

Nouwen puts it this way: “There is a great difference between successfulness and fruitfulness. Success comes from strength, control, and respectability. A successful person has the energy to create something, to keep control over its development, and to make it available in large quantities. Success brings many rewards and often fame. Fruits, however, come from weakness and vulnerability. And fruits are unique. A child is the fruit conceived in vulnerability, community is the fruit born through shared brokenness, and intimacy is the fruit that grows through touching one another’s wounds. Let’s remind one another that what brings us true joy is not successfulness but fruitfulness.” 

Psalms Through The Testaments

“Our heart has not turned back, nor have our steps departed from your way… yet for your sake we are killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered. Awake! Why are you sleeping, O Lord? Rouse yourself!... Rise up; come to our help! Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love!” – Psalm 44: 18, 22-23, 26

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, ‘For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.’ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” – Romans 8:35-39

It’s always interesting to bump into familiar lines while going through the Psalms. I had always viewed Psalm 44:22 through the lens of Romans 8, where it sticks out in a somewhat confusing way. Paul summarizes the truths of one of the greatest chapters of all time with an emotional peroratio (“What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?”), and then, like a downer, of all verses, he quotes Psalm 44:22. Why? To offer proof that sufferings are to be expected? To prophecy the suffering of the church?

But reading Romans 8 through the lens of Psalm 44 feels different. This Psalm is so honest, isn’t it? How many times have we, or our friends, said, God, where are you? I’m following you with my whole heart; why am I suffering? Why have you not given me good things I’m hoping for? I feel like I’m just being killed all day long, doomed like a sheep marked for the slaughterhouse. The Psalm ends with a plea, lobbed out into the empty void.

And then, hundreds of years later, these words of Paul echo back as if in answer: the sufferings are real. They are happening. But we are more than conquerors through it all, because God has sent Jesus, like a lamb to the slaughterhouse. He rose and will bring us to a glory that is not even worth comparing with the sufferings of this present time (Romans 8:18).

Every single word of the plea was answered. Rise up: Jesus rose from the dead. Come to our help! Jesus came as God incarnate in order that the world might be saved. Redeem us: Jesus’ blood bought us out of slavery to sin and one day he will bring us out of all suffering to glory. For the sake of your steadfast love! Love was the reason God did it (John 3:16). It turns out that this is the point of it all: that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Stages Of Life

“The glory of young men is their strength, but the splendor of old men is their gray hair.” – Proverbs 20:29

The Bible Study Fellowship I attended in Virginia was composed mostly of women with, well, gray hair. They would look at me, sleep-deprived, nursing, pregnant, hauling toddlers and diaper bags, or all of the above, and say fondly, “the days are long but the years are short.” I’ll never forget how excited the women in my group were for each new baby I had, how special they made me feel. I was able to emerge from my life of surviving from one nap to the next long enough to hear their wisdom: value the stage that you’re in because it won’t last forever and one day you will miss it.

Our society values youth, almost to the point of being pathological about it, but Proverbs recognizes the strengths of every stage of life. The Hebrew words used here for “glory” and “splendor” both essentially mean beauty. If you look them up in a lexicon, they define each other: the word for glory can also mean splendor; the word for splendor can also mean glory. Yet they are different words. There is a unique kind of beauty to be admired and valued in each stage of life. As Tim Keller writes, “The young have a strength and an unwearied ambition that older people cannot muster. The old have a perspective, wisdom and dignity that younger people have yet to acquire. These are all distinct goods that should be enjoyed in their time.”

We should enjoy these goods. We should look for the beauty in our stage of life. Today I hugged Emmy, the only one who still has some baby fat, a little harder. I noticed Ellie’s goofy theatrics, Eric’s irrepressible energy, and Elijah’s quiet curiosity. They will probably not be so open and unfiltered about sharing these things with me forever. And we should spend time with people in other stages of life, for the wisdom, energy and perspective they can offer. 

We do tend, though, to long for the stages of life we’re not in. No stage is perfect, but one day, our bodies will be resurrected and redeemed. There will be revealed a kind of glory, beauty and splendor that leaves no room for longing (Romans 8:18-23). J. R. R. Tolkien captures a bit of this in his description of the death of Aragorn: “Then a great beauty was revealed in him, so that all who after came there looked on him with wonder; for they saw the grace of his youth, and the valor of his manhood, and the wisdom and majesty of his age were all blended together. And long there he lay, an image of the splendor of the Kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world.”

Mystery Unveiled

“Not to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but has now been disclosed…” – Romans 16:25-26

I was out this morning in the fog that so often blankets this part of the world that time of day, out in a mountain forest. There was a moment when the fog lifted, and crystal-clear I could see the redwoods looming around me. “The redwoods,” wrote Steinbeck, “once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It’s not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time.”

The fog lifted to show me what had been there all along: what I had sensed but not been able to trace in detail, and it was something entirely beyond myself and my time. When Paul talks about mystery and revelation, it reminds me of N.T. Wright’s description of what the temple meant to a first-century Jew: “The Temple in Jerusalem was not just a big church building at one corner of the city; in Jewish cosmology it was the place where heaven and earth actually overlapped and interlocked… This is not about something ‘up in the sky’ – it is like a curtain being pulled back in the room where you sit.”

