FRIENDLY PERSUASION

Is Jesus real in the center of your world? Are you open to some friendly persuading? Film number 7 on my favorite list speaks about these issues.

This is a film I cannot praise highly enough. It starts with a goose and ends with the goose almost being cooked, but in between there is a rich world of faith and humor and family strength.

The “friendly” in the title refers to the Quakers. What happens to people who don’t believe in fighting when they are thrust into an age of war? One fellow swears up and down in Quaker meeting that nothing would get him to take up a weapon should the south invade Indiana. Later on he sings a different tune, but the majority of the picture is about a family who holds true to their convictions even as they are being shaken and tested and formed. This is not an outsider’s view, but was based on a book written by a Quaker herself who maintained a fairly large level of influence over what went into the film version of her book.

Though the story takes place in the time of the American Civil War, it is not really about the war. It is about people being out of step with the world they live in, but in step with God. It’s about finding out that some things in the final analysis don’t matter. It’s about the revelations of young love and the irksomeness of being too young to seemingly count for anything. It’s about a husband and wife who don’t always see eye to eye, but who have built a real marriage on a common ground. It’s about a young man learning to find convictions of his own, even if they differ from those of his parents and about the parents coming to terms with that, even to the point of going out to rescue the son who did not do what his mother wanted him to do. It’s about a Sunday morning horse race to church with one of the Methodists and about a young man keeping himself pure in the face of family of male-starved young women. It’s about bringing an organ into a home where they don’t believe in organs. It’s about facing the church board when they come to call and rising to the occasion.

For the most part all of these things are told with humor, but also with realism. We have to live in a real world with real neighbors and real crises, but we can meet them if we have a firm center to our lives. The Birdwells (and even their Methodist neighbors) have that.

ADULT CHILDREN (and others)

After our journaling session last Saturday I was talking with some of the fellows about dealing with adult children. It came to me in the discussion that if we only control them and do our best to direct their growth the most they can ever be is what we are. We don’t want that. We want them to be what Jesus is. That was a powerful revelation. I think it can be freeing in more areas than that one. It can also apply to parents, in-laws and, of all things, church members who don't see things like we do. We need to lead and guide when we should, but not beyond what we should.

Last Night While I Was Preaching

Many times while I am preaching the Spirit will give me insights into the word which did not come out of my study. I spend a lot of time working on the background and history and meaning of a passage. Sometimes I think I know it all. Then something like last night happened.

The text for the evening was II Corinthians 7:8-16. The theme was that God regrets nothing, and we can regret nothing either if we move through repentance to rejoicing. It is in verse 11 that Paul describes godly sorrow. I had done word studies on all 7 of the things that he lists in this verse, but as I was preaching I began to see the true and real value of repentance in a way I had never seen it before. What I saw was that by moving through repentance we get these things, and we won't get them if we hold on to our sins.

It's not "religiously correct" in much of America today to talk much about repentance anymore, but this verse tells us what we get from it:

Earnestness - the ability to be able to be sincere in front of others without putting up a front.

Vindication - being able to defend ourselves against the charges of the accuser.

Indignation - we now feel the proper attitude toward sin.

Fear - we respect God as we should and have a proper assessment of who He is.

Longing - we have a real desire to be with God as a person, something we would not have if we were afraid to appear before the judgment seat.

Zeal - this is an enthusiasm for something outside yourself beyond the measure of your own feelings or abilities; it is our zeal for the things of God which is activated after we have moved through repentance.

Avenging of wrong - this doesn't mean that we become vigilantes with "Lone Ranger" masks (I'm telling my age on that one), but that we are properly able to dispose of things. In a sense the only real way to avenge a wrong is to deal with it like God does. That is to forgive it.

NONE OF THESE THINGS will we be capable of doing until we pass through godly sorrow over sin and deal with it and get it out of the way.

Maybe none of this is new to you, and I'm sure I'm not expressing it as forthrightly or completely as I did last night, but if you had been there you might have seen the dawn of realization in my face as I preached these things.

