For the church this season I am writing devotions. This morning I decided to post them on my blog as well… God bless.
Sunday — A season of preparation
Reflection —
My younger brother runs marathons. He intensely trains for them in the months, weeks, and days leading up to race day. Sometimes, those races involve particularly difficult obstacles, like running up a mountain, or in Death Valley where the heat coming off the asphalt can melt your shoes while you run. He trains accordingly: running up and down hills, lifting weights, or even working out in the sauna to increase his heat resistance. In training season, he eats a certain way to fuel and prepare his body. Paul draws a comparison between running in races and the spiritual training for our lives of following Christ. He explains that all athletes are disciplined in their training to win a prize that will fade, but that followers of Christ train for the purpose of receiving a reward that will last forever.
In the New Testament, Timothy is a young pastor who was discipled by Paul for ministry work. In Paul’s first letter to the young pastor, he includes a powerful bit of instruction: “…train yourself for godliness; for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.” (1 Timothy 4:7–8) We live in a culture that is obsessed with the physical, but Paul is telling us that physical fitness is far less vital than spiritual fitness. He states that it is “valuable in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.” In the ancient church, the seasons of Lent and Advent were seen as times of intensified training leading up to the big day.
The ancient church believed wholeheartedly in preparing spiritually for major spiritual events.They used the seasons like Lent (the 40 days preceding Easter) and Advent as times of preparation. God stepped from heaven to earth to save us from our sins. He did it because He loved us when we did not love Him. Preparing for Christmas during the weeks that precede it involves more than simply decorating trees and listening to Christmas music to get yourself into the spirit of the season. It is spiritual training for celebrating God’s arrival in our world.
You might wonder how we train spiritually. Everywhere you look there are advertisements for fitness gadgets and meal plans to reshape your flesh, but how do you reshape your soul? There are plenty of ways to do it and still more ways that don’t help or make things worse. Daily prayer, reading the scriptures, reflecting on God’s love for us and His work to provide our salvation, worship, fellowship with the church, serving, and many other practices are prescribed in the scripture as exercises for spiritual fitness.
One passage in particular that will inform our Advent devotions going forward is found in 1 John 4:19-21. John tells us that the reason we love like Christ is because He first loved us. He goes on to say that loving God leads to love others. This is one vital component of spiritual training. When we focus on the love of God, it results in loving others and everything that entails. We will be spending the next few weeks gazing at the love of God as a means of training for race day, for our walk with Jesus, and for eternity. Ultimately, we know what love is because of Christ. 1 John 3:16-20 tells us that Christ freely laying down His life for us. The added benefit of understanding this perspective is that it frees you to engage in training out of love for Him and a desire to be closer to your Savior, rather than out of obligation, guilt, or shame.
Scripture — 1 John 3:16-20, 1 John 4:19-21 (read 7-21 if you have time), 1 Timothy 4:8, 1 Corinthians 9:24-7, Matthew 6:31-34, Lamentations 3:22-23
Readings —
I remember visiting Indonesia and speaking with a Hindu leader and a Muslim leader. They would say, “We have different paths that lead us to spiritual fulfillment, that lead us to God.” And they said, “We respect your path. You respect our path and we will all go different ways. Together we are one and we’ll end up in the same place.”
I looked at them and I said, “Well, let me make sure I understand. You’re saying that basically you picture God at the top of a mountain and we’re all at the bottom of a mountain. And I may take one path to get to God and you may take another path up the mountain to get to God, but in the end, we’ll all eventually end up at the same place?” They both had big smiles on their face and agreed with my assessment.
I looked at them and said, “Well, if that’s the way it is, let me ask you one question: What if the God at the top of the mountain decided he was going to make his way down the mountain to us, and he came to bring us up the mountain himself?” And they said, “Well, that would be wonderful.” And I said, “That’s what the God of the Bible did. Let me tell you about who Jesus really is. It’s not about trying to find our way to God. Jesus has come to us and he says, “I am the way.”
From Radical by David Platt
A quick note on this reading — It is easy to fall into the belief that training toward Godliness is climbing the mountain. Christians often fall into this trap of believing that they can do good works and earn their way to God. It’s just not possible. God came down the mountain to us. Training spiritually doesn’t earn our way to Him. It makes us capable of knowing Him completely. — Erik
God’s ultimate goal for us, however, is that we be truly conformed to the likeness of His Son in our person as well as in our standing… Jesus did not die just to save us from the penalty of sin, nor even just to make us holy in our standing before God. He died to purify for Himself a people eager to obey Him, a people eager to be transformed into His likeness… This process of gradually conforming us to the likeness of Christ begins at the very moment of our salvation when the Holy Spirit comes to dwell within us and to actually give us a new life in Christ. We call this gradual process progressive sanctification, or growing in holiness, because it truly is a growth process.