For some reason, we do tend to think of God as up in the sky somewhere, but Paul speaks to a first-century Jew who would have been looking for Him here on earth. The concept of God showing up like the unveiling of a secret right here in our space is a bit radical and unsettling. He is not unobtainable or ethereal; he is not an invention. He existed before my ability to see him, he is right here next to me and now within me, and he is as solid as the trees rising slow and strong around me, whose trunks I can touch, even if I can’t quite put the feeling they give me into words. “I do not want you to be unaware of this mystery, brothers,” writes Paul (Romans 11:25). Let us open our eyes to it, to this God who is “very near you… in your mouth and in your heart” (Deuteronomy 30:14).

Living Sacrifice

“I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” – Romans 12:1-2

If you think about it, Paul speaks in oxymoron here: by all Old Testament standards, a living thing only becomes a sacrifice once it stops living. We just read in 2 Chronicles about Hezekiah supplying 1,000 bulls and 7,000 sheep for the Passover offering: sacrifices were a big deal, and Paul knew his readers were intimately familiar with the concept. The animals used were of economic value and practical use. They were cared for with feed, pasture lands, and physical labor. To take something like that, and kill it without receiving any personal gain, was a sacrifice. It was an active decision that cost you something.

Jesus is our sacrifice, once and for all. But Paul makes an appeal here. He says, do you want to know what worship means? Do you want to know how we respond to such a gift of mercy and grace? We look at what it took to make an animal sacrifice, and we live that out with our bodies instead. We feed and rest our bodies, souls and minds as caring for something that belongs to God. We use our bodies to think and act, to do and create, in a way that is set apart for God and acceptable to him. The Old Testament sacrifices were teaching us all along, not only that we need Christ for atonement, but about how it is we are called and enabled to live ever after. 

In a way, this type of sacrifice is infinitely harder than a one-time act. As someone once said, “the problem with a living sacrifice is that it keeps climbing off the altar.” That’s how I feel sometimes, like I’m dragging myself back up, again, up and down. That’s how these days feel in general. As home dynamics, work demands, school phases, and personal routines fluctuate in this strange new world we’re ever-settling into, there’s a lot of up and down. Some days I do better than others, but I figure that’s why Paul uses the present tense here. It’s an ongoing thing, our worship. It takes time, our transformation. Sometimes it happens too slowly to be perceived, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening, even, or even especially, in the world we now find ourselves.

Making Provision

“But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” – Romans 13:14

These days, we have to make provisions. Given lines at grocery stores, longer amazon delivery times, and the scarcity of certain goods (as David Haley said on last Sunday’s stream, “the whole circle of life at Costco—gone”), we can’t live moment-to-moment in quite the same way. We have to think ahead more about what we need, and people are stocking up. Paul writes here, “make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” This word for “desires” refers not to good desires, but specifically to wanting what is unlawful. The previous verse names four examples: desires for drunkenness, sexual immorality, quarreling, and jealousy. Paul says, starve those desires to death! Don’t supply them with anything they need to live! Deprive them of paper products! Make not less provision, but no provision.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones writes a wonderful (albeit long) commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, including several chapters on the beatitude, “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.” Part of hungering and thirsting after righteousness, he writes, is avoiding anything that is opposed to such righteousness. This means avoiding things we know to be patently bad or sinful. He uses a timely analogy: “I say that to hunger and thirst after righteousness means avoiding such things just as we would avoid the very plague itself. If we know there is an infection in a house, we avoid that house. We segregate the patient who has a fever, because it is infectious, and obviously we avoid such persons. The same is equally true in the spiritual realm.” 

But, he says, it doesn’t stop there. “We shall even avoid things that tend to dull or take the edge off our spiritual appetites. There are so many things like that, things that are quite harmless in themselves and which are perfectly legitimate. Yet if you find that you are spending much of your time with them, and that you desire the things of God less, you must avoid them.” There is something to this, I think. Every parent knows that a child’s appetite for food is a valuable, and not inexhaustible, commodity. Spoil dinner with a snack right beforehand, and suddenly food they would have otherwise devoured becomes completely unappealing. The same is true for all of our appetites: fill up on mental, spiritual or emotional junk food, and we have no taste for what truly satisfies. 

Making no provision for the flesh means avoiding anything we would admit feeds sinful desires, even if they aren’t obviously sinful themselves. What falls into that category is a question only we can answer. But the point is that appetites are malleable. They can be fed or starved; stoked or smothered. And the more we starve our sinful desires, the more we open up space to hunger and thirst for what truly satisfies. The more we can put on Jesus and live into the reality of his Lordship over every area of our lives, over even our desires.

Rescue

“Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” – Romans 7:24-25

Something amazing happened today. During a family meeting to debrief a fight, I was describing what one of the kids had done wrong when the child in question started crying. Typically the kids, particularly this one, aren’t very verbal when they get that emotional, but suddenly words started coming out in between the sobs, about how they knew they were wrong but just couldn’t stop, in this torrent of self-incrimination and anger and sadness. It was a very real glimpse into the interior struggle all of us have but few of us admit to ourselves or allow others to see. It’s the struggle Paul admits to in Romans 7: “For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.”