GOD'S SUN NEVER SETS

Just thought I should let you know that the picture with that caption on the right side of the blog is not a stock photo. It was taken here at Nevins.

SOME THINGS I LEARNED IN NINE MONTHS WITH THE PSALMS

I would like to make a few comments on what came out of my recording of the Psalms. As with C. S. Lewis in his book Reflections on the Psalms, this is not an attempt to deal with them totally, but simply to share some thoughts.

The recordings got easier as time went on. At first I made all kinds of mistakes in reading them and in inflections and had to go back and redo whole Psalms or large sections. This was the big factor slowing me down. Even though you’re reading the words you still have to get hold of the rhythm underlying them. Repetition takes a person deeper inside each time.

I mostly did the music tracks separately, but the music seemed to match whether I listened to the text while recording it or if I just got an idea and recorded to the time frame without listening to the text. These words are such that they transcend melodies and fit inside whatever framework is provided for them.

There is a real intensity of the text. This is not warm fuzzies for the timid but blood and anger and damage and trust. It’s not just in the vengeance Psalms, but throughout that such direct boldness occurs. The Psalms are not always pleasant, but they are always true. No one should ever discount the Psalms as an old people’s religious book to hide in when you get your feelings hurt.

The Psalms take us way beyond the regulations of the law and even the conditions of the gospel to a direct life with God. I don’t think we are intended to take these for the totality of our prayers or songs or even as the only models available, but in looking at them we see how much farther we have to go than we normally go.

The psalmists are as bold about themselves as they are confident in God. They speak with absolute confidence. It is not pride or bravado, but God’s character rubbing off on them. They have taken on the viewpoint of God; their hatred of evil is not just a projection, but a real identification with God.

We may speak of ourselves, but we cannot think of ourselves when we read these. We are not just drawn to God, but are directed and shot at Him.

There is a rising and falling of ideas. There is nothing flat about these. They move to intensity. The Psalms should never be old hat or familiar country; they are God’s country.

Sometimes I found that the music had to contrast the words to bring them out with greater force. It doesn’t seem like it would work but it does. The whole is greater than the parts here of all places in scripture.

The harmonization I experienced was not of my voice and fingers, but of God throughout.

The end result of even the most violent Psalms is peace with God. I noticed on the playback of Psalm 137 that my reading of the ending was very subdued. When we take our feelings of anger and vengeance to God, He always does what is right, but He also teaches us to look at others with His own heart which does not willingly judge anyone.

In the days these were written there was not an open covenant for all mankind. Now there is, and everyone can enter into the benefits of these.

-Kevin

Recording The Psalms

On 24 November 2008 I set out to record the book of Psalms. The whole thing was originally designed as a Christmas present for Jeanette. I did not realize the amount of time it was going to take, and there were only 15 Psalms on the disk I gave her for that Christmas. After that I worked on them in spurts until completing the entire book on 12 August 2009.

I both read the text and played my own original improvisations in the background on a harp sound from a keyboard. I figured it would just take too long to set all of them to music and make a new 21st century Psalter of my own, but this method still fulfills the definition of a psalm as that which is accompanied by an instrument.

I chose to use the American Standard Version my recording. I updated many, but not all, of the archaisms. I used this version for two reasons. First, because it is in the Public Domain and I didn’t have to get any permission to record it, and second, because it actually uses the name of God in the text itself. No one knows which way it is to be pronounced, so Jehovah, which is used by the American Standard, is, in some ways, as valid as Yahweh which has come to more current usage.

Christians do not need to be bound by the non-scriptural scruples of the Jews who were afraid to pronounce the name of God lest they fall under judgment. If God didn’t want the name to be pronounced He wouldn’t have let the Psalmists inscribe it. For the Christian the full revelation of God in Jesus Christ has come, and we are able to approach God’s throne face to face through Jesus. This means we are completely at home in His presence. You call people by their name in such a context. Using the actual name of God rather than the substitution of “LORD” is important because these Psalms are personal directives to a person and not poetry dedicated to a faceless nameless idea.

