Ego is the Enemy

Ego won't leave me alone. He lurks in the neglected corners of my heart. Out of the shadows, he whispers just loud enough to make sure he gets my attention. He’ll say things like, “You’re so good at ministry. Look at the scope of your leadership!" Or, "Your influence is growing. You're doing such a great job leading your team.”

TICKLING THE EARS

Ego likes to remind me of where I was a few years ago and how I’ve risen like a phoenix from the ashes in such a short time. He tells me my theology is solid and my leadership is gracious. He points out how helpful my preaching has been and how I’m just really hitting it out of the park. He tickles my ears by telling me exactly what I want to hear. Sometimes he doesn’t have to come up with his own material. He just reminds me of when so-and-so said this or that and then embellishes it to get me to think I’m really a big deal.

I like it when he does this, of course. Ego helps me feel valued, appreciated, successful, and important. I have a love-hate relationship with this little monster inside of me. The danger is that I enjoy having Ego around. I love the way he puffs me up but I hate that I believe him.

I know the scriptures speak of God hating the proud and how God will bring to nothing all those who raise themselves up against him. So I have to keep Ego in check. But doing so is difficult.

PILGRIMS' PRIDE

For the pilgrims who sung the Psalms of Ascent on their way towards the Holy Land, there could be a smug, self-congratulatory feeling upon reaching the temple in Jerusalem after the arduous journey. Arriving with the throngs to worship, feast, and celebrate could feel like a big deal. Like they had arrived in more than just the literal sense.

Much like those making the pilgrimage to Rome in Martin Luther’s day climbed the Sacred Steps to receive the plenary indulgences awaiting them at the top, the Hebrew pilgrims could bask in their own religious success. With their close friend Ego crouching in the corridors of their hearts, they could hear him whisper, “You did it! You’re so great. God must really love you now. Way to go!”

But pride has no place in worship. Worshiping God leaves no place for spiritual victory laps or trophy ceremonies. The final Psalm of Ascent puts Ego in his place and commands a way of living that shuts down the pilgrims' pride. The Psalmist declares,

“Now bless the Lord, all you servants of the Lord” (Ps. 134:1).

We get to the top, we feel the accomplishment of our spiritual journeys, and we hear, “Give glory to God! Praise him, you servant! Worship and exalt him in the holy place—not yourself!” We bless the Lord because, if we don't, we end up listening to Ego and blessing ourselves. That makes Ego the enemy, as one author recently put it.

EGO IS THE ENEMY

Ego is the enemy because he steals the spotlight intended for God and redirects our worship from the Lord to ourselves. This is why Jesus said, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me" (Lk. 9:23). The cross crushes Ego.

Blessing God—not ourselves—must be the attitude and posture of our whole lives. The Psalms of Ascent end with a reminder that it God who got us to the top. Psalm 134 reminds us that though we have begun leaving the lives we knew and receiving the blessing of God, it is not a result of our own accomplishments.

God did it. So he receives the glory. And when he receives the glory, we receive the blessing: “May the Lord, Maker of heaven and earth, bless you from Zion.”

What a way to conclude one year and embrace a new one! Let's praise and exalt God for his grace in working through us in 2018. In the last year, you may have lost weight, read the whole Bible, purchased a home, or learned to forgive. But let's not forget that blessings like these come from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth. We stand firm in our faith because of God, not our own self-righteousness. We get to “Zion” because of the blood shed by his son, Jesus, whose righteousness is imputed to us, and whose Spirit works to transform us into his image.

So we give glory and thanks and honor and worship to God. And yet, he pours out more blessings, as we've learned here at Gospel-Centered Discipleship during the last year.

GCD'S BLESSINGS IN 2018

As we've seen, all our accomplishments are a grace from God, and so we here at GCD give thanks to God for his kindness to us. As we abide in him, he makes us prosper and bear fruit. He graciously gives us the bandwidth to write and communicate the goodness of his mercy and grace. Before 2018 draws to a close, we want to take a look back at everything God has done through our work over the last twelve months—not to stroke our Ego, but to glorify God.

In October, we held our first ever Writers' Intensive in Louisville to foster a live environment for Christian writers and editors to learn in community about producing good, true, and beautiful content. At the Intensive, we heard from authors Jonathan Dodson, Hannah Anderson, and Mike Cosper. Our aim in the year ahead is to bring events and training like this to more of you around the country.

This was a year of huge growth for our readership and community. In 2018, we published two books and saw our site traffic grow by 50% to an average of 20,000 page views per month. That's thanks to God's blessing, first and foremost, and to you, our faithful readers. Page views are great, but they're not everything. Around here, we pray for God to increase our traffic inasmuch as what we're publishing brings him glory. I believe our growth this year is the result of publishing God-glorifying articles like "The Big God Behind Your 'Small' Ministry," and "'I Don’t Know How You Do It': God’s Grace for Foster Parents," and books like Walk With Me: Learning to Love and Follow Jesus and That Word Above All Earthly Powers.

We publish books and articles to help make, mature, and multiply disciples of Jesus—not ourselves or anyone else. That makes Ego our enemy. We cannot magnify God and ourselves at the same time. We praise God for his grace in 2018 and look forward to another year of glorifying him.

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Jeremy Writebol is the Executive Director of GCD. He is the husband of Stephanie and father of Allison and Ethan. He serves as the lead campus pastor of Woodside Bible Church in Plymouth, MI. He is also an author and contributor to several GCD Books including everPresent and Make, Mature, Multiply. He writes personally at jwritebol.net. You can read all of Jeremy’s articles for GCD here.

How the Lord Blesses God-Fearing Husbands and Fathers

We usually associate fear with the anticipation of something unpleasant or the expectation of our safety being threatened. We think of fear in terms of what we’re afraid of. Scripture teaches about another kind of fear—the fear of the Lord.

Psalm 128 addresses the fear of the Lord in terms of the reverence and awe we have for God and his majesty. Martin Luther described this kind of fear as filial, meaning the kind of fearful respect a child has for his father. His obedience is not motivated out of fear of punishment, but fear of displeasing the father he loves so much. The child’s respect and love for his father produce in him the desire to obey in all things.

This is the fear of the Lord. And there is a reward for the God-fearing: “Blessed is everyone who fears the Lord, who walks in his ways” (Ps. 128:1).

The 128th Psalm is one of the Psalms of Ascents, made up of Psalms 120-134. Each year, the Jews would travel to Jerusalem, the city on a hill, for religious festivals. As they made the upward journey, they sang these psalms to encourage one another. Psalm 128 encourages a specific audience—godly husbands and fathers who fear the Lord.

Charles Spurgeon writes, “It is not to be inferred that all blessed men are married and are fathers; but that this is the way in which the Lord favours godly people who are placed in domestic life.”

While the Bible teaches that everyone who fears the Lord invites his blessings into their lives, Psalm 128 is the application of that blessing specifically to husbands and fathers. Consider the blessings intended for such a man who fears the Lord.

HE WILL BE BLESSED IN HIS WORK

“You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands; you shall be blessed, and it shall be well with you” (v. 2). This man invites God’s provisional and occupational blessings into his life. He is blessed with labor. Despite the commonality of men in our culture having jobs to go to each day, we must never forget that our careers are an evidence of God’s grace. The Lord blesses him with work.

This man is blessed as his employment provides for his needs. He works hard and enjoys the financial rewards from his hard work. He has the means to care for his family. God blesses the work he has already completed.

This blessing of eating the fruit of his labor is not to be confused with the prosperity “gospel.” This is not a blank check theology—this is the promise of provisional blessings. Some of the dearest saints in church history were among the poorest in their cities, and yet this blessing is applicable to the materially poor as well.

God sets the terms of our blessings according to his pleasure and generosity, and we humbly accept what he offers for our good as he fulfills his desire to bless.

HE WILL BE BLESSED IN HIS FAMILY

“Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your children will be like olive shoots around your table. Behold, thus shall the man be blessed who fears the Lord” (vv. 3-4). This man invites God’s familial blessings into his life.

He is blessed with a fruitful wife who brings joy. She is fruitful in good works. She gives birth to his children and welcomes the orphaned into his family. His children surround his table as they engage in the formative liturgy of family mealtime. Like olive shoots, they represent life and energy. They are a blessing for his future welfare. He will have heirs to care for him in his old age.

The godly husband and father who fears the Lord will enjoy blessing in his home. Spurgeon says, “Family blessedness comes from the Lord, to the Lord alone we must look for it.” All efforts to trust in ourselves for blessings must be rejected. Favor doesn’t come from a healthy bank account, an attractive wife, a Paleo-lifestyle, or well-behaved children. The Lord is the giver of this blessing.

HE WILL BE BLESSED IN HIS VISION

“The Lord bless you from Zion! May you see the prosperity of Jerusalem all the days of your life! May you see your children's children! Peace be upon Israel” (vv. 5-6). These blessings are corporate and multi-generational. The blessings apply to the larger welfare of the family of God. And God blesses this man by expanding his vision beyond himself and his biological family.