When I was younger, I got so frustrated at the end of Romans 7, because I wanted a more concrete answer to how to fix this problem, how to stop doing what I know I shouldn’t do. I felt like Paul builds up to a cliffhanger, then just goes on to say, “Thanks be to God!” Thanks for what? What was the twelve-step process? What was the solution? –try harder? avoid triggers? make a fresh resolution? 

I asked one of our pastors last year, if you could memorize any chapter in the entire Bible, which would you choose? His response was immediate: “Romans chapter 8.” So I did it, and it’s now, amazingly, that I see that the entire chapter is Paul’s answer. I should I have seen it in the way he phrases the question in Romans 7:24: “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” Who, not what. Deliver, not advise. We cannot save ourselves. We are in need, not of advice or therapy, but of rescue. The question is not, “what can I do?” but, “who can rescue me?” The answer is not a technique but a person, and our response is simply, thank you, Jesus. He spells this out all through the next chapter: Jesus has put to death this thing in you that does the wrong thing, and because of that, live according to the spirit. There are action steps, but it only comes after the rescue, for the rescue itself is a deliverance not only from the consequences of sin but its power in our lives.

I’ve been asking God lately to show me what purpose he has for me during this time, and part of the answer came today. Normally, it’s rare to have such a collectively vulnerable moment, and part of what all the recent friction and grief has done is laid bare our very real need for rescue. I pulled this child into my lap and said, I have really good news! When you feel like this, you can do a few things. You can conclude you’re a shameful, bad person; you can hate yourself and do things to make up for that shame. You can ignore it, convince yourself you’re still good most of the time, and tell yourself you’ll try harder. Or you can admit you need rescue. Jesus has given that to you, and you can ask him for help! Even when you hate yourself the most, he looks at you and sees someone worthy of love, someone he loves so much. In that moment, I thought to myself, thank you God, for this time that brings us to the gospel. I don’t have all the answers, but I can still thank you, and receive moments like these that you give me.

Meritocracy

“For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” – Romans 5:7-8

We live in a moral ecology, writes David Brooks, built on assumptions that include “the centrality of accomplishment”: we are not measured by how well we conform to code, or the “thickness” of our relationships, “but by what we have individually achieved… promoting the self is the prime mission.” One New Yorker article describes how this works when it comes to education: up to high school, you just need to show up. But college is different. It’s a bottleneck, a sorting mechanism. “You are either selected or rejected. And it matters where… The narrower the entryway, the broader the range of opportunities on the other side. College, in turn, sorts by qualifying some students for graduate and professional education… And graduate and professional education then sorts for the labor market. It’s little gold stars all the way up.”

Little gold stars all the way up. Even as someone who has outwardly stepped off the escalator of career ambition, I’m finding that it’s incredibly difficult not to apply some system of meritocracy to everything else: my parenting, my housekeeping, my marriage, my ministry, my hobbies. My spiritual life. Soaked deep into me is the assumption that my accomplishments determine my value. I like to think, oh, I’m beyond wanting to get into Harvard, but really, it isn’t that simplistic, and it never was. There’s a good thing in me, that wants to be excellent, that thrives best with challenging goals, but I live in a world based on meritocracy, so immersed in it that we can’t even tell we are. I have to constantly distinguish between good thing for God’s glory and good thing that makes me good. Between effort and fruit, between self-justifying works and holy discipline. And the line between those things can be thin.

The most spiritually formative experiences in my life have been those that cause me to hit the limits of my merit. Marriage. Parenting. And now I can add to the list: quarantine. Even starting off with all the advantages I could have—a spacious house, no need to work, a healthy family foundation—I am struggling to accomplish it all, to homeschool, parent, housekeep, cook, write, self-care, support a necessarily absent spouse. I’ve let creep in, as I so easily do with any new venture, this silent but deadly belief that I ought to be able to, even that I am measured by how well I do it. Part of what this time is doing is confronting me with the functional meritocracy in my life. This is what Paul was trying to do in Romans. He is saying, the way that God loves you has nothing to do with what you have accomplished. More than that, it has nothing to do with how you have messed up. Jesus says you alone are worth his life, completely apart from anything you have or haven’t done. How would my life look different if I truly believed this? 

Rejoice

“Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” – Romans 5:2-5

Did you know that there are four main Greek words translated “rejoice” in the New Testament? Chairo is the one used most frequently (75 times); it means “to be glad,” and we’re familiar with it from the book of Philippians. Agalliaomeans “to jump for joy”; euphraino means “to cheer up.” The word Paul uses here is kauchaomai, and it has two meanings: “to glory in a thing or on account of a thing,” and “to boast.” It adds a kind of subtle redundancy here, to “glory in the hope of the glory of God.” 

The definition of “rejoice” from the dictionary is: “to feel or show great joy or delight.” If I had to explain the meaning of kauchaomai to one of the kids, I would say it’s to be happy about the nature of something so much that you need to show your happiness. It has to come out in some way. It’s a boasting in something, not to selfishly brag about it, but because you really want to show it off. Paul says that we should feel this way about the hope that we have.