From Transforming Grace by Jerry Bridges
Prayer Guide —
A — Take time to express adoration to God for His amazing love for you. Talk to Him about Christ coming down to us because we cannot climb up to Him.
C — Spend time reflecting on the ways you have fallen short in your walk with Jesus. In particular, reflect on the times and ways you have neglected your training for Godliness.
T — Thank God for the amazing truth that before you even confessed your sins, He had already forgiven you through the death and resurrection of Jesus. Thank Him for the incarnation
S — Pray for the coming weeks and the time of preparation you are embarking on. Ask God to help you tune out the noise and stress of the season that will draw you out of your training for Christmas. Pray for Him to reveal His love for you more completely and fully.
I am a magnet for bad habits and addictions. I know I am not alone in this. I have spoken to scores of men who have developed unwanted patterns in their work, relationships, stress management, and leisure. Part of what puzzled me about my habits over the years is that many of them are things I don’t really want to do, but it seemed like my mind would shift into automatic pilot time and again, allowing me to live out some impulse that I’d just as soon avoid. The following is a newspaper column I wrote looking at brain functions and why they make habitual behaviors so difficult to break.
One of my favorite stories to read my daughter at bedtime is from The Adventures of Frog and Toad. In the story, Toad bakes a batch of cookies. He and Frog discover that they cannot stop eating the cookies because they are too delicious. They begin to devise ways to prevent themselves from eating the cookies by making it more difficult to give in to temptation. Frog called it: “Building up willpower.” They quickly discovered that if they wanted to eat the cookies badly enough they would find a way around obstacles. Eventually, Frog throws away all the cookies and proclaims: “we have lots and lots of willpower.” To which Toad responds: “You may keep it all, Frog, I am going home now to bake a cake.” It’s a funny story with an interesting point. The problem wasn’t the cookies, the problem was that they wanted the cookies more than they wanted to not eat them. The book of James touches on this idea when it addresses the things that are in our lives that cause temptation. It’s easy to blame God for giving us such temptations. However, temptation starts in us and are a product of our fallenness. In Romans Paul describes how the sin living in us seizes upon the law of God as a standard to rebel against. Sin drives us to do things we hate. He describes sin and the ensuing temptation as powerful and ruling over our bodies. As a result of this powerful force within us, even if the things we want are not in front of us, if we want them badly enough, we will go looking for them. Mind you, it is not the case that desire itself is bad. Desire is natural. Desire for food, pleasure, leisure, security, relationships, being right, or anything else are simply a part of how people are designed. Desire becomes destructive when it loses all checks and begins to cause damage. It can be seen in decisions made simply based on a desire with no concern for inevitable consequences and what is right or wrong. A common example is carelessly spoken words that are regretted the moment they are spoken. Other examples include extramarital affairs, the seemingly iron grip that pornography seems to have over the lives of many men, addictions, eating disorders, spending problems, etc. These typically involve normally healthy desires that become distorted and get out of control. James describes this as being dragged away by our own lusts. Ultimately, it’s important to recognize that the source of the problem is within us.
The topic of manhood is complicated and will take more than one post to properly explore. In the short term, it’s important to establish a basic concept of manhood from which to work. I’d suggest that the place to start is with the source of manhood identity that is built into our world: Boys learn to be men by watching their fathers. This is because parents stand in God’s place in the lives of their children for the first several years of their lives. They provide life, food, shelter, moral guidance, correction, etc. Children’s conception of God is often shaped by their perception of their dads. Genesis tells us that when God created man, He created them in His own image. Fathers (and all men for that matter) are supposed to be copies of God in many respects. We are to share His heart, passions, loves, understanding of family, and work. When dads fail to model this lifestyle and teach their boys to do the same, they create problems. Fortunately, God provides us a more clarified example of manhood in the person of Jesus, who is God made flesh. A boy without a good fatherly model to follow can see ideal manhood in Jesus. When we choose to follow Jesus, our job is to learn to be like him through a lifetime of training, which is discipleship. This is why Christ’s self-sacrificing love and attitude of humble service is the example for husbands. He demonstrates the ideal manner of intimate relationship through his relationship with the church.
It’s easy to picture Jesus as a pollyanna-type figure or as the feathered haired guy in a bathrobe that we all encountered on flannel graphs in Sunday School as kids. Fortunately, the tame version of the Son of God is far from accurate. C.S. Lewis captured Jesus’ identity best when he wrote: “He’s not safe! But, he’s good.” Jesus’ integrity, passion, penchant for action, grace, wisdom, willingness to speak openly (even offensively if necessary), self-sacrificing service, and lifetime focus on making the world better are just a few of the qualities that make Jesus is the ideal standard of manhood. He is the ideal mold from which men were meant to be cast. It is from Him that we learn how God desires us to be. Once we know, our job is to enter training to become like him.