We are blessed to bless others. As this man’s own family is blessed, they, in turn, are a blessing to their city, their future lineage, and beyond. This godly man will be blessed with a vision that extends beyond his lifespan of God’s blessings in his own family and in the family of God. Our enemy doesn’t want us to see God’s covenantal faithfulness to us. He seeks to destroy what God blesses by directing our focus to our hardships.

But look deeper. Look upward. You were meant to behold God’s blessedness.

BE BLESSED

Husbands and fathers, are you God-fearing men? Do you walk in his ways?

When you fear the Lord, his ways become your ways. And it will be well with you. Scripture says you will be blessed, and you will be able to see the blessings as they extend beyond yourself.

Imagine the Jewish people singing this Psalm together as they climbed the hill to Jerusalem. While meant to encourage the husbands and fathers specifically, consider the joy of the mothers and children as they realized how their husbands’ and fathers’ godly living resulted in their blessing as well. Imagine how the single men and women might have rejoiced as they were reminded of how this blessing extended to them as part of the family of God.

God’s people are blessed when they fear him. And when they do, they have nothing else to fear.

We need to reclaim a gospel view of fear. Fear is good when rightly aimed at our Father. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 9:10). Husbands and fathers, be wise. Fear the Lord. Walk in his ways and be blessed. The blessing is yours. Seek it.

Fear God and receive your reward, knowing that if you are not experiencing these blessings currently, you have greater rewards to look forward to. The rewards of Jesus Christ and the eternal blessing of a heavenly home.

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Christy Britton is a wife and mom of four boys. She is an orphan advocate for 127 Worldwide and writes curriculum for Docent Research. Her family worships at Imago Dei Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. She writes for several blogs, including her own, http://www.beneedywell.com/. You can follow her on Twitter.

Adorn Yourself with the Peace that Passes Understanding

I careened into the driveway and slammed the engine into park. My breathing was shallow and quick. I was hot and sweaty and felt like the car was closing in on me. I flung open the door and hung my legs out, hunching over on my knees.

What is happening to me? I wondered. I re-traced my day, realizing I had lost myself in a mental spiral about my career. I knew I would soon be looking for another job, though I didn’t know what kind, if I would have to move my family, or what that would even look like.

Fortunately, I was seeing a counselor around that time. I told her what happened, and she asked about my prayer life. “Huh?” I said, confused. “Your prayer life. How is it?” she replied.

Ugh, I thought, knowing it was basically non-existent. “It’s not very good,” I told her.

As we talked, I realized that as my anxiety increased, my prayer decreased. As my inner world became noisier, I filled the prayer space with podcasts, music, and audiobooks—anything to keep me from dealing with my thoughts.

And it was ruining me.

HEARTBURN

The more I hid from my thoughts, the more I felt like David in Psalm 39:

I held my peace to no avail, and my distress grew worse. My heart became hot within me. As I mused, the fire burned . . .

I’m guessing you’ve felt the same before. You tie your stomach in knots while planning your next move. You’re not sure if that school is right for the kids: They might excel academically, but what about their influences? You’re wondering what’ll happen if you take that job: Will my family be upset? Will we regret it in a year? You feel exhausted even when you aren’t doing anything physically strenuous. You’re depleted, anxious, uneasy, discontent.

David was no stranger to these emotions. Before he was crowned king, he spent years on the run from Saul, who wanted him dead because Saul knew God had promised David the throne. At one point, David took to hiding in caves. Alone in those damp, dark caverns, he surely had to ask God, What are you doing? I thought I was supposed to be king, but here I am hiding from a madman. Will this ever end? How long, O Lord?!

THE LONGEST PSALM TO LEARN

I wouldn’t be surprised if David eventually worked himself into a tizzy like I did that day in my car. But David didn’t have a counselor to calm him down, so what did he do? He wrote this prayer:

 O Lord, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me.

O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and forevermore.

It may not look like much at first, but Psalm 131 is one of the finest gems in all the Psalms. “It is one of the shortest Psalms to read, but one of the longest to learn,” wrote Charles Spurgeon.

He’s right. I stumbled onto this psalm during those days of inner turmoil and it became a balm to my heart, soul, and mind. These three short verses reached down and plucked me from the cave I was hiding in.

Much like the other Psalms of Ascent, this song starts low but rises to great heights. It can take a wild-minded person and subdue them into an unhurried soul. And it starts with humility.

I DON’T WANT TO BE KING

David starts his appeal by admitting he has been humbled. Verse 1 shows the future king brought low by years of scrambling and surviving. His heart was no longer set on the throne. His eyes stopped gazing up as he daydreamed of ruling. He quit trying to figure out what only God can know.

David rightly connected his heart, eyes, and soul, for “What the heart desires, the eyes look for. Where the desires run, the glances usually follow.”[i]

God wanted David gazing up not at the throne, but at him. So it is with us. God wants us peering up with anticipation, but he wants our gaze fixed on him, not the things of this world.

Too often, I want to understand how the puzzle fits together. I want to know why things happen. I want all the information. But my eyes can only be one place at a time. When I’m fixated on planning my steps, I miss the God who establishes them (Prov. 16:9).

A humble and lowly heart is the beginning of sanctification. God works not with a heart of stone, but with a heart of flesh, softened and made malleable by being brought low. And what starts in the heart continues into the soul.

BE STILL MY SOUL

In verse 2, we see the result of David’s humbled heart—a calm and quiet soul. But this tranquil state didn’t happen on its own. David says, “I have calmed and quieted my soul.” It was an act of the will; in fact, it was a deliberate submission of his will before the Lord.

The word translated calmed can also be rendered composed. “To compose your soul means literally to level it. [To] bulldoze the building site,” writes David Powlison. “To quiet your soul means to silence the noise and tumult. [To say] ‘Sssshhh’ to your desires, fears, opinions, anxieties, agendas, and irritabilities.”[ii]

David stopped trying to control the uncontrollable, quieted his manic thoughts, and was left with a peaceful soul.

A peaceful soul is only possible when it has been hushed into submission. This surely rubs us the wrong way, but David gives us a word-picture to explain. He has calmed and quieted his soul “like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me.”

As a father of four, I’ve learned that an unweaned child frantically roots around for milk when they’re anywhere near their mother. When it comes time to wean the child, they cry their little hearts out, breaking their mother’s in the process.

But the mother stays the course because she knows it’s necessary if the child is ever going to go on to solid food. After a while, the child moves on and is no longer overcome by their former desire. A weaned child can simply enjoy being in his mother’s lap, and this satisfaction is not a matter of food but of the heart.

This is a picture of David’s humbled heart. This infantile contentment leads to a parental concern for others, as seen in verse 3.

WAIT WITH HOPE

A humbled heart is freed to love and care for others. “Pride dies as the humility of faith lives,” writes Powlison.

As David’s pride died, his humble faith began to live, and the overflow of his contentment was to plead with his people not to make the same mistakes. “O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and forevermore,” he says.

Stop pursuing impossibilities and start pursuing certainties. Hope in God, who we know is unchanging and good and loving. Don’t get impatient and move forward without him.

Eugene Peterson paraphrased verse 3 this way: “Wait, Israel, for God. Wait with hope. Hope now; hope always!” A humble heart and submissive will allow us to wait with hope. Hope for the next phase, the next doctor’s appointment, the next meeting, the next day, even the next life. That hope then feeds and sustains humility in our hearts and helps us see the wisdom of submitting our souls to the God who formed our innermost parts (Ps. 139).

“When we cease to hanker for the world we begin hoping for the Lord,” wrote Spurgeon. The only way to cease longing for the world is to pick up our cross daily and follow the Lord of hope. That daily dying requires a humble heart, a submitted soul, and a patient hope.

THE PEACE THAT PASSES UNDERSTANDING

Once I realized I was ruining my soul by trying to control the uncontrollable, I calmed and quieted it instead. I memorized Psalm 131 as ammunition against my anxious thoughts. I fasted from podcasts and other audio while running or walking in the mornings. I deleted social media from my phone and blocked it in my browser.

I was back behind the wheel one morning when I realized I could feel the silence in my soul. I wasn’t inundated with anxieties. I was calm. I was quiet.

I wish I could say that tranquility has lasted, but I’ve relapsed many times since then. I am calmer and quieter than I’ve ever been, but I have a long way to go in turning over my heart, eyes, and soul to the Lord. Maybe you do, too.

If so, David’s last line in the psalm can bring us comfort. Linger over these words: “O believer, hope in the Lord from this time forth and forevermore.”

Spurgeon wrote that Psalm 131 is like a pearl that will beautifully adorn the neck of patience. Be patient, brother. Be patient, sister. Hope in the Lord and adorn yourself with the peace that passes understanding.

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[i] Charles H. Spurgeon, Treasury of David: Explanatory Notes and Quaint Sayings on Psalm 131, http://www.romans45.org/spurgeon/treasury/ps131.htm.

[ii] David Powlison, “’Peace, be still’: Learning Psalm 131 by Heart,” The Journal of Biblical Counseling, Vol. 18 No. 3, Spring 2000, https://www.ccef.org/wp-content/uploads/archive/sites/default/files/pdf/dp_psalm131_1803002.pdf.