Someone once said, “Man can live about forty days without food, about three days without water, about eight minutes without air, but only for one second without hope.” I remember a friend once asked, “what is something you are looking forward to?” and I thought it was such a good question. What we look forward to keeps us going, doesn’t it? But the hope we have as believers isn’t just looking forward to the next exciting experience or anticipated pleasure. It’s not counting on when something bad will end. It’s not self-generated optimism or wishful thinking. Paul is quite specific here: it is hope of the glory of God. The glory of God is everything about him; the excellence and magnificence of every one of his qualities. There is a sense in which we experience God’s glory now: we stand in this grace; his love is poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. But there is a sense in which we anticipate much more to come, both here on earth but especially one day in the eternity to come.

And here, the awful mystery: this kind of hope comes in suffering. The more we continue in suffering, the more we endure, the more it shapes the nature and quality of our inner selves, the more, somehow, it leads to this exact kind of hope. This is why we rejoice in our sufferings the same way we rejoice in our hope: so happy about the very nature of its work in us that we can boast about it, that we must express it somehow. 

When I think about someone who rejoices this way, Joni Eareckson Tada comes to mind. She wrote a short booklet entitled Hope… The Best Of Things, in which she wrote: “I sure hope I can bring this wheelchair to heaven. Now, I know that’s not theologically correct. But I hope to bring it and put it in a little corner of heaven, and then in my new, perfect, glorified body, standing on grateful glorified legs, I’ll stand next to my Savior, holding his nail-pierced hands. I’ll say, ‘Thank you, Jesus,’ and he will know that I mean it, because he knows me. He’ll recognize me from the fellowship we’re now sharing in his sufferings. And I will say, ‘Jesus, do you see that wheelchair? You were right when you said that in this world we would have trouble, because that thing was a lot of trouble. But the weaker I was in that thing, the harder I leaned on you. And the harder I leaned on you, the stronger I discovered you to be. It never would have happened had you not given me the bruising of the blessing of that wheelchair.’ Then the real ticker-tape parade of praise will begin. And all of earth will join in the party. And at that point Christ will open up our eyes to the great fountain of joy in his heart for us beyond all that we ever experienced on earth. And when we’re able to stop laughing and crying, the Lord Jesus really will wipe away our tears. I find it so poignant that finally at the point when I do have the use of my arms to wipe away my own tears, I won’t have to, because God will.”

Leisure

“For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.” – Romans 1:20

I’m finding that this new world has changed my relationship with entertainment and leisure. Perhaps because my days are more intense and non-stop, because there is a greater sense of restlessness with being cut off from outside activities, or simply because I’m generally online more following news and connecting virtually with others, the lure towards media-oriented, escapist entertainment is greater. It’s tempting to be lazy about what I read or watch, but part of navigating the new rhythms of this life is recognizing that I must also navigate what I do with my spare time. Are there inner emotions, stresses or struggles underlying the impulse for escapism? How does what I read or watch affect me? How does it reveal what I crave or long for, or what I believe will save me? How can I readjust my leisure life in a healthy way?

The question I’ve typically used to help me sort through whether something is a healthy form of leisure is: how life-giving is this activity for me? After I do it, do I feel more refreshed, energized, or renewed, or do I feel more deadened or tired? But as I was reading our passage in Romans, it occurred to me that there could be a deeper question to ask. Paul says that when we look at things in our world, one of two things can happen: we can perceive the nature of God, or we can perceive idols that replace God. All of God is writ in his creation, but how we perceive it can be vastly different. 

The truth is, I come to my leisure time with a need. How can I use the free time I have to perceive God in the way I need to receive Him, to receive life in Him? Sometimes I need to perceive God’s vastness after a cloistered day at home: that may mean going outside, or reading something that expands my awareness of the world. Sometimes I need to perceive God’s presence in suffering or emotion: that may mean reading a book or watching a movie that gives me an excuse to cry. Sometimes I need to perceive God’s image reflected in the parts of me that aren’t related to being a mom: that may mean exercising an old hobby. Sometimes I need to remind myself of aspects of God I can’t see myself: that may mean connecting with some friends. 

Conversely, does my leisure sink me more deeply into idolatry in any way, or to an unhealthy degree? Is it leading me, however insidiously, to exchange some truth about God for a lie, to serve some aspect of creation rather than the Creator (verse 25)? The line between something showing me an image of God, and becoming an idol unto itself, is a tricky one, and I generally have to be both brutally honest and uncomfortably vigilant with myself. Sometimes these are the hardest, unseen battles that I fight. But I don’t do it to be legalistic. I do it because I know that how I spend my leisure time is one of the most important things I do. I do it because I love Jesus, and I know that ultimately in Him is life (John 1:4). May God reveal Himself to us in the ways we need life and rest as we walk into each day. 

The Holy Spirit

“And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever … it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.” – John 14:16-17; 16:7

“From my perspective, the Holy Spirit is tragically neglected and, for all practical purposes, forgotten. While no evangelical would deny His existence, I’m willing to bet there are millions of churchgoers across America who cannot confidently say they have experienced His presence or action in their lives over the past year… The benchmark of success in church services has become more about attendance than the movement of the Holy Spirit.” – Francis Chan

For some reason, it’s easy to subconsciously think of the Holy Spirit as an “it”: some kind of electrical energy we charge up on or impersonal force we wield. But the most basic thing Jesus tells us here is that the Holy Spirit is a “him.” He is a person with feelings (Ephesians 4:30), thoughts (Romans 8:27), and a will (Hebrews 2:4). He is someone we have a relationship with. Having him fill us is less like calling down some force from the skies, than like inviting a person into our home, someone for whom we might clean and arrange our space.

