This morning, I received an email from my husband.  He wanted to know if I would like to do some inshore fishing this weekend when we celebrate our anniversary.  He had the courtesy to ask because right now my “good” shoulder is struggling a little bit, and he wanted to make sure I felt like it.  My response:  BOY DO I!  And I remember, for one of our early anniversaries, we went to Destin for the very first time, and went deep-sea fishing with about 100 other people.  I don’t even know if I caught anything.  But it was a blast.

This time we’ll be aware of the oil that lurks in the Gulf.  This time, neither one of my shoulders will work as well as they did 28 years ago.  If I catch anything, I may have to let my husband help me pull it in (another sign of redemption of my determined independence!).  But I don’t care.  We’ll be fishing.  And there’s not a hurricane anywhere near us right now.

I spent the first five years of my marriage waiting to be divorced.  Like I would just wake up one day and be divorced.  This despite the fact that my husband and I got along very well and showed no real signs of trouble in those first five years.  But as a child of divorce, I think in some weird faulty wiring of my heart, I feared I was doomed.

As I know, the painful split of divorce does happen.  And so, as my husband and I celebrate 28 years of “loving and hating one another well” on Saturday, I am not gloating, but wondering.  Wondering at the mercy of Jesus, who I see in this photo, bringing us together and holding us together, despite our numerous failed attempts to tear each other apart.

Don’t get me wrong, there have been far more sweet seasons than hard ones, but the hard ones could have so easily taken us down.  We are two glorious children of God who brought such a heavy sinload of baggage into our marriage that these days it would be too expensive to fly.  And yet, somehow, our covenantal, committed God, has pursued our hearts, and our marriage had not only survived but thrived.

People have asked me this week, “How does it feel to be celebrating 28?”  My answer, HUMBLING.  I am in awe as I remember. His many wonderful mercies.  His penetrating kindness.  His redemption.  This weekend we will tell really good stories.  And they won’t all be as pretty as this picture.  But, like this picture, they will all reveal Christ bringing together what we and others might have easily torn apart.

God says in Matthew 11:29-30 “Take my yoke upon you for I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls.”

These gospel words have given me peace. It reminds me that I must work but Christ calls me to work the correct way. The preceding verse calls me to come to him with all of the things that are weighing on me…what I think the day should look like, what I feel should be accomplished, how I hope people will respond, what needs to be done on my to do list…when it says “come to me all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest.”

But then the following verses of 29 – 30 remind me that when I give him my burden he gives me his yoke. Here is the difference, his yoke fits me perfectly. And Jesus is not a slave driver – he is “gentle and humble in heart” and through following him we “find rest for our souls” Oh the mellowing effects of putting the gospel deep in our lives!!!

Father, whatever comes my way today remind me that it comes from the hand of a sovereign, loving God who is gentle and humble. Let me rest and relax, even as I work, in the truth of your yoke rather than the burdens I or others put on my back. May I be satisfied today with pleasing you above all others. Amen and Amen.

Thinking about Flannery O’Connor, the funny, unorthodox, and excellent Christian novelist who wrote of the “inescapable Jesus.”  If you’ve never read Wise Blood, with its central character Hazel Motes, I recommend you find that one hour you would have lost before you ever knew you had it and read this short novel.  Here is a brief introduction from an essay by Stephen Sparrow.  The link to the rest of the essay is below.

Listen you people. I’m going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgement because there wasn’t the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar…

Where you came from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.

Now, if the reader teases out the meaning of those words, he ends up with a frightening scenario. All explanations have vanished: all justification for living, gone: everything has collapsed in a heap. The virtue of Hope lies dead. Of course O’Connor would be the first to say that Faith is not about comfort zones. In 1959 she wrote to her friend Louise Abbot saying; “What people don’t realise is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe.” But the irony here is that for those who profess no faith, there are likewise no comfort zones. The bottom line is that Atheism is also a Faith

Read more: http://mediaspecialist.org/ssinescapable.html#ixzz0yBOQO4p3
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution Non-Commercial

⁷ But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. ²⁸ He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, ²⁹ so that no one may boast before him.” I Cor. 1:27-29

“Christian Hedonism combats pride because it puts man in the category of an empty vessel beneath the fountain of God.  It guards us from the presumption of trying to be God’s benefactors.

Philanthropists can boast.

Welfare recipients cannot.

The primary experience of Christian Hedonism is need.

When a little, helpless child is being swept off his feet by the undercurrent on the beach and his father catches him just in time, the child does not boast; he hugs.”

Where do you feel strong today?  What do you need?

“The great hindrance to worship is not that we are a pleasure-seeking people, but that we are willing to settle for such pitiful pleasures.

The prophet Jeremiah put it like this:

My people have exchanged their glory for that which does not profit.  Be appalled O heavens, at this; be shocked, be utterly desolate, says the Lord; for my people have committed two evils:  they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water. (Jeremiah 2:11-13)

The heavens are appalled and shocked when people give up so soon on their quest for pleasure and settle for broken cisterns.”

Dear Lord,

Help us to come before you, not just tomorrow, but every day, seeking the joys of being with you, of knowing you, of knowing how much you love us, how completely you have forgiven us, how fully you have graced us.  Let us rest in the realities of who you are and enjoy you and all of your good gifts to us without wanting to replace you with them.

With the joy you grow in us, we pray,

Amen.