Grayson Pope (M.A., Christian Studies) is a husband and father of four, and the Managing Web Editor at GCD. He serves as a writer and editor with Prison Fellowship. For more of Grayson’s writing, check out his website or follow him on Twitter.

Lasting Joy Among the Waves

The sun provided the perfect counter-balance to the cold ocean waves washing the sand off my feet. From where I stood, there seemed to be an endless supply of water that stretched until meeting the blue sky in the distance. To my left, kids with boogie boards were laughing while trying to catch waves. The air was a mixed fragrance of salt and sunscreen.

I watched my 15-month-old son giggle as he tried to jump over a wave again and again. With each wave, my son became braver and wanted to go deeper into the water. So I took his hand and went until the water was up to my knees and his chest. He continued to laugh as the waves pushed against his little body.

A HELPLESS STATE

His small stature and flimsy body were no match against the incoming waves. Each wave would have knocked him down apart from my grip. His desire to be independent would often lead him to try and pull his hand away from mine, but I knew he couldn't withstand the waves on his own, so I wasn't going to let go of him. What kept my son standing against the powerful waves was not his ability or desire to hold on to me, but my ability and determination to hold on to him.

I often feel as helpless as my son standing in those waves. Each day brings hard decisions that crash into me like the rising tide. Today’s problems and tomorrow’s worries weigh heavily on my mind. Am I doing a good job as a parent? Will I be able to afford a new vehicle when our minivan finally bites the dust?

Maybe your worries are similar, but the questions are different. How will I ever be able to pay for college? How can I deal with this issue in our church? How can I encourage my friend who's suffering? The never-ending waves threaten to bury you in the sea and your ability to swim against them seems as hopeless as an ant tied to a cinder block being tossed off a pier.

The greatest antidote to the doubt caused by my own weakness is the reminder of who God is and the promises he has made. Reflecting on God's unconditional promises reminds me that my Father loves me too much to abandon me (Deut. 31:8; Josh. 1:5; John 14:18-20; Heb. 13:5-6). Though I'm weak, he simply won't let me go.

What God Promises vs. What Man Promises

In Psalm 132, the psalmist is reflecting on the unconditional promises of God. The psalm would later be recited by the Israelites as they displayed their confidence that the Lord would keep his promises, specifically the promise he made to their king, David.

The Psalm begins with a promise made by David. He "swore to the Lord" to make him a dwelling place (Ps. 132:2). When David made known his desires to build a temple for the Lord in 2 Samuel 7, the Lord tells David that one of his sons would do so, instead. David's intentions are presumably good; Scripture after all refers to him as a "man after God's own heart" (1 Sam. 13:14; cf. Acts 13:22). Even still, the limited ability of man is easy to see.

Because of our limits, we can have the best of intentions and the most committed resolve and still not be able to guarantee results. Proverbs 16:1 comes to mind: "The plans of the heart belong to man, but the answer of the tongue is from the Lord." In David’s case, the Lord's answer was no.

The fact that David didn't build the temple was certainly not lost on the psalmist, nor the Israelites as they later recited this psalm while ascending the hill. In fact, the first verse is a prayer to remember David, and in verse 10 a prayer is made "for the sake of your servant David." Why, then, does David play such a pivotal role in salvation history even though he didn't build the temple? He didn’t accomplish what he intended, right?

It’s not because of David’s promise to God, but God’s promise to David. In 2 Samuel 7 the Lord tells David,

“And I will make for you a great name, like the name of the great ones of the earth. . . . When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever...And your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me.”

The Coming King

One of David's son's would build the temple. We know Solomon built a great temple to the Lord. However, this temple was a building made with hands that was eventually destroyed by the Babylonians. The Lord promises another one of David's sons, many generations later, would build God a "house" that would never be destroyed (Ps. 132:13-14; 2 Sam. 7:13; 1 Pet. 2:2-5). This son of David would clothe the priests with salvation and make the saints shout for joy (Ps. 132:16). This king would reign forever (v. 11-12; 2 Sam. 7:13)!

These were unconditional promises given to David. While David was a good king, Scripture is clear he was also a sinner. Even David's sons—referring to his subsequent generations—would not fulfill their obligations to "keep my covenant and my testimonies." They would fail over and over as the phrase "he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord" seems to be on repeat in the book of Kings (2 Kings 13:11, 21:2, 23:37, 24:9).

However, in spite of the failures and shortcomings of man, God had determined that he was going to ensure this promise comes to pass. Centuries later, an angel would appear to a young woman announcing her pregnancy:

“And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end” (Luke 1:31-33).

David was limited in fulfilling his promise. God was not. Where men fall short, God still enables his promises to be kept.

GOLDEN ANSWERS TO SILVER PRAYERS

God's promises are sure, and they are better than what we typically ask for. Ephesians tells us that God "is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think" (3:20). This psalm gives us a picture of the Lord answering prayers in such a way. Charles Spurgeon calls this God's "golden answer to a silver prayer." Notice the parallels between the first and second half of the psalm:

• The requests in verses 1-6 to remember David is answered in verse 12.

• The desire for a place of worship in verse 7 is answered in verse 13.

• The prayer for the Lord's resting place in verse 8 is answered in verse 14.

• The cries for the righteousness of the priests and joy for the people in verse 9 is affirmed in verses 15-16.

• The prayer to remember David and not turn away from the anointed one in verse 10 is resolutely answered in verses 17-18.

God's answers are better than the requests given. The people pray for God to remember the Davidic kingship; God promises that it will be eternal. The people pray for a place to worship; God provides a spiritual worship that doesn't depend on geographical location. The people pray for righteousness and joy; God promises salvation that causes the saints to shout for joy.

Seeing the certainty of God's promise and his ability to guarantee follow-through on those promises should encourage us to continually trust the Lord. Even as the difficulties of life and the awareness of my own shortcomings pound against me like the relentless waves, I know that the Father is holding on to me and he has promised to never let me go. Thankfully, my hope in this life does not depend on my strength, but on his.

Because God delivers on his promises, the Son of David came as promised. Because God delivers on his promises, we know our sin has been atoned for and our relationship with Christ is secure. Because of the good news of the gospel, we can know we have been "clothed with salvation" and "shout for joy" (Ps. 132:9). Real, lasting joy out among the waves.

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James Williams has served as an Associate Pastor at FBC Atlanta, TX since 2013. He is married to Jenny and they have three children and are actively involved in foster care. He is in the dissertation stage of a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology. You can follow James Twitter or his blog where he writes regularly.

Unity in an Age of Division

Our church hosted a “Unity Forum” after the 2016 elections. I’ll never forget it. Pittsburgh is one city that often feels more like two. There’s Old Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh of the steel industry, I.C. Light, and voting Republican. Then, there’s New Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh of the technology and health industries, microbreweries, and voting Democrat.

At the forum, one side wanted to Make America Great Again, while the other side chose to stand With Her. People from both side, citizens of both the Old and the New Pittsburgh go to our church.

Instead of sitting on opposite sides of the aisle, we often share the same pew. Red and Blue are sprinkled throughout the congregation instead of neatly divided into separate sections. It’s not uncommon to see an outspoken Trump supporter squished into the same pew as someone who marched against Trump.

But on a Sunday during an election season, it can feel about as volatile as Thanksgiving dinner with your extended family. Conversations are cordial as long as no one asks who you voted for.

High Tensions

Tensions were particularly high after the 2016 elections. Social media posts from some of the people in our church were downright offensive. Congregants were wondering what we would say from the pulpit, if we said anything at all.

Our church felt more divided than ever, and we wanted to do something that could heal the disunity before the cement dried. We announced an upcoming “Unity Forum” and invited anyone with feelings—any feelings—to attend.

It seemed like a good idea.

We tried, really really tried, to lead people into face-to-face conversations with one another. We tried to help people seek to understand before they were understood. We tried to teach people how to make sure they could explain what the other person was feeling before they shared what they were feeling. We tried to create unity and, in the end, we only saw how deep the disunity ran.

We saw in our church a microcosm of our country, and we didn’t know what to do about it.

Israel’s Polarized Cultural Moment

We aren’t the first nation to live through a polarized cultural moment. God’s chosen people, the nation of Israel whom he had set free from slavery in Egypt, had their own experiences of disunity.

In 1 Kings 11-12, after King Solomon walked away from the Lord, God promised the kingdom would fall apart under the leadership of Solomon’s son—an act of judgment on Solomon’s worship of foreign gods. And, under the poor leadership of his son Rehoboam, the unified kingdom divided into two: Israel in the north, Judah in the South.

If they had cable news, the anchors would have been stoking the heated rhetoric. Some people would have had “Make Israel Great Again” bumper stickers on their chariots, while others would have been wearing “I’m with Rehoboam” t-shirts. There would have been long arguments on social media about which side was to blame for the division. Feast days would have been full of tension, not unlike our own.