He is also God. There are several Greek words for “another,” but the one Jesus uses here means “similar, same”: and indeed, they are spoken of interchangeably (1 John 2:1). The Holy Spirit is not some lesser being, some commodity we use for our own purposes. He is God himself. To fail to submit to and trust in him is to fail to submit to God.

There are many things about the Holy Spirit to think on from these chapters, but one is this interesting word Jesus uses to describe him, translated “Helper” (ESV), “Advocate” (NIV), “Friend” (MSG), “Comforter” (KJV), “Counselor” (MEV). The Greek is parakletos, from para, which means “to stand alongside,” and kletos, which means “to declare or call.” Together, they mean “a legal advocate”: someone who is called to one’s side to plead one’s cause before a judge or counsel for defense. The Holy Spirit defends us against enemies on earth and in our own hearts. He testifies that we are children of God (Romans 8:16), under the new covenant (Hebrews 10:15), saved (Hebrews 2:4) and have eternal life in Jesus (1 John 5:6). He intercedes for us in prayer (Romans 8:26).

Have you had anyone in your life who is truly for you? Who is loyal to you, to the end? It is mind-blowing, life-changing, really, that I have someone like that, with me all the time. Jesus actually says it is better for him to go away so that I can have the Holy Spirit. Do I really believe that? Most of us would probably say we would rather have Jesus in the flesh. When was the last time you undeniably saw the Holy Spirit at work in or around you? What is your relationship with him? Do you live any differently because you have his power and presence within you?

Covetousness

“I gave you your master’s house and your master’s wives into your arms and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah. And if this were too little, I would add to you as much more. Why have you despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in his sight?” – 2 Samuel 12:8-9

When God sends Nathan to confront David, Nathan talks about covetousness, something so often at the root of other sins. It’s no accident that it’s the one commandment Paul mentions in Romans 7:7 when he explains how the law reveals our sin. It is the last of the ten commandments, and in a way underlies those before it. And while the preceding commandments are perfunctory (“You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal.”), God is strikingly specific when it comes to coveting: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s” (Ex 20:17).

This is worth ruminating on, because I find that covetousness is essentially normalized by our consumeristic culture. Consumerism breeds covetousness. Consumerism is more than simply the consumption of goods; it is a worldview that tells us we must acquire ever more or ever better goods as a means to deserved self-gratification or self-actualization. It works best when we set our sights on something specific: it starts with generalized discontentment and moves towards specific envy.

It tells us marriage is about making ourselves happy, not sacrificially loving someone else. That sex is about self-gratification, not relational giving. That jobs are about self-glorification or earning esteem to feel good, not a sense of vocation or calling. That parenting is about having kids who fulfill your own ambitions or make you look good, not stewardship for God’s kingdom. That material possessions are about comfort or status, not experiencing God’s faithful provision. And so it is easy to feel discontent if we don’t have the spouse, sexual partner, parenting outcomes, or possessions that we want or feel we should have. It’s easy to covet what we see around us.

At heart, coveting is despising God’s word. We despise what he has given us, but we are also despising his invitation to ask him instead for what we want. Isn’t it interesting that God says, “And if this were too little, I would add to you much more”? Do we really believe that? Do we believe Jesus when he says, “how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him” (Matthew 5)? Asking takes vulnerability and trust. It forces us to examine our worldviews and confront the nature of our longings. It opens us to experiencing the love of our father God. It is far easier to simmer into discontentment or fall into envy. May God expose any covetousness or self-focused consumerism in our hearts, and lead us instead to see His goodness and long for His glory in our lives.

Obedience In The Unseen

“And she said, ‘I will surely go with you. Nevertheless, the road on which you are going will not lead to your glory, for the Lord will sell Sisera into the hand of a woman.’” – Judges 4:9

“As we live our ordinary lives we are declaring all the time exactly what we are.” – Martyn Lloyd-Jones

At this time of transition from the bronze to the iron age, Sisera’s 900 iron chariots represented a huge technological advantage. In human terms, Barak was leading his 10,000 men into certain slaughter, but they stream down Mount Tabor anyway under Deborah’s command. We learn later in song (Judges 5:21) that God flooded the valley, creating mud that clogged the chariots’ wheels and giving the Israelites victory. 

Barak points to Christ, who like him is under authority (John 8:28), does not act apart from the one who sent him (John 5:19), and is victorious through obedience (Romans 5:19, Philippians 2:8; Hebrews 5:8). In all this, he demonstrates courage, humility, and a faith for which he is remembered in Hebrews 11. But most of all, he does it all unseen. He goes on a mission instigated by a woman and finished by a woman, knowing he will get little credit for it.

