the weight of glory

For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.
2 Corinthians 4:17-18

My sufferings are not heavy
when compared
to an eternal weight of glory
always there
pushing me forward
serving my Lord
moving onward
at His Word

I look beyond what is seen
here today
to things that are unseen
that sway
my heart in the direction
to never waver
toward the infinite affection
of my Lord and Savior

The weight of glory on me
...a burden light
the Holy Spirit in me
...a flame so bright
illuminating the journey
toward eternity
a vision always before me
my bright destiny



- Prepare your minds for action.
1 Peter 1:13

we are being transformed

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.
2 Corinthians 3:18

Growth in the Christian life is a process. Maturity takes place over our lifetimes. God does this great thing in relationship with us. As we see Him, as we come to know Him, as we follow His guidance and obey His teaching, we become more like Christ. And God gives us this great change. It is what He wants of us. He empowers us and transforms us.

I love that this is about transformation! The metaphor that Paul uses in this passage is Moses' physical transformation after coming down from Sinai with the Law. His face literally shone from being so intimately in contact with the glory of God. The Israelites were so afraid of this transformation that Moses had to wear a veil to cover the glory still radiating from him. This is the picture that Paul uses to talk about what happens in Christian maturity. We become more like Christ. We recover the "imago dei" (the image of God) as God transforms us. It is glorious.

Somehow we need to recover Paul's spiritual enthusiasm for transformation. Many times, if we are not careful about it, we make Christian maturity just another exercise in lists and exercises. I am all for spiritual disciplines, but not when they lose the image of God and the glory of Christ as their goal and directive! We must also remember that this is a lifelong process. We cannot insist a certain "transformation rate" take place. Paul would not even write about it being complete. Instead, he makes it clear that believers are in transit to this new degree of glory as they behold the glory of the Lord. We ARE BEING TRANSFORMED. Christian growth is always in process until we stand complete in the presence of our Lord.


- Prepare your minds for action.
1 Peter 1:13

insufficient messengers: the tension of gospel advancement

Who is sufficient for these things? For we are not, like so many, peddlers of God's word, but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God we speak in Christ.
2 Corinthians 2:16b-17

The work of the gospel is a humbling calling. Paul's entire point at this place in his epistle is to reiterate that God has to be doing the work of spreading His knowledge everywhere (see 2 Cor 2:14). God chooses to use human means to do so. But it is clearly God that does the work in us. We are not sufficient in and of ourselves. God is leading the triumphal procession of the gospel's advance and if we think we are leading the advance of the gospel, we have another thing coming.

The tragedy is that human egos can get caught up in the work of ministry. It was true in the first century. It is true today. Paul contrasted his own work (a self-supported passionate pursuit of God's call to preach the gospel among the Gentiles, always moving forward into places where it had not yet been preached) with the work of "so many" who were mere peddlers of God's Word, obviously motivated by self-interest or material gain. Paul warns that the gospel is preached by men with a different motivation. One that comes from God.

So there is this strange paradox that Paul deals with here. It is the tension of preaching the gospel. We are not sufficient to do so until God is doing the enabling, the commissioning, and supplying the message. When that awareness is in place, Paul says we are "men of sincerity"... moved and motivated by nothing other than the gospel itself and the compelling commission of God. Those thus consumed by the gospel "speak in Christ."

I have seen this same paradox today. Except the 21st century church has managed to reduce the ministry of the gospel down to three clear components for "successful" ministry: celebrity, curriculum, and culture. We make something of the men behind the ministry. And then the new celebrity status is driven to build the teaching (curriculum) that gets marketed and mass produced as "the answer" in the crazy Christian sub-culture. Pretty soon it can look nothing like what the scriptures teach. It is sad really. I have seen this church program machine churn out false teaching, false optimism, and pathetic self-motivated, gospel-shattering actions as the work of the kingdom. How sad! It is proof of our own insufficiency because we come up with something powerless, sugary and fluffy and tasty, but ultimately with nothing to feed and nourish the soul!

How we need to be committed to the pure preaching of the gospel! We need to repent of our exaltation of the messenger! We need to humbly commit to a life of preaching the gospel without the motivation of personal pride and materialistic success. Lord, give us again men of sincerity, for the sake of the gospel!