Israel’s Moment of Peace

Only two generations before the division, though, the kingdom was in a far better place. King David was on the throne. The kingdom was mostly at peace with itself, even if it was at war with foreign nations. It was a peaceful, rather than a polarized, cultural moment—one in which the king had time to write poetry.

In Psalm 133, a poem which would be sung for generations to come, David muses,

Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity! It is like the precious oil on the head, running down on the beard, on the beard of Aaron, running down on the collar of his robes!

It is like the dew of Hermon, which falls on the mountains of Zion! For there the Lord has commanded the blessing, life forevermore.

It’s one thing to sing this in a moment of unity, like what Israel experienced under David’s rule. It’s quite another to believe it when your kingdom is divided in two.

As one of the “Songs of Ascents,” a collection of psalms possibly intended to be sung on the way to Jerusalem, this psalm was part of a playlist that was listened to from generation to generation. It was sung when the nation was at peace and when relatives were ready to kill one another. It was sung when politics were cordial and when they were explosive. It was sung when unity was palpable and when disunity was the norm.

In a polarized cultural moment, how can we find the kind of unity David describes in this psalm? Is it even possible?

How Not to Create Unity

While most of us are not sure what oil dripping down Aaron’s head or dew on Mount Hermon feels like, both seem better than whatever we’re experiencing right now. We’re growing tired of the disunity all around us—in the church and outside of it. There’s a sense of malaise about our fragmented, polarized moment.

None of us, though, can seem to agree on what it might look like to pursue unity.

For some of us, unity means not talking about our differences. We can have unity as long as no one brings up politics at dinner or on Sunday morning. We can have unity as long we only stick to the accepted topics of conversation. It’s superficial, of course, and everyone knows it. But it’s better than losing friends over midterm elections.

For others, unity means agreeing on everything. Kyle J. Howard, in his recent article in Fathom Magazine, writes, “As a young Christian, I assumed that being ‘united’ had to also include uniformity.” Until we can agree on everything from politics to baptism, unity will always be just out of reach. In the end, we tend to just surround ourselves with people whose opinions make sense to us.

Then, there’s a third group of people who believe unity is impossible. We’re too divided and too polarized to even pursue unity. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. We’re never going to agree on everything, and superficial conversations with relatives aren’t worth it.

But is there another way?

Through and In Jesus Christ

When Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote Life Together, he opened with Psalm 133:1 as a way to set the stage for the entire book. In the opening chapter, he explains the secret to the unity David describes:

Christianity means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. No Christian community is more or less than this. Whether it be a brief, single encounter or the daily fellowship of years, Christian community is only this. We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ.[1]

Jesus is the one who makes true unity possible. In his death and resurrection, he created unity across racial and ethnic divides, gender divides, and political divides. It’s a unity even greater than the one David probably imagined when he wrote this psalm. The gospel creates the unity we can never create on our own.

In Ephesians 1:14-18, Paul describes the unity made possible by Jesus, writing,

For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.

Unity is not primarily something we create; it’s something we discover.

What Unity Truly Depends On

In and through Jesus Christ, we have access to unity that goes deeper than surface-level conversations and the need to agree on everything. It’s here that God “has commanded the blessing, life forevermore” (Ps. 133:3).

When I left the “Unity Forum” back in 2016, it felt like a failure. It felt like we made things worse by trying to make things better. It felt like we were trying to do the impossible at our church by being a church where both sides of the political spectrum could worship the same God from the same pew. I thought people would leave the Unity Forum and never come back again.

In the end, though, people stayed in our church. People showed up the next Sunday and sat down in the same pews. They still talk to one another. They still have hard conversations. We still address political topics from the pulpit, and it tends to offend people on both the left and the right.

No one can create unity with a Unity Forum. If that’s what we’re trying to do, we will always leave feeling like failures.

The best we can do is point to the unbreakable unity we have in and through Jesus Christ—a unity that depends not on whether we can agree on everything or how well we can avoid hard conversations, but on what Jesus did on the cross thousands of years before any midterm election.

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Austin Gohn is a pastor at Bellevue Christian Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and a student at Trinity School for Ministry. He is the author of a forthcoming book from Gospel-Centered Discipleship on Augustine’s Confessions and young adulthood. You can follow him on Twitter.

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (New York: HarperOne, 1954), 21

We Wear the Mask, But We Don’t Have to

The days stretched on like a bad movie that would never end. I wore a cheerful mask as I meandered through my day. I was found myself floundering in the darkness of depression. Sometimes you look at someone and wonder what’s going on behind their eyes. “How are you doing?” friends would ask. “I’m good . . . ” I uttered robotically.

But if you looked close enough behind the mask, you could see I was unraveling. There’s always more happening underneath the mask.

GRASPING FOR WORDS

Some suffering is brought on by our sin and other times suffering happens without invitation. Our hardships are colorful and various. Instead of finding the words to explain our pain, it’s easy to mask our trials with the subtleties of “I’m good," “Things are fine," or if you’re talking to other Christians, “I’m blessed!" We put on the mask of cheer because this is expected of us.

Paul Laurence Dunbar communicates similar sentiments in his poem “We Wear the Mask:”

We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, — This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties.

I marvel that out of the labors of suffering, beauty such as this can be birthed. The Psalms remind us that corporate and individual suffering can’t be divorced from the human experience. They so eloquently reveal what’s happening underneath the mask. They do not hold back how bleak life in a Genesis 3 world can become. They show the intensity of our pain and the goodness of our God.

When the Worst Has Come

If you live long enough, there will be a point when your worst fears become reality. Your marriage goes from bad to worse when you find the divorce papers in your mailbox. Your oldest child proclaims, “There is no God!" despite your best efforts to train them in the way they should go. You find yourself struggling, again, with the same sin that has been a snare most of your life.

Perhaps, you receive the paralyzing news of the death of a parent or loved one. You feel the pulse of your own heart as the doctor mumbles, “There isn’t a heartbeat.” You sigh at the long road ahead as your people are marginalized, disenfranchised, or enslaved by fellow humans. The list goes on.

The people of Israel were no strangers to suffering. Yes, God chose them to display his glory to the nations, but this privilege did not exempt them from years of pain. In Psalm 129, the psalmist removes the mask, and we witness the metaphorical and literal scars which reside underneath.

In verses 1 and 2, the psalmist sings twice that, “since my youth they have often attacked me." As a people, their suffering was long and consistent. Throughout their history, they went in and out of enslavement to other nations. From the cries of Egypt (Ex. 3:7-8) to the lion’s den in Babylon (Dan. 6), the Israelites experienced consistent attacks. Across generations, some of their worst fears happened over and over again.

In verse 3 the psalmist paints a beautifully disturbing word picture describing physical pain as they sing how “plowmen plow over [their] back; they made their furrows long”. Plows are sharp tools used to break up the earth to plant seeds. Furrows are the long narrow trenches made in the ground by the plows. The mask is off, and here we find the home of the tears and desperation of the suffering.

ATTACKED BY SIN

Similarly, the final stanza of Dunbar’s poem, “We Wear the Mask,” removes the mask as he speaks of this long road of pain:

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To Thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh, the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask.

And this is the case for us. While we may not be enslaved, we still experience attacks. Our attacks may be our sin patterns, spiritual warfare, or an actual enemy who seeks to destroy our reputation by gossip. Enemies are seeking to kill us, bringing many of our fears to reality.

Suffering Together

Perhaps the most beautiful part of Psalm 129 is the call for all of Israel to say, “since my youth they have often attacked me." This Psalm speaks of the collective suffering of a group of people. It gives words to the corporate cries of the oppressed.

My ancestors penned many poems and songs like this when they were, and in some ways still are, oppressed by fellow humans. Littered throughout the beautiful words of negro spirituals and poems written by African-American men and women are the collective pronouns of “we," “our” and “us." African-American poet, Melvin B. Tolson, displays similar sentiments as Psalm 129 in regard to the collective nature of suffering in his poem, “Dark Symphony.” He writes:

Oh, how can we forget Our human rights denied? Oh, how can we forget Our manhood crucified? When Justice is profaned And plea with curse is met, When Freedom’s gates are barred, Oh, how can we forget?

Some may not feel this collective “we” in which these poems and some psalms speak, but we can learn from them. We learn of the nature of the church community—we were meant to suffer alongside one another.

As one body (1 Cor. 12:26) we not only worship with one another, but we feel deeply with one another. As Romans 12:15 says, we “Rejoice with those who rejoice, [and] weep with those who weep.” We draw near to our brothers and sisters in the faith, and we see what is underneath the mask. We don’t disregard it or explain their suffering away; we weep with them.

Through bearing burdens together, we become a tangible expression of the comfort of Christ to them. To even begin to do this, we must be close enough to our brothers and sisters in Christ to know what is going on in their lives and to see behind the mask.

God’s Righteous Character

In the suffering of his people, Tolson writes, “When Freedom’s gates are barred/ Oh, how can we forget?” As Psalm 129 reminds us, the goal of our suffering is not to forget it, erase it, or ignore it.