Sometimes it feels like my hardest battles are the ones I fight unseen, the hidden battles of ordinary life. Battles to control what I say or don’t say. Battles to not indulge in self-pity, complaint, judgment, or gossip. Battles to give up what I know God is calling me to turn away from. Battles to forgive someone, again. Battles to discipline well when I’m tired. Battles over my thoughts in the dark before sleep. I fight these battles against my own sinful nature, against the schemes of Satan, and for the most part there is no element of public recognition. The struggles are real, hard, and sometimes long; the victories when they happen can be unmistakable experiences of God’s power. But no one really sees them.

Barak had no less courage though he knew there would be no fame, and neither should I. Because the reality is, of course, that I am seen. Deborah’s words echo Jesus’: I will be with you. Mount Tabor is thought to be the place of Jesus’ transfiguration so many years later, the place where God declares his love to his Son as he does to us. The Holy Spirit lives inside me. I am not alone, in these most important battles in my life.

Intercession

“And he stood between the dead and the living, and the plague was stopped.” – Numbers 16:36

This is an incredible picture if ever there was one: Aaron, clad in the robes of the high priest, holding the censer with holy fire and incense (see Exodus 30), running into defilement and death, through over fourteen thousand corpses, to stand at the live front of the contagion. Standing between the living and the dead. Surely Aaron prefigures Christ: he loves his own people though they rejected and spoke out against him. He leaves a place of safety for uncleanliness and exposure to possible death. Even Moses could not go: only Aaron, the appointed high priest, could act out the very essence of what his office entailed, literally interposing himself between the deserved death of his people and the wrath of a holy God. 

Christ acted as our high priest through his incarnation and atoning death: but he also continues to intercede for us. “Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us” (Romans 8:34). “Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:25). He intercedes for us as our advocate (1 John 2), and also through his prayers for us (Luke 22:32, John 17).

“I’ll pray for you” has become over-spoken to the point of meaninglessness—a while ago, I decided never to say those words unless immediately followed by said prayer, lest I forget—but this notion is not a platitude for Jesus. He exists perpetually to make intercession for us. His work for us did not stop at the cross. He prays for us. And not only Jesus, but the Holy Spirit: “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words” (Romans 8:26). You would think if we didn’t know what to pray for, the Spirit would help by, well, telling us what to pray for—but he intercedes for us instead. He himself speaks for us.

I tend to think, and I’m constantly told, that I can speak for myself most of the time, but the truth is, I am beset by the plague of my pride and my sin. I don’t just need coaching; I need someone to speak for me. And that is what God does. I consider how encouraged I feel when I know or feel or hear someone praying for me, or acting on my behalf. I think, what does it mean to me that Jesus is advocating for me in the heavenly realms, right there before God? That the Spirit himself groans in intercession for me? That all of this happens now? How could I not feel deeply and undeservedly loved? I think of Aaron, who despite being around 100 years old is not walking, but running, into the plague. How could I not desire in Christ-like-ness to intercede for others with the same sense of fervency and love? 

Pondering Our Paths

“Do not enter the path of the wicked, and do not walk in the way of the evil. Avoid it; do not go on it; turn away from it and pass on.” – Proverbs 4:14-15

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth…

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.”

- Robert Frost, ‘The Road Not Taken’

I like what Keller writes about this verse in Proverbs: “Life is likened to a path because every action takes you somewhere.” We like to think we are completely in charge of every choice we make, but on some level, each action changes us in a way that affects the next action we take, and the one after that, and eventually the direction in which we go. It’s like that saying about how thoughts lead to actions, which lead to habits, which lead to character.

This plays out in lots of ways. Our actions place us in environments where subconscious cues and cultural mores affect how we act and think, what we buy and do, more than we realize. It’s no accident that, after moving to the Bay Area, I’ve started working out, wearing joggers, and buying organic (sometimes, like at Costco, I feel like I don’t have a choice). The culture and value system at our workplaces, sports teams, schools, local neighborhoods all affect us more than we think, not to mention advertisements, phone notifications, and more. 

Our actions inform our feelings. In our Disneyfied, be-true-to-your-heart culture, we like to think that our feelings should drive what we do, but the Bible commands us often to do things, not feel up to them first. I always thought that part of the reason I loved our kids as newborns, even though they basically only cried, pooped, and slept at that stage, was because I sacrificed so profusely to care for them. C.S. Lewis writes, “Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.” The same could be said of acting in dislike towards someone.

Our actions inform our thoughts. Romans 8:5 says, “those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.” Wouldn’t we tend to write that the other way around? If you set your mind on the flesh, then you live according to the flesh—that seems more logical. But that’s not how the sequence goes here. Our actions determine what we set our minds upon.

The wisdom here is simple. Realize that you tread a path in life. And “knowing how way leads on to way,” be careful with each step. The tone of this section is one of extreme vigilance: keep hold, don’t let go, avoid, turn away, let them not escape, look directly forward, do not swerve. Obviously this does not come effortlessly: it is much easier to discount our actions, to tell ourselves they don’t matter, or that we can always go back. But the truth is, every action takes you one step farther in one direction or another. “Ponder the path of your feet” (Proverbs 4:26).

The Four-Day Lamb

“Tell all the congregation of Israel that on the tenth day of this month every man shall take a lamb according to their fathers’ houses, a lamb for a household… and you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month, when the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill their lambs at twilight.” – Exodus 12:3, 6

Ellie joined student council this year, and apparently their first item of business is to carry out a school-wide vote on the names for the two new baby goats the school farm acquired this year (top contenders: Salt and Pepper). All the kids know about this, from Elijah in kinder, to Eric in second grade, to Ellie in fifth grade, because all the classes visit the farm every week, where they take care of and get to know the various livestock.