Over the past few years, I’ve read several articles arguing varying perspectives on the ideal wife portrayed in Proverbs 31. Most of these articles have argued the matter in terms of whether or not this woman is a standard model for wives and women everywhere to aspire to be the best housewife possible in serving her 1950s family or an allegory for wisdom so as to remove the unattainable ideal that just serves to discourage women into standardized gender roles. I’ll admit that these characterizations are hyperbole, but I am exaggerating the extreme sides of this debate for a reason: because this text has become a bit of a tug-o-war passage for folks in the battle over the role of women in the church. Each side pulling for a gender political stance and taking pride in their position, sometimes without bothering to ask whether or not they are glorifying Christ in their stance. My intent in this post is not to engage either of these positions, but rather to offer an analysis of the text with an eye on shedding a little light as to what believers are actually supposed to do with these passages.
Understanding the historic context is also important for getting a solid grip on the meaning of the passage. The advice being offered isn’t being given in a culture where people typically married for love. Marriage was generally a very utilitarian institution. Wives were selected based on all sorts of considerations, most of them pragmatic. The poem is literally about choosing a wife according to high character standards. This choosing was more akin to shopping than our culture tends to immediately recognize.
I take my daughter with me to the office every day. She goes on nursing home visitation with me. Sometimes she goes with me when I visit parishioners in their homes. She spends about 8 hours of every day with me. Unfortunately, there is a difference between time when she is playing with dolls in my office while I work and quality time. I’ve spent some time in previous posts discussing daddy-daughter date nights and tea parties. Those sorts of activities are great, but tend to be spread out. It’s important to spend time with your kids daily. I encourage dads to try to spend at least an hour with their kids daily, just focusing on them. This sort of invested time is important to children and will impact them well into the future. This time investment may seem difficult, but I’ve discovered that it’s all about how you spend the time. It’s easy to look at an energetic kid at the end of a long work day and cringe at the thought of trying to keep up with them for 5 minutes, let alone an hour. Or to look at your daughter’s Frozen dolls with horror at the thought of reenacting a few of the dance numbers. However, there are a few tricks that work well for making the time more enjoyable for both you and your child.
Focus on the Big Picture– Everything is about the mindset you bring to it. It’s important to remember that the time you are spending is an investment in the life of a person you love and who loves you unconditionally. That investment will help shape their sense of self worth, confidence, and your influence on their values and beliefs. Further, your child is also a child of God, one who you are preparing for a life of knowing Him. Part of how they perceive God will be shaped by their relationship with you. This isn’t time wasted when you’d rather be unwinding. It’s time spent on a job that is far more important than the one you get your paycheck for doing.
Be Creative- I recently found myself playing with my daughter’s frozen castle and toys on the living room floor. I cannot stress enough how little interest I have in princesses. Rather than phoning the time I was spending with her in, I took out some batman toys I had picked up during one of our trips to the comic books store. Before long, Batman was saving Elsa from the Joker. There was fighting and adventure and princess stuff. She loved the silliness of it, though I suspect that my enthusiasm and energy was what she really appreciated. Kids like being the center of their parents’ attention. Bringing a little creativity to the table is important for making sure that you are able to enjoy the time as well. Don’t hear me saying that spending time with your kids is dull or that it’s all about you. What I am saying is that adult men don’t necessarily enjoy the same activities as small children. Bringing your own interests into the mix can raise the entertainment factor and make it easier to consistently put the time in every day.
Pay attention to them– Kids catch on pretty quickly when you aren’t interested in what they are doing. If you sit and surf the internet on your phone while you play with them, they’ll notice. If you ignore the stories they tell you, they’ll catch on. It won’t make them hate you. It’ll adjust where they think they land on your priority list. While you are giving the time they are getting from you, give them your undivided attention. Ask questions. Tell them things. Take the time to teach them new things.
It’s easy to understand how alcohol or cocaine are addictive substances, but when it comes to pornography addiction understanding the issues involved can be more difficult for a variety of reasons. For starters, discovering a hidden pornography habit can result in significant feelings of betrayal for a wife and can make understanding the addiction component very difficult. In addition, pornography use carries some stigma, which clouds perspective and makes understanding the addiction more difficult. However, pornography addiction is a real illness, it’s diagnosable, and it’s treatable. Looking at pornography produces similar brain functions that take place with using cocaine. It is highly addictive for the same reasons as any other drug. This is not to excuse the betrayal of a spouse or anything of the sort. Rather, it is to say that an individual can develop an illness, which prevents them from quitting the behavior. Let there be no mistake, addicts cannot stop a behavior on their own. Denial, thinking errors, shame, and an out-of-control reward response system in their brains literally result in the addictive patterns becoming compulsive.
Patching Cracks 