Psalm 129, and all the Psalms of Ascents, were written to celebrate seasonal feasts in Jerusalem. The Israelites sang these songs corporately and regularly. They sang about their oppression and the Lord’s deliverance. In singing, they forced themselves to remember. Faith helps us to see that God will work in the future—like he has done in the past—because of his consistently righteous character. As one quote renders it, “What God has done for his people formerly are, in effect, promises too. Faith may conclude that the Lord will work in like manner in the future. If he delivered others who rested in him, he will deliver me if I trust in him now. He is the same yesterday and forever.”

In Psalm 129:2, the Israelites sing that their enemies have not prevailed against them. If we were to read only verse 1-2, we might conclude that the Israelites were the reason their enemies didn’t overcome them. We may assume they delivered themselves from their enemies.

HOLD FAST TO THE PROMISE

As we read on, verse 4 reveals salvation didn’t come from the Israelites own strength and efforts but from the Lord’s righteous character. They could sing “the LORD is righteous” (Ps. 129:4) because they drew on years of history which proved the Lord’s faithfulness to them. He delivered others—and by faith—we can believe he will deliver us as well.

We, too, can hold fast to this same promise. For centuries God has kept his Word to his people. He stayed true to his unchanging and righteous character. The ultimate evidence of his deliverance is through the person and work and Jesus Christ who delivered us from the bondage of sin. And in a myriad of smaller ways, he will do the same for us.

Our deliverance may be different than we expect and slow coming. Perhaps instead of removing us from the struggle, he will mold and shape our character, integrity, and faith in it (Rom. 5:3-5; Jas. 1:3). If we find ourselves in the dark night of the soul—before the face of our Father and in the presence of his people—we can remove the mask. We can mourn and remember the faithfulness of our God. And we can recall, he loves to shine his light into the darkest places.

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SharDavia “Shar” Walker lives in Atlanta, GA with her husband Paul. She serves on staff with Campus Outreach, an interdenominational college ministry, and enjoys sharing her faith and discipling college women to be Christian leaders. Shar is a writer and a speaker and is currently pursuing an M.A. in Christian Studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

God In Our Waiting

Paul once said he had learned the secret of contentment, but he never had to shop at a grocery store. Everyone has their hang-ups, and this is one of my many. Every time I walk through those automatic doors and grab a shopping cart (or “buggy” where I’m from), I know I’m entering a minefield of frustration and impatience.

It's like the engineers who designed the shopping carts didn't consult with the engineers who designed the width of the aisles to allow two shoppers to pass with ease. Some shoppers seem to think their carts are holograms and can be walked through as if they were immaterial. As I shop, thoughts run wild in my head:

Why do five people need to be looking for spices the moment I need to be? Who had the bright idea of putting water pitcher filters in the hardware section? Who goes through self-checkout with 35 items at DMV-level speed?

My shopping experiences sometimes morph into moments of inner rage. I don’t want to be this way.

I want to be grateful I get to shop for food at all, with little concern about having enough to pay for what I need.

I want to see people as God sees them, but then someone forgets how to use their credit card in front of me. It’s a trivial example of a deeper reality of my humanity.

Waiting is not easy.

ALREADY, NOT YET

Paul wrote, “For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out” (Rom 7:18). Many theologians have ascribed Paul’s reflections here to the Christian experience. Regardless of what Paul specifically meant in this instance, the sentiment itself could describe how Christians often feel.

We are thankful for the gospel’s promise of adoption and grace extended toward sinners like us (Eph 1:5-6), but we are discouraged when our flesh continually presumes on the riches of his kindness (Rom 2:4). We love the thought of receiving “new wine,” but this old wineskin of a body seems to be the wrong place for it (Mk 2:21-22). We live as a “new creation” right here and now (2 Cor 5:17), but a day will come when we are made new, indeed, sinless (Rev 21:5).

Here lies the already-but-not-yet reality of the Christian life, and the answer is not very satisfying: wait.

Why does God make us wait, specifically as it relates to the presence of sin in our lives? Isn’t he aware of how much we hate waiting? Hasn’t he seen us on the interstate or getting off a plane? We’re living in a push-notification, fast-food, tweet-able, convenience-store world; isn’t it about time he catches up with the rest of us and stops the waiting already? Hasn’t it gone on long enough?

Our microwaves and two-day shipping services have conditioned us to believe that waiting is wasting. But God never wastes our waiting.

LEARNING THROUGH WAITING

In fact, it’s only through our waiting that God can teach us certain aspects of himself. There is a reason God has not eradicated the reality of sin yet in us. To make us wait is not to punish, so much as it is to demonstrate and instruct. There must be something redemptive about waiting, as difficult as the tension might be, for God to deem it necessary for each of us.

Psalm 130 is a window through which we see the goodness of waiting and the “okay-ness” of the already-but-not-yet tension that marks Christian living. This psalm is recognized by Bible scholars as one of the seven Penitential Psalms. It's found right in the heart of the Songs of Ascent, a collection of laments, praises, and prayers that frame a sort of “pilgrim’s progress” toward right worship of God.

There's an emphasis on both the individual and communal aspects of sin and penitence. Therefore, this psalm has something pointed to say both to the Church at large as well as to the individual Christian when it comes to sin and hardship and how they relate to our waiting. In particular, it offers four reminders for the person facing sin and hardship.

1. God meets our misery with mercy (Ps. 130:1-2)

Our Father loves us too much to shield us from being brought to the depths. He is not like the over-protective parent who works tirelessly to keep his children free from struggle. We cannot know we are empty until we truly feel it. He will never coerce us into the wrong decision; rather he knows that it is in the depths that his children abandon all attempts at quick fixes and self-help, and turn their gaze upward.

This first stanza is the first of three instances where the Psalmist uses both “LORD” (Yahweh) and “Lord” (Adonai) to describe God. “Yahweh” was considered too holy of a name to speak when referring to God, and “Adonai” was often used in its place.

But the two names have specific and differing points of emphasis regarding the character of God. “Yahweh” is often used in Scripture to point to the covenant faithfulness of God toward his people, while “Adonai” is often used when describing the power and sovereignty of God.

In verses 1-2, God’s faithfulness (Yahweh) and God’s power (Adonai) remind us that God is both faithful and sovereign in hearing our prayers. Our prayers do not fall on apathetic ears or into incapable hands. He is attentive to our cries for help from the depths of our sin. He mercifully ordains our misery, that he might display his power and faithfulness to us.

2. God meets our confession with forgiveness (Ps. 130:3-4)

One of the main reasons many Christians struggle with confessing wrongdoing is that it is simply humiliating. We feel more exposed than the Emperor with his new clothes, like a tabloid will be telling the world in bright and bold letters what we have done.

But as the psalmist recognizes, we are all exposed in the end. Why should we fear confession when we have all fallen short of God’s glory (Rom 3:23)? In verses 3-4, God’s faithfulness (Yahweh) and God’s power (Adonai) remind us that God is both faithful and sovereign in spite of our personal sins.

When we confess our sins, God clothes us with the garments of salvation (Isa 61:10). It is only through the way of confession that we come to understand being forgiven. And even more so, God allows us to go through the difficulty of confession “that [he] may be feared.” When we confess our sins, God will manifest his forgiving power in our lives, which will spark worship in our hearts.

3. God meets our hope with promises (Ps. 130:5-6)

Our only hope of being rid of the battle with sin once and for all is if God makes it so. It is hopeless for us to attempt in our own selves to finally eliminate sin. God must intervene, and therefore we must wait.

The psalmist says in our waiting for the Lord, we must hope. The way Scripture talks about hope is not the same way the world talks about hope. The world’s hope is frail. It's quasi-confidence, with little to bank on other than chance. I hope the Bears win tonight. I hope I have studied enough. I hope life slows down soon.

But the Christian hope is not a shot in the dark. It is grounded not in sheer luck, but in a person. And not just any person, but Yahweh and Adonai Himself. God’s faithfulness (Yahweh) and God’s power (Adonai) remind us that our hopes aren’t hanging in the air. God not only hears us and forgives us but he has also given us his Word to form our hope.

He is worthy of being trusted with our hopes because he will do what he says he will do. His Word itself is power (Rom. 116), and therefore guarantees it.

4. God meets our world with redemption (Ps. 130:7-8)

The hope we're guaranteed is redemption. God’s faithfulness (Yahweh) and God’s power (Adonai) are not only applied to us in an individual sense but in a communal sense as well. Jesus Christ is your personal Lord and Savior, but he’s more than that. He is also our shared Lord and Savior.

Sin has affected us not only as individuals but also as a community. The Fall ushered in a host of fault lines and distortions in our hearts and in our world. But through the cross, redemption is available to those who trust in him.

And, get this: it’s coming for the world God’s people live in, too. There is “plentiful redemption” available to the community and the nation of Israel, an inside-out “making all things new” that we await (Rev. 21:5).

AND NOW WE WAIT

Waiting isn’t easy. No one said it would be, not even Jesus. “I do not ask that you take them out of the world” (Jn 17:15).