- Prepare your minds for action.
1 Peter 1:13

affliction's great purpose

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.
2 Corinthians 1:3-4

God is in our affliction. He meets us in our trials and difficulties with a sweet comfort found only in Him. He does this because it is what He is. He is the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort. Ultimately we find purpose and comfort in our difficulties because God has always planned to be there with us in those times. And it is those experiences that cause us to lean on God like never before.

God comforts us in "all our affliction" according to Paul in this passage. I take that to mean what it says. There is no difficulty that can arise in our lives that is absent of God's ability to comfort. He is the God of ALL comfort who comforts us in ALL our affliction. No one can ever say that God does not care.

There is a means in which God uses us to comfort in this way. In fact, that is one purpose for affliction in our own lives. It gives us a place of identity with other sufferers, it gives us a place of ministry to hurting people, and it gives us a place to draw from the experience of comfort. We are told that one purpose of trial is so that we may be able to comfort those in any affliction with the same comfort with which God comforted us. We pass God's care along through our experience of pain and difficulty. We find a measure of peace and we share it with others in their pain.

This is why a robust theology of suffering makes sense to keep alive among Christians. The world around us longs to just make it all go away. We throw a party to forget. But that is not God's way. He longs for us to go through the pain and emerge stronger, better, and more humble... with a servant's heart that is ready to help other sufferers along the way. He equips us for ministry by being with us through our pains. And then He asks us to be available so that He can be with us to reach others in similar difficulty. We become the comfort God longs to give. It is a beautiful purpose, and we deprive ourselves of a chance to see God at work when we deliberately short circuit trials, losses, pains, and afflictions with our worldly sense of distancing ourselves from the suffering person. Jesus entered our world of suffering. And He knew our wants and needs. And He suffered greatly for us. He longs to share His peace with suffering people THROUGH us!


- Prepare your minds for action.
1 Peter 1:13

redeemed by love

Then all the people who were at the gate and the elders said, "We are witnesses. May the LORD make the woman, who is coming into your house, like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of Israel. May you act worthily in Ephrathah and be renowned in Bethlehem, and may your house be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah, because of the offspring that the LORD will give you by this young woman."
Ruth 4:11-12

The book of Ruth ends with the joy of a wedding and a family restored. Ruth is given in marriage to Boaz, whose immediate act of serving as kinsman-redeemer serves to save Naomi and Ruth from poverty and obscurity. Everything has been changed by the grace shown by Boaz. And

Most notably there is now blessing. It begins with the elders at the gate blessing Boaz for his move to redeem the property of the family of Elimilech, including marriage to Ruth. They offer a blessing of prosperity and fame to Boaz. And in a way, that became prophetic. We have his story preserved in scripture, and from this marriage sprang forth the lineage of David. And from David's line came the Messiah and Savior of Israel.

The blessings continue when God blesses the marriage of Boaz and Ruth with a son, Obed. When that boy is brought to Naomi, the women of Bethlehem bless the baby and Naomi. They praise the noble relationship of Ruth who chose to be with her mother-in-law, and now experiences the joy of this new family in a life redeemed from her former despair.

The important change came to Naomi. She is no longer Mara (bitter). She is a content and overjoyed grandmother who gets the privilege of caring for her new grandson. Her joy is complete because she has been redeemed by love.



- Prepare your minds for action.
1 Peter 1:13

My thoughts on Rob Bell's "Love Wins"

Rob Bell asks a lot of questions, and I have to admit that most of them are great questions... thought-provoking questions. In Love Wins, Rob presents a lot of questions about heaven, hell, and eternity. Ultimately he questions the very heart of the gospel and how evangelicals present it.

Let me begin with some things that I share in common with Bell. We are both human beings created in God's image. We both are educated pastors. We both grew up in the evangelical culture. But we part ways dramatically when it comes to how we view scripture and our calling to preach the gospel.

Rob is a gifted dramatist and communicator. He is an actor and an "ar-teest" (see any NOOMA video). But he is no expositor. It goes without saying he commits some humdingers of exegetical fallacy in his teaching... things like etymologies and root errors. I have seen dozens of them in his books, and I have read them all. But I doubt that he cares much for the title of "expositor" because for him it matters not whether details in scripture are accurate or truthful in themselves. It is how you feel about God at the end.