-Kevin

Next time I will share some of the things I learned out of this nine month process.

WATCH YOUR BUZZ WORDS

Contemporary Christian culture has developed a vocabulary all its own, quite apart from both the scriptures and the world culture around it. Sometimes the choice of words obscures rather than to expresses the truth. One such case is in the overuse of the word “passionate”.

We are told to be passionate in our prayer life and in our walk with the Lord, but what does that that mean to the world at large or even to Christians who are not on the inside of the cultural group using that word? To me, a Christian of 48 years, it even means something different than what they are wanting it to mean. It produces a different picture in my head than that of someone truly devoted to God.

Passion has always seemed to be a word with tremendous sexual overtones and connotations. It’s usually used to express some kind of over the top emotion which takes control of a person. It can be a passion for a certain kind of food or other innocent experience, but it is, in most modern usage, an appetite word.

Oh, I know the use of it in the technical sense of the passion of Christ. Just lately, though, I’ve been hit with the word so much in a book I’m reading that I could stand it no longer and had to speak up.

According to the edition of Webster’s I possess the origin of the word is the meaning suffering. They even go so far as to specify that the suffering referred to in the origin of the word is that of Christ. Then the definitions move on down through a description of extreme compelling emotions. The emphasis is on the feelings over which we have no control being brought up by desires inside us. Another way the word is frequently used is in current culture is with regard to being passionate about some particular cause, usually either political or the salvation of something other than human beings.

Do we want the world to think that we have some kind of psychological compulsion to pray, that we have to position ourselves in the place where we get in the grip of emotion? Must we become mad men and women suffering under feelings which we cannot control in order to be sincere or can we just be sincere without putting our heart into 17th gear? When we say that we are passionate in our prayer life, do we mean that we are suffering and that we have to suffer in order for God to pay attention? Must we beat ourselves like some medieval flagellants parading their righteousness through the countryside? Do we have to pick up the flag of some advocacy and go into battle knowing we’ll probably be shot down? No, to all of these connotations.

We’re not called to feelings or advocacy. We’re called to relationship. We’re not told to get into a particular mood, but simply to ask. It’s even simpler than that for we are just to let our requests be made known. What moves God is His own heart and our relationship to Him. The importunity of Luke 18 is only stick-to-it-ive-ness recommended to us for our own good. The point of that parable is that God for His part doesn’t need such pleadings since He’s better than the unjust judge.

The words passion or passionate are not used in scripture to describe prayer in either the King James Version, New American Standard Version or New International Version. The word passion is used once correctly of the passion of Jesus in Acts 1:3 (KJV). In James 5:17 passions are actually contrasted with prayer. Prayer is not operated in that way.

I know that from the dictionary passion may be a legitimate word to describe what we want to describe about our commitment to God, but it’s not the best word to use in that regard. Let’s pick a better word, one which doesn’t imply agony or physical desire, but which describes the truth of what originates in our spirit. Even to put it into the context of the cross takes us in another direction. The passion of Jesus is something He experienced for us. Our prayers are not something we experience for God.

Prayer is where we can be the most personal for there’s no façade to keep up. God knows before we pray and sees behind any mask we might hide behind. Let us be genuine rather than operating with a put-on, peer-inspired “passion”.

Let’s talk about being zealous in our prayers, about being fervent in our devotion to God. Let us mention our aspirations and ambitions to be found pleasing in His sight. Let us not wallow in passion. In the context of my prayer life this word, passion, just brings too much baggage of the wrong kind with it. Let us use words which start from our convictions and gratitude, words which speak not of what we are aroused to do, but of what we have purposed to do, what we have been inspired to do.

(By the way, if I've been perhaps a bit too passionate about this please pardon me. It all just goes to prove my point.)