Jesus’s plan for our growth is not escaping or fleeing—it’s going through the refining fire. It’s being exposed of our inabilities, confessing our need for God, trusting that his Word is worthy of our hope, and anticipating the work he intends to do in us and around us. It’s all bound up in the psalmist’s words: “I wait for the LORD, my soul waits.”

Perhaps our best shot at living a life of gospel witness is to choose the way of waiting. To slow down and ignore the shortcuts, to stay the course and fight our sin, to hold fast to his Word, and to endure in the world he is making new. Like watchmen in the black of night, we know our task during the dark is hard, but the dawn of morning is on the way.

The waiting will be worth it.

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Zach Barnhart currently serves as Student Pastor of Northlake Church in Lago Vista, TX. He holds a Bachelor of Science from Middle Tennessee State University and is currently studying at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, seeking a Master of Theological Studies degree. He is married to his wife, Hannah. You can follow Zach on Twitter @zachbarnhart or check out his personal blog, Cultivated.

You Have One Job

I know it’s coming. I’ve read it before. But maybe the story will be different this time. But alas, it’s not. It never is.

Genesis 3 always follows Genesis 1 and 2. It’s like watching a train wreck over and over again, and I’m a passive observer with the unfortunate privilege of being an eye-witness to chaos and destruction. Powerless to stop it but forced to watch.

If I had written Genesis 3, things would have gone differently. Adam would’ve done his job, protected his bride, resisted temptation, vanquished the serpent, and left a heroic legacy for the rest of mankind.

But I don’t get to rewrite the story because the story itself tells us its Author is perfect. He doesn’t make mistakes.

Sometimes, I need the story to correct me. That’s what Psalm 127 does. It doesn’t let me long for what could’ve been, but rather live wholly—and trustingly—in what is.

A Garden Psalm

One of fifteen Psalms of Ascent—a set of songs regularly sung by Hebrew pilgrims making their way to Jerusalem—Psalm 127 reminds pilgrims that in every aspect of our created reality, God can and should be trusted.

And that really is the point of the garden story in Genesis—that God can and should be trusted.

But we have a hard time trusting him, don’t we?

When viewed alongside Genesis, we discover that the 127^th psalm is a garden psalm. It reminds us of the origin story that set the assigned rhythms and responsibilities of human life. It’s a psalm about how life was intended to be lived, how we’ve fallen away, and how we can once again be brought back into God’s intended design.

Psalm 127 is a hope-filled corrective in a fallen world, a glimpse into how a garden life is once again possible because of the reality of redemption. Ours is a fallen world, yes, but living as we were intended is also possible, even in the midst of brokenness.

To help him (and us) live as intended, God gave Adam a three-fold job description in the garden, which is echoed in Psalm 127: work, protection, and multiplication.

The Dignity of Labor

God made it clear that humanity’s role on the earth included the responsibility of work:

“Fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion” (Gen. 1:28, emphasis added).

“The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it . . .” (Gen. 2:15, emphasis added).

Work, labor, was not originally a toilsome thing, but as a result of the Fall, God cursed mankind’s labor with toil, making it a vanity, a chasing after the wind. It’s no wonder, then, that the psalmist says,

“Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain . . . It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep.” —Psalm 127:1a, 2

Rather than working from our identity, we fallen humans tend to try to work for our identity.

This misplaced identity comes when the creator God—the original and primary Worker—is disconnected from our work. We work in our own strength and for our own purposes, so our work ends up defining who we are. Those who “rise up early and go late to rest” are enslaved to their own need for validation through accomplishment or success.

Humans were made to work for God. Divorced from this reality, we allow our work to define us rather than allowing God to define both us and our work. Work becomes toil when it’s disconnected from the God who “works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:13).

Since God should be our defining reality, work—a good thing in itself—has a natural limit. Labor should not be all-encompassing. It shouldn’t consume us. Work’s natural end is God-protected rest: “for he gives to his beloved sleep.” This is the natural rhythm that God himself observed on the seventh day when he rested from all his labors (Gen. 2:1-3). Without this rhythm, we cannot live as God intended.

The Role of Vigilance

Adam’s second responsibility in the garden was protection: “The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (Gen. 2:15, emphasis added). The Hebrew word translated as “keep” carries the idea of protection: Adam was to guard the garden. But from what? Hadn’t all of God’s creation been good?

From this language, it’s clear there’s an imminent threat, an Enemy at the gate. Adam’s job was to protect the garden from this insidious intruder.

Sadly, Adam wasn’t up for the task. He let his guard down and the intruder entered the garden, successfully tempted Eve, and Adam found himself falling into disobedience alongside her.

Psalm 127 echoes this protective responsibility with the image of the watchman:

“Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain.” —Psalm 127:1b

We Americans are a people obsessed with security and safety. Unlike the ancient Israelites who lived with constant threats from nature, disease, and foreign armies, our days are passed in relative ease.

We’re shocked when our sense of peace is invaded by natural disasters, terrorism, or senseless acts of violence. We observe tragedy on the news, then quickly coddle ourselves back into a sense of safety. We pad our bank accounts, increase our insurance coverage, and buy safer cars. But without God’s protection, it’s all for naught.

Implied in the verse above is that the watchman is trusting in his own vigilance to bring safety. He is not trusting in God’s protection. This was Adam’s weakness as well: forgetting to trust in his guardian, the God who had created him. Adam failed to turn to God for help in his protective role, trusting instead in his own vigilance and power.

What would have happened if Adam (or Eve) had turned to God and cried out for help in that moment? We’ll never know.

There is only One who can truly protect us. We have one Shepherd who knows the number of hairs on our head. In our moments of greatest fear and anxiety, we must look to him. When we do, we live into the lives we were made for.

The Task of Multiplication

The final task assigned to our first parents was multiplication: “And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth . . .’” (Gen. 1:28).

Psalm 127 echoes these blessings:

“Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them! He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.” —Psalm 127:3-5

Children naturally reflect the ones who bore them. This was God’s intention in calling humanity to multiply, that those made in his image were to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” with his reflected glory (see Num. 14:21; Hab. 2:14). It’s an undeserved reward for men and women to join God in this glorious task.

When we partner with God in the work of multiplication, we’re pictured as warriors, armed with the arrows of proliferation. The enemy confronts each of us at the gates with the lie uttered since the garden: “You can’t trust God. He doesn’t love you. You aren’t blessed. He can’t use you.”

And yet in our work of multiplication—whether it be bearing and raising children or making spiritual children through disciples (see Matt. 28:18-20)—God uses us despite ourselves.

And like all human tasks, unless the Lord does his work, we remain fruitless, unequipped for the battle at hand and defeated by the lie. But equipped with our God-given arrows—the fruit of grace in our lives—we meet the enemy at the gates, ready and triumphant, just as we were intended.

You Had One Job

Adam had one job: to trust God. His sin was thinking he could work, protect, and multiply without God. Psalm 127 reminds us of our own similar tendency and calls us instead to a life of trust.

This kind of life is possible because there is one who did the job Adam couldn’t: Jesus. He boarded the train wreck of this world, bore its destructive consequences, and is putting it all back together.

We can’t rewrite the story, but Jesus has written it for us and redeemed the ending.

So instead of looking back at the garden and lamenting the Fall, we must look forward to Christ. We can trust what he has accomplished, rest in his finished work, and join him in the work he has for us.

Let’s meet our enemy at the gate with a ready answer: Our trust is in Christ, the Lord.

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Mike Phay serves as Lead Pastor at FBC Prineville (Oregon) and as a Staff Writer at Gospel-Centered Discipleship. He has been married to Keri for over 21 years, and they have five amazing kids. You can follow him on Twitter (@mikephay) or check out his blog.

Learning to Live in This Home Away from Home

If you’re a Christian, you’re a miracle. Your conversion was a restoration of fortunes, a miraculous release from captivity, and a joyful homecoming. With God, there are no “boring” testimonies. But over time, life gets boring. We wonder how we lost that lovin’ feeling. We want the good times back. More than that, we want a future of greater glory.

Israel anticipated the hopeful restoration of Zion. But they didn’t just hope for a prosperous city—they looked forward to a reigning king, their promised Messiah.

They looked forward to the time when, after the anticipation and the hope, after the promises and the prophecies, Jesus comes. He lives and dies and rises again to save his people from their sins.

But that’s not the end of the story. The Bible concludes not with a deep sigh of rest but cries out in desperate anticipation, “Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev. 22:20). God’s people aren’t home just yet.

Such is the tone of Psalm 126, a psalm of ascent, filled with what was and longing for what will one day be.

LONGING FOR BETTER DAYS

Even without knowing much of the context, it’s easy to see that Psalm 126 speaks of an Israelite restoration so grand that even the surrounding nations remembered it (Ps. 126:2-3). Maybe it was their return from exile in Babylon. Maybe something else.

Whatever it was, it was like a dream (Ps.126:1). It was the happy day from which all others orbited, evoking laughter and joy, like Job after his suffering (Job 42:10). And the psalmist wanted another hopeful and joyous restoration.