Which is why he keeps complaining about the gospel as it is being preached normally in evangelical circles. It is just not a "good story". His revision of it is to say that no one has to go to hell forever. He does not deny hell as much as he does not like eternal damnation. And hell for him is just so much misery here on earth. He cleverly keeps his ambiguous tactics in play (something he has done in all his books to date). But in the end he does not believe that a loving God could sentence any loved human being to hell. He supports a view that seems to indicate that hell is more purging than punishing, that eventually all will come under God's love and accept it.

He embraces a form of universalism, saying that Jesus is behind every religion somehow so that even those who have not heard the message of the gospel can still respond to God's love. He is really, really vague on the specifics here. To support his view, he claims that Ezekiel 16 teaches that God will restore Sodom. Rob did not even read the context. Ezekiel 16 says that, but when you read the entire text it is clear that God calls Samaria "Sodom" and then says he will restore "Sodom" (renamed Samaria). The text is very specific to a unique time and circumstance in the nation of Israel. The text is not ambiguous, but Rob is. And I have to say I found at least a dozen other examples of Rob's loosy-goosey approach to scripture. Hermeneutics don't matter because he has embraced post-modern narrative drama as his hermeneutic. He can make the text go with his feelings that way.

I am worried about Rob's small view of God. He keeps talking about how we need to "recover our humanity" in God's plan of redemption. I am hoping he means our pre-fallen humanity. The gospel does this at the moment we believe. I must live it, but I don't recover a thing... God does it. I am worried about Rob's view of salvation. He seems to put a huge emphasis on social works and very little emphasis on the redeeming work of Christ and the Holy Spirit. And I am worried that Rob's false optimism about hell might just put him in the company of leaders who "lean of God" saying "no disaster will overtake us" (Micah 3:11). It is sad to see this in a popular "evangelical" author who really draws young people to his teaching and writing.

In the end, I was disappointed that there was really no clear presentation of Rob's views. Lots of drama. Some tear-jerking, gut-wrenching stories. Some great questions that show that Rob Bell knows where to take off with theology. Too bad he just crashes with no scriptural or logical support. I am sure he feels great about it though. Unfortunately so will many who read this book


- Prepare your minds for action.
1 Peter 1:13

attraction to virtue

And now, my daughter, do not fear. I will do for you all that you ask, for all my fellow townsmen know that you are a worthy woman.
Ruth 3:11

This is the most moving part of the story of this book. In the third chapter of the book of Ruth, Naomi coaches Ruth through a bold marriage proposal. It hinges on Boaz already being aware of and impressed with Ruth and her situation. Naomi is already trusting God again! She moved beyond her bitterness in the second chapter, moved by the sovereign love of God at work in her situation. Now she is a woman of faith again.

Basically, the odd marriage proposal comes from Ruth to Boaz. At the threshing floor she sneaks in among the sleeping men (the men slept at the floor to guard the grain from pilfering... ironic that she could sneak up on these tough farmers!) and lays at the feet of Boaz. He awakens in the night and is startled at her presence. It is then that Ruth asks Boaz to assume the legal duties of kinsman-redeemer. She is asking the man to marry and care for her. And Boaz assures her that he will settle the matter the very next day by approaching the other "closer" relative. That is the summary of the statement in Ruth 3:11.

The concept at stake predates the giving of the law. It is the practice of levirate marriage, in which, the brother of a dead brother is bound to marry the widowed bride of his brother. If there were no living brothers, the duty to the family was passed to close relatives. This insured family inheritances and duties. And it is this practice that Ruth appeals to with Boaz. And he is honored to perform it because he is impressed with Ruth's character! She has a reputation... and it is a good one. She is a "worthy woman"... the same Hebrew phrase used in Proverbs 31:10 to describe an "excellent wife". Boaz was a man of character, and he was attracted to virtue.

How we need to recapture this sort of thing among believers! Our young people need to know that physical attraction without this character conviction is just emotional lust, and should be avoided. A good relationship is built on character commitments, not just the way a person looks or their station in life. God wants to keep building a godly generation, and to do so, He needs people of character and commitment. It starts with relationships that are committed to character, spiritual growth, and the beauty of virtue and holy lives. These relationships keep Christ central in the home and are blessed with the presence of God guiding them.


- Prepare your minds for action.
1 Peter 1:13