That being said, we can NOT smugly sit aside and point fingers at those who struggle with alcohol addiction.  I have a powerful addiction too, and the Bible tells me you do too:  ADDICTION TO SELF.  Add into that substances, activities, relationships that I think I will die if I cannot do or have.  I am an addict.  That’s why I love grace.  Hear from Samson and the Pirate Monks again on the dire need for community along with the gospel to combat addiction, not to mention the stunning reality that addiction sends us flying to God for grace (though sometimes later rather than sooner.)

“God, in his grace, has used addiction to shatter my moralistic understanding of the Christian faith and force me to accept the gospel. I am not a faithful man. That’s why I need a Savior. I cannot live victoriously on my own. That’s why I need a Helper and brothers. I cannot keep my promises to God—the very act of making them is delusional—but God will keep his promises to me.

As a Christian, I am perpetually reduced to the role of a supplicant. No more can I offer God a bargain, his favor in exchange for my faithfulness, or go toe-to-toe with him, demanding payment for years of service. But when I approach him humbly, as a restored prodigal son, he responds with overwhelming generosity to my requests for aid. No fancy prayers are required. In fact, God finds fancy prayers repugnant. He loves it, however, when I acknowledge my need and my belief in his benevolence with a simple one-word prayer: “Help! ”  Samson and the Pirate Monks, Nate Larkin

“Most of us are slow to recognize that we have lost the war against our besetting sin. We deceive ourselves about the progress of that war, taking false comfort in inconsequential successes, distracting ourselves with elaborate battle plans and issuing orders to internal forces we cannot control. Our losses continue to mount, affecting everyone around us, but we ignore them. We imagine that we are “fighting the good fight” against sin, but the battle is already lost. All that remains is the formality of surrender—and the opportunity, the wondrous alternative, of surrendering to God instead. Until we grasp the magnitude of our defeat, the prospect of surrendering to God is distasteful to us. We recoil at the thought of giving up, fearing a loss of our imagined liberty, and we frantically carry on our feeble resistance. But on that great and awful day when the inner defensive ring finally collapses, we fall toward God exhausted, and there to our inexpressible relief we find welcome instead of rebuke, dignity instead of shame, and life instead of death.”

It’s like being on a tour through a new country and you stop to take a closer look at a site you never understood that well but knew was really important.  That’s the way I feel about these verses in Galatians.  It’s another one of those, “What does that really mean?” verses.

Here’s what I did with this — read Keller’s commentary, then went through it in a real life situation — a squabble I had with my husband last night.  (I won’t go into the details today — suffice it to say, our kids got so tired of listening to us go round and round they got up and cleaned the kitchen (it came at the end of dinner.)) At the end of Keller’s quote, I wrote the prayer that came from my reflection on how much God loves me in spite of my faulty attempts to live under the law of pseudo-Saviors. Maybe you’ll want to try it too.

“…’crucifying the flesh’ is really the identification and dismantling of idols. It means to put an end to the ruling and attractive power that idols have in our lives, and thus to destroy their ability to agitate and inflame our thoughts and desires. Verse 24 is about withering sin at the motivational level, rather than simply setting ourselves against sin at the behavioral level. Real changes in our lives cannot proceed without discerning one’s “characteristic flesh,” the particular idols and desires that come from it. We have to ask ourselves not just what we do wrong, but why we do it wrong. We disobey God in order to get something we feel we have to have. That’s an “over-desire,” epithumia. Why do we have to have it? It is because it is a way we are trying to keep “under law.” It is something we have come to believe will authenticate us. To crucify the flesh is to say, “Lord, my heart thinks that I have to have this or I have no value. It is a pseudo-Savior. But that is to forget what I mean to you, as I see in Christ. By your Spirit, I will reflect on your love for me in Him until this thing loses its attractive power over my soul.”

Lord, you love me.  You really love me.  You love me in my glory.  You love me in my sin.  You sent your son to die BEFORE I committed all of these sins, and BEFORE I was born into the world as a sinner.  You KNOW my heart.  You know the sinful nature, and you know the Spirit resides there.  You know the Spirit has won this battle.  You treat me as a “son,” a child adopted by you, given all the rights (righteousness) and inheritance of Your kingdom.  That means you PROVIDE everything I need.  I need not fear.  I need not worry about my reputation.  I need YOU.  Loving You is truly the only way to live with freedom and hope.

“Your faith has made you well.  Go and sin no more.”

“They are in conflict with each other so that you do not do what you want.”

Keller says that the “desires” of the sinful nature is the Greek word epithumia, which translates literally into “over-desires” or “inordinate longings.”  It is not desire which is bad – it is taking a good thing and making it the key to your salvation:  “I’ll die if I don’t have a date to the prom.”  “I must have the constant approval of my co-workers[fill in the blank.]”  These would be examples of taking desires for good things and making them the driving force of our lives.

Here’s the good news – the Spirit is in us, and it creates desires too.  And guess what, these desires are even more powerful than the “over-desires.”  What we really want, or desire, is what the Spirit wants. What does the Spirit want?  To “glorify Christ” (John 16:14).  The Spirit wants to reveal Christ and to make us more like Christ.

And that’s good news.  Because even with “flesh” or “sinful nature” bent toward wanting what we think will make us happy or safe or powerful, as Christians, we have new hearts that want what we were really made for – to glorify God and to enjoy God.  To love others more than we love ourselves.  To give rather than take.  To say, “I will be sad if I don’t have a date to the prom, but I won’t die, because God will dance with me.”  To know, God’s approval is unfailing because I have Christ’s righteousness and thank God, I don’t have to work work work to please my co-workers, boss, friends, spouse, children.”

Let’s live today asking the Spirit to help us live the way we really want to live.