Christians recognize this feeling of elation. Like the conversion experience or a season of personal revival, spiritual restoration awakens zeal for the gospel. These brief moments can stick in our memories for a lifetime, and if you’re like me, are ones to which your heart longs to return.

The psalmist understood that longing. The Lord had done great things for the people of God, and they were glad (Ps. 126:3). But that gladness faded, as it tends to do.  We need more than memories of great things done. We need the hope of great things to come.

NOSTALGIA ROAD

An initial reading of this psalm can leave the reader with the impression that nostalgia weighed the psalmist down—like remembering “the good ole days” that are now long gone. But that’s not quite the tone.

Nostalgia takes us half-way home; it takes us back to the place of our former blessing, but it can’t take us to future hope. Like the glory days of old, only God can take us to that blessed shore. Only God can gather us together with lasting joy, like Israel bringing in plenty during the harvest (Ps. 126:5-6).

“Nostalgia” first appeared as a word in the 1770s, springing from the combination of the Greek words nostos, meaning “homecoming,” and algos, meaning “pain.” In the 1800s, encyclopedias of medicine listed nostalgia as a disease: “severe homesickness.”

Isn’t that what we all are, to some degree or another? Homesick.

Israel sure was, even at home. So are we. We’re homesick for God, for what only he can provide. We’re homesick for final freedom, forgiveness, refuge, victory, and peace.

Christians live in a world that looks like home without the satisfaction of home. As C.S. Lewis said, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” Made for another world, indeed. But we’re in this one now, and we must learn to live here.

LEARNING TO LIVE HERE

Far from a disease bringing one down, the memory of Psalm 126 causes the careful reader to swell with hope. Today may not be like yesterday, but God doesn’t intend to take us back to what was. He intends to bring us forward to what will one day be.

The Garden of Eden was a pointer to—not the culmination of—the glory to come. God’s gift of your future is better than the varied gifts of your past. In the end, even all the revivals of history will pale in comparison to the great revival coming on the clouds. Walking with Jesus is a journey of hope!

So Psalm 126 is not a great and longing sigh as much as it is the first verse of a new and hopeful song. Yes, there is a plea for restoration (Ps. 126:4), but it’s not a cry of desperation. It’s a cry of expectation. It’s a cry for God to do it again, grounded in faith that he will.

The lesson is that learning to live here is more than coping with a happy memory, it’s rejoicing in a coming glory. That doesn’t mean homesickness is easier to bear. It means, given to Christ, nostalgia points us homeward to glory rather than backward to the Garden.

Jesus reverses nostalgia’s direction. With him, as good as our past was, the best is yet to come.

THE GARDEN OF GRACE

However, the glory to come doesn't make the present angst disappear. Life is full of disappointments. So God gave us the Psalms—as Tim Keller says[i]—to pray your tears (Ps. 126:5-6).

No single event of blessing is enough to sustain us forever. We forget. We weaken. We falter. We fall.

We need a resurrection hope. That's why God sent his Sower to sow gospel seeds into our lives (Mark 4:1-20). But that seed doesn't grow instantly. Cultivating takes time we don’t often want to spend. It takes watering when we don’t want to. It takes, in a word, maturing.

Learning to pray our tears is the maturing process by which we prepare for a greater harvest. Psalm 126:5-6 promises “those who sow in tears shall reap with shouts of joy! He who goes out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, bringing his sheaves with him.” As we weep toward God, he takes our tears and plants them in his garden of grace. They take root and grow. But the harvest comes later—as late as the resurrection.

SHOUTS OF JOY

I imagine Mary Magdalene and the other Mary on their way to the tomb of Jesus, weeping as they walk. What a joy it was to know him, to be by his side as he taught, as he healed, as he filled the world with happiness and hope. But that was yesterday. Today, their tears are with him in the grave, buried in the ground.

As they approach the garden tomb, the earth quakes and the stone rolls away. Someone stands before them. His appearance is like lightning. His clothing is white as snow. He seems to know their tears. “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen.”

Could it be? Then behold—he appears and says, “Greetings!”

They fall and worship. Then they rise and go, to tell his disciples that they too will see him. (Matt. 28:1-10).

In other words, they’re coming home with shouts of joy (Ps. 126:6).

NO MORE TEARS

Sally Lloyd-Jones captures this joyful mood in The Jesus Storybook Bible. Mary runs,

And it seemed to her that morning, as she ran, almost as if the whole world had been made anew, almost as if the whole world was singing for joy—the trees, tiny sounds in the grass, the birds . . . her heart.

Was God really making everything sad come untrue? Was he making even death come untrue?

She couldn’t wait to tell Jesus’ friends. ‘They won’t believe it!’ she laughed.

She laughed. Oh, she laughed!

Her mouth was filled with laughter (Ps. 126:2) because the Lord had done great things for her (Ps. 126:3). But not only for her. The Lord had done great things for all his people, for all his friends, for all of us.

Those great things of the resurrection came by way of death. That’s the Christian life: first the cross, then the crown. It's the planting that produces the harvest, the death that produces life. As Jesus said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24).

Jesus is the proof that buried hope grows into glorious reality. The tears of the cross bore the fruit of the resurrection. He went out weeping, bearing his life for sowing; he came home with sheaves (Ps. 126:6), bringing many sons to glory (Heb. 2:10).

COMING HOME TO A BETTER STORY

Israel’s story was a good one, but a better one was yet to come. And there’s a better one coming for us, as well.

One day, the Lord will restore our fortunes—untarnished communion with him, coram deo. The first earth will pass away, and the holy city, the New Jerusalem, will come down out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

We will receive our glorified bodies on the new heaven and new earth. On that great and glorious day, God will say to all his people, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man” (Rev. 21:1-4). He will wipe every tear from our eyes, and death shall be no more!

No more mourning. No more crying. No more pain.

The former things will have passed away.

We’ll finally be home.

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David McLemore is an elder at Refuge Church in Franklin, Tennessee. He also works for a large healthcare corporation where he manages an application development department. He is married to Sarah, and they have three sons. Read more of David’s writing on his blog, Things of the Sort.

[i] Timothy J. Keller, “Praying Our Tears,” February 27, 2000, City Life Church, Boston, sermon, The Timothy Keller Sermon Archive.

God Has You Surrounded

Bad guys often have good vision. In Tolkien’s The Lord of The Rings, Sauron’s all-seeing eye gazes throughout Mordor. In Harry Potter stories, “he who shall not be named” sees through horcruxes what other characters cannot see. Villains who have the ability to see far and wide make others uneasy. Just think if there was someone who could see all you do on a daily basis--talk about nervous!

When we see a lot, we are reminded of how small we are. We are struck by the fact our vision is limited. I grew up on a hill, and although the field leading to the top of the hill was no fun to climb, the view from the top was a treat. I could see adjacent hills for miles. It was hard to tell where one stopped and another started.

Standing there looking out, I was reminded of my smallness. However, sensing God's omnipresence, his ability to see everything and be present everywhere, didn't make me feel uneasy. It brought me joy.

A FIRM FOUNDATION

When Israel climbed those hills to meet with God, they too were struck by God’s vastness and nearness. The promise of God’s presence brought hope to the Jews when they wandered through the wilderness and were exiled to Babylon. The fact that the Lord was with the exilic Jews in Persia was a source of hope to draw on.

Psalm 125 compares faithful Israelites who trust the God who surrounds them to the stability of the hill. Those who trust God—whose presence is with them—become fixed, unmoving. They are the people of God built on a firm foundation. The Psalm says, like Mount Zion, those who trust the Lord are unshaken, like a hill (Ps. 125:1). And unless you live near a fault line, hills don’t move very often!

Psalm 125’s composer is contemplating a vast landscape of hills surrounding the holy city. Jerusalem is built where David conquered the Jebusites and, likely, where Abraham offered up his son, Isaac. Jerusalem is where Solomon built the atop a hill. And Psalm 125 dreams of a celebratory day—like other glorious moments in Israel’s history—when evil is vanquished and peace dwells in the land, an unmoving rock amidst an army of rolling hills. (Ps. 125:5).

Yet the psalmist's most important claim is that the stability of the nation depends on their stable and unchanging God. Our stability depends on trusting him, too. His vastness to uphold nations doesn’t overshadow his nearness to his people.

The psalmist envisions that the ones who trust in the Lord remain unshaken. Those who trust the Lord abide forever (Ps. 125:2). Like a healthy branch that must stay connected to the vine for nourishment, the Christian life demands we trust God as the only place for true stability (John 15:4-7).

When we are tossed by circumstance, we are invited to trust in the abiding love of God. When we continue trusting the Lord, despite ensuing chaos, we can experience real joy. Jesus promises that when we abide in him, his joy can be in us and that kind of joy is full! (John 15:11).

Enduring hardship takes us deeper and deeper into realizing the love of God in Christ. When trouble comes, stand your ground like a hill. Hills don’t lean on themselves. Hills rest upon the terrain around them. Just as hills encircle Mount Zion (Ps. 125:2), God is around us, holding us up, supporting us. When we could be shaken, we rest in his stability—not our own.