I’ve always found it interesting that God asks the Israelites to keep the one year-old, unblemished lamb or goat (the Hebrew seh here can refer to either) in their own homes for a period of four days before killing it. Livestock were surely not normally kept in a house, much less crowded slave quarters. Why would he do this?

It would have been a constant symbol of what was to come. Nine plagues had happened by this time, but Pharaoh still had not let them go. Had the people lost heart? Or grown in hope? This bleating lamb or goat, wandering the house nibbling on clothing, pooping on floors, surfing the counters, would have been a reminder—salvation is coming, this time we really will be set free, have faith and believe. It was a promise they could touch, see, smell, hear, and later on, taste. 

But it was a promise that would come at a cost. Four days were probably long enough to start to see the lamb as a pet, particularly for the children. Can you imagine explaining to your kids that they would have to watch you kill it? Can you imagine how Abraham felt for the days it took him to walk up the mountain with Isaac to the altar? I don’t even really want to imagine any of that. But God wants his people to know—the sacrifice comes not just at a material cost, but an emotional one. The lamb is not just any lamb: it is a beloved one. It helps us understand what it meant that God was a God who “did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all” (Romans 8:32). 

This was done as a household. As a parent, I think about the significance of that: the lamb was to be brought into the family. All of it a story, a lesson, for everyone, from the smallest to the oldest. All of it a journey to be walked through together, as each family did the same thing, killed at the same time, ate the same flesh. I think about what it means to live with the gospel so centric in our family lives that it cannot be avoided. That it would be obvious to the neighbors. I think about how it looks to live as a congregation of families. I picture our last community group meeting, where folks in their sixties sat in the same circle as five year-olds, everyone sharing and listening to each other. The lamb was not for each individual, or just for the pertinent individual, the first-born son. It was for every household, and neighbors were to come together as needed. This is how growing in understanding salvation happens, how the journey is meant to be taken. 

Sexual Sin

“How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?” – Genesis 39:9b

It is a common fallacy to think as singles that our struggles with sexual sin—pornography, masturbation, erotic literature, mental fantasies—will evaporate once we get married and actually have sex. For one thing, those inescapably addictive and progressive things train us to desire and expect something completely different from what the realities of sex in marriage is like. Whether we realize it or not, we are internalizing a cultural view of sex that is about self-gratification, performance, objectification, and idealized as being the ultimate source of fulfillment and an end unto itself (Keller uses the term “apocalyptic sex” in his book Counterfeit Gods). Whereas sex as God created it to be in marriage is about giving of yourself, being vulnerable in an unconditional atmosphere of trust, and ultimately points back to God. Sex in our culture is about consumerism; sex in marriage is about relating, and takes work and time to grow in.

For another thing, I am increasingly convinced that our ultimate struggle in this area is a spiritual one. It is not a matter of biology, or willpower, or understanding how much it hurts your spouse, hurts every area of your life—though those things are a part of it, as we see in Joseph’s story. In the “day after day” struggle, Joseph “would not listen to her… He left… and fled” (verses 10, 13): there is an element of willpower, choice and preparation as we safeguard against the ways and times we are prone to listen, as we find others to help, as we flee. 

But if we go back before those verbs and look at what Joseph says during the only time he speaks in this entire episode, we find something unexpected. In verse 8, he responds to an invitation to sexual sin by talking about his master. One would expect him to conclude, “how then can I sin against my master?” That would be logical. Instead, he makes a total pivot. He says, “How then can I… sin against God?”—and this in a place where no one, least of all the person he was addressing, believed in God. It’s almost as if he was speaking to himself, revealing the inner workings of his own heart.

Ultimately, we must look at God, grow in seeing his face, until in the moment of temptation this too rises up in us: how can I do this, this sin against God? Too often, we confess to ourselves rather than God; we don’t see the degree and depth of wickedness as God sees it; we don’t truly repent or plead for the Holy Spirit to help us. We don’t flee but we linger. We listen just a little bit. But when we encounter the holiness of God, and our love for Him, we become truly willing to fight the battles, whatever it takes. 

It is a battle, and there is suffering. Despite it all, Joseph ends up in prison for years. Hebrews 2:18 speaks of Jesus this way: “For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.” Have you thought of temptation as suffering? Those who give in the least suffer the most. C.S. Lewis writes: “A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist.”

Jesus is able to help. He intercedes for us (Romans 8:34), as does the Holy Spirit (Romans 8:27). God can reveal himself to us in this area. We are not alone. We can identify with and become like Jesus even in the very midst of the struggle. 

Chiasms In The Flood

I remember learning in high school Latin class about chiasms, a literary technique using an A-B-C-…-C’-B’-A’ structural pattern. Typically it serves to emphasize whatever is being framed in the center (which I’m told is particularly important in languages like Hebrew where there is no ability to emphasize with bold or italics). It can be used to clarify meaning, by comparing or contrasting B with its B’ counterpart, or for general emphasis given the repetitive nature of its structure.

Reading through Genesis 6-9, I was struck for the first time by the significance of the detailed accounts of time intervals, and then came across this chiastic structuring of the account (from Joe Carter of the Gospel Coalition):

A Noah (6:10a)

B  Shem, Ham, Japheth (10b)

C   Ark to be built (14-16)

D    Flood announced (17)

E     Covenant with Noah (18-20)

F      Food in ark (21)

G       Command to enter ark (7:1-3)

H        7 days waiting for flood (4-5)

I           7 days waiting for flood (7-10)

J            Entry to ark (11-15)

K            God shuts Noah in (16)

L             40 days flood (17a)

M             Waters increase (17b-18)

N               Mountains covered (18-20)

O                150 days water prevail (21-24)

P                  God remembers Noah (8:1)

O’               150 days water abate (3)

N’              Mountain tops visible (4-5)

M’             Waters abate (6)

L’            40 days waiting (6a)

K’           Noah opens window (6b)

J’           Raven and dove leave (7-9)

I’          7 days waiting (10-11)

H’        7 days waiting (12-13)

G’       Command to leave ark (15-17)

F’       Food outside ark (9:1-4)

E’      Covenant with all flesh (8-10)

D’     No flood in future (4-17)

C’    Ark (18a)

B’   Shem, Ham, Japeth (18b)

A’  Noah (19)

This is one person’s interpretation and some may argue with the partitioning, but the general structure brings out a few things. For one, it highlights as the center of the narrative “But God remembered” (Genesis 8:1). I had never really seen the focus of the story that way—we tend to think of ourselves, or maybe the parade of animals, at the center, but when we consider the ark a small speck on the entire watery planet, before a God with the power to undo creation, we see that the entire narrative turns on this point. God is a God who remembers us, and it is a remembrance that results in reversal.

Another takeaway is that Noah did a lot of waiting! For some reason, we tend to think of the flood as forty days long—while there are different interpretations of the exact number of days (not all agreeing with the above), most agree that Noah was in the ark for over a year, with active rain for only a fraction of that year. Can you imagine being inside a boat with the same few people and all the animals, endlessly caregiving and cleaning and stewarding, while waiting for the everlasting waters outside to recede? Sending out a bird, then waiting another seven days before sending out another? Or before that: loading up the ark, then waiting seven days before the first drop of rain falls?

Noah utters not one word of complaint. Interestingly, he utters not one word at all in this entire passage. He listens and does as God commands, nearly always when it made no sense, and waited, nearly always for something he could not see (be it water or land). So much of the spiritual life is in learning to wait well. “But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:25). Nouwen notes that the word “patience” is from the Latin “patior,” meaning “to suffer.” “Waiting patiently,” he writes, “is suffering through the present moment, tasting it to the fullest in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us,” rather than being anxious about the future and wanting to move on from the present. As Simone Weil wrote, “waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.” There’s much of that in this journey, isn’t there? So much of the “already, but not yet,” so much of faith that is being fully present in the now while hoping for what we do not yet see. 

Nakedness And Clothing

“Something strange was happening. They had always been naked—but now they felt naked, and wrong, and didn’t want anyone to see them. So they hid.” – Jesus Storybook Bible

“And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skin and clothed them.” – Genesis 3:21

I brought Eric’s soccer clothes for him to change into after school yesterday, and as I was wondering where I could find him a place to change, I actually thought for a second, maybe I’ll just change him outside under a tree; I saw some other mom doing that before realizing he would never be okay with that—and it hit me, wow, I’m at that stage now where all of the kids would want privacy while changing. Oddly, it seemed like a kind of milestone.

A consciousness of nakedness isn’t something we’re born with, but it’s something we all acquire, which is interesting if you think about it. I wonder if infants wonder why big people go around with pieces of fabric hanging off their bodies all the time. Reading Genesis this time, it struck me that the very last thing written before Satan appears is “and the man and his wife were both naked and not ashamed” (Gen 2:25), and the very first thing that happens after they ate the fruit was “the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths” (Gen 3:7). Quite a pointed contrast framing the fall.

What does this awareness of nakedness mean? We know from Genesis 2:25 that it had to be the opposite of “not ashamed”—shame. A feeling not only that we did something wrong, but that something is wrong with us. Perhaps there was a sense in which Adam and Eve felt ashamed not only of themselves, but unsafe before the other who had not protected them but contributed to their sin. And it’s interesting, isn’t it, that being aware of nakedness by definition means needing to cover it? 

Thus the fig leaves—and most of us around here have seen fig trees enough to know that while it wasn’t a bad first attempt, those leaves weren’t going to last very long. But the first thing God does after the curse is to clothe them with skins, presumably through the first animal sacrifice. Can you imagine that? Adam and Eve, perhaps watching blood shed for the first time, seeing the death God had warned would happen the very day they ate the fruit, but seeing God do it so that he could then take the skin from the death to cover their nakedness. Banned from the garden, but walking out smelling and seeing and feeling God’s provision, and a promise, whether they knew it then or not: one day another will die to cover your shame, because your own efforts are never enough.

I happened to be memorizing verse 35 yesterday in my way through Romans 8: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?” Nothing, not even our nakedness, can separate us from the love of God.