THE GOD WHO IS EVERYWHERE

The omnipresence of God, which the psalmist is well aware of, is compared to all the hills surrounding the Temple Mount, “the Lord surrounds his people, both now and forever” (Ps. 125:2). The people of God still know that the Lord is present everywhere, all the time. And that means he is here with us now.

What’s better is that our God promises he will not only be with us today but his presence will not shift tomorrow. To be present everywhere means you can’t take a day off and go somewhere else. If he can only be present everywhere, there’s nowhere for him to leave to. No space for vacation. This is good news for our hearts and our minds.

God surrounds you. He sees your frustration and, by the presence of his Holy Spirit in your life, brings comfort to it (John 14:16). He sees your anxiety and he mediates peace to you (John 14:27). God’s omnipresence is good news. He steps into our shattered existence. The people of God realize God is here. More than a notion though, the people of God get to rejoice in his good and faithful presence.

Israel longed to celebrate with the Messiah who would shatter his enemies. The wicked scepter they knew would be overtaken by a righteous one (Ps. 125:3). His righteous sword would shatter the rod of the enemy. The best fight scene in cinema has nothing on the clash the Bible paints of God wiping out his adversary.

God will win and restore. The exiles wanted the restoration of Jerusalem. You and I long for a day when what’s upside-down in our cultural moment no longer rages in our land. When shootings cease. When racism subsides. When abuse stops.

Because the promise of Scripture is that the power of death, hell, and the flesh were defeated at the cross, the wickedness and injustice we see in the land will be finally vanquished (1 Cor. 15:26).

God is not only fully aware of the brokenness we experience, he valiantly steps into the fray as the God-man Jesus Christ. Righteous among the unrighteousness. Freedom among bondage. Peace among chaos.

TRUST BRINGS STABILITY

The psalm operates as a prayer for the Israelites: “Do good, O Lord, to those who are good, and to those who are upright in their hearts!” (Ps. 125:5). But we know that we’re not good. We get frustrated when someone cuts us off on the highway. Our inboxes preach that we lack some diligence.

We know our very natures are tainted. Total depravity means we have a bent towards doing what’s wrong (Rom. 3:23). And God sees all of our sins! He sees our missteps. His omnipresence necessarily entails that he is always among us when we get short with each other. When we waste time that could be used for his glory, he’s there. While we stumble and fall, he’s present.

The promise of the end of this psalm, though, shows us that we can approach God in our brokenness and ask him to keep us stable. When we trust the Lord, he will steady us. The psalmist is clear that those who trust in the Lord receive stability.

We are finite. God is not. We are fickle. God is not. In all our messiness, are we trusting in ourselves or trusting in our God?

A PEACEFUL CELEBRATION

When I visited Jerusalem a few years ago, I saw a nighttime celebration.  Kids giggled and ran down the street while twenty-somethings proudly paraded blue flags around. They danced in the streets. I think the psalmist is envisioning a dance party like this—a celebration of peace.

In Scripture, God brought peace to Israel many times. Psalm 125 is hopefully looking towards the day when shalom will come to Israel (Ps. 125:5). God will lead evil away from his city and peace will be restored.  Israel looked forward to the restoration of stability.

Through the gospel, we know that God sovereignly saves us from our wickedness (Rom. 5:6). The way we used to walk led toward destruction (Matt. 7:13; Prov. 14:12). But because of God’s peaceful takeover of our lives, we walk on a new path (Matt. 7:14).

The good news is the Messiah has come and he has brought stability to chaos. For those that trust the Lord, the Holy Spirit guides us among our brokenness (John 16:13). The God who sees all and knows all continues to walk with us despite our mess.

His omnipresence doesn’t mean he is too busy elsewhere to be near you. His vastness shouldn’t make us uneasy. Rather, it’s a comfort. The God of the Bible—who sees everything—is simply asking us to trust him.

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Zak Tharp (@zaktharp12) is an editor, writer, and lay pastor, pursuing an M. Div at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY. He grew up in rural East Texas and received an undergraduate degree in Communication Studies at Stephen F. Austin State University. He enjoys coffee, hammocks, theology, and seeing people savor Jesus! He has served in camp ministry and as an intern at Fredonia Hill Baptist Church in Nacogdoches, TX.

The Hazardous Work of Discipleship

I was slumped over my computer triaging my inbox when a knock broke my concentration.

“There’s a guy asking to speak to a pastor. He’s . . . well, he’s crying. Can you go talk to him?”

I said sure, and inhaled a long, slow breath as I prayed over what lay ahead.

He was sitting with his back to me when I arrived. I recognized him. He thanked me for seeing him, his head slightly bowed like he was in the principal’s office.

He wasn’t sure how it happened. Things had gotten out of hand, one thing had led to another, and somehow he had spent the night in jail. The details were fuzzy. Their flesh wounds were not.

“Something’s got to change with me,” he said. But he had no idea what that meant. “I don’t want it to go on like this. What do I do?”

This is the hazardous work of discipleship. The part no one prepares you for.

when you don’t know what to say

I intentionally say it’s the hazardous work of discipleship—not the pastorate—because sooner or later every disciple-maker finds themselves in conversations they weren’t prepared for. These conversations are loaded with questions that don’t have easy answers and are smeared with the filth of sin.

“When someone’s life is falling apart, we need to offer robust truths that stand the test of time.”

In times like these, disciple-makers need something substantial to grab hold of and to offer to drowning disciples. Flimsy Christian phrases about “seasons of life” and “God having a plan” simply won’t do.

When someone’s life is falling apart, we need to offer robust truths that stand the test of time—truths like those in Psalm 124.

Dangerous Discipleship

Written by David likely after a time of great onslaught and suffering, this psalm “better than any other describes the hazardous work of all discipleship and declares the help that is always experienced at the hand of God,” wrote Eugene Peterson.

The first five verses declare the dangers of discipleship:

If it had not been the Lord who was on our side when people rose up against us, then they would have swallowed us up alive, when their anger was kindled against us; then the flood would have swept us away, the torrent would have gone over us; then over us would have gone the raging waters.

Where would we be without God? In every time and place, the church has faced physical or spiritual persecution, and sometimes both. Beatings, torture, marginalization, spiritual warfare, lust, greed, death; these are commonplace among God’s people.

What believer has not known a threat that rose so steadily and powerfully around them that they thought they might be carried away by the flood? What believer has not known the suffocating pressure applied by people bent on demeaning or destroying their character?

“If it weren’t for an almighty, all-powerful God we would surely be carried away by the raging waters; we would surely be swallowed up.”

But it is in these moments, at just the right time, that our Lord comes to the rescue. “Imagine what would have happened if the Lord had left us, and then see what has happened because he has been faithful to us,” wrote Charles Spurgeon. If it weren’t for an almighty, all-powerful God we would surely be carried away by the raging waters; we would surely be swallowed up.

“This psalm, though, is not about hazards but about help,” Peterson writes. “The hazardous work of discipleship is not the subject of the psalm but only its setting.” The psalm now turns to what happens in such a hazardous setting.

Why the Caged Bird Sings

After calling us to look back and see the Lord’s rescuing hand, David beckons us to celebrate our escape by magnifying the Rescuer.

Blessed be the Lord, who has not given us as prey to their teeth! We have escaped like a bird from the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken, and we have escaped!

When all our friends and help have evaporated and all hope is lost, then God breaks the snare and sets us free. Our deliverance comes by the hand of God, so we must thank him properly, for he snatched us out of danger like a helpless mouse in the snake’s fangs or a bird who narrowly escapes the snare. “We rob [God] of his due if we do not return thanks to him,” wrote Matthew Henry. “And we are the more obliged to praise him because we had such a narrow escape.”

Spurgeon, in his commentary on these verses, lingers on the bird and snare imagery:

“Our soul is like a bird for many reasons; but in this case the point of likeness is weakness, folly, and the ease with which it is enticed into the snare. Fowlers have many methods of taking small birds, and Satan has many methods of entrapping souls. . . . Fowlers know their birds, and how to take them; but the birds see not the snare so as to avoid it, and they cannot break it so as to escape from it.”

We are helpless, like a caged bird, as much as we wouldn’t like to admit it.

Paul Laurence Dunbar was a poet born to emancipated parents in June 1872. He went on to become one of the first influential African-American poets in America. In his poem titled “Sympathy,” he writes of the desperation of being another man’s property:

“I know why the caged bird sings, ah me, When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore — When he beats his bars and he would be free; It is not a carol of joy or glee, But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core, But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings— I know why the caged bird sings!”

Though we are not enslaved to other people today, we have all been slaves to sin (Rom. 6:16). But if you are in Christ, the gate of your cage has burst open and you have been set free! Spurgeon writes,

“Happy is the bird that hath a deliverer strong, and mighty, and ready in the moment of peril: happier still is the soul over which the Lord watches day and night to pluck its feet out of the net. What joy there is in this song, ‘our soul is escaped.’ How the emancipated one sings and soars, and soars and sings again.”

Brothers and sisters, rejoice at your rescue and freedom in Christ! God has snatched you out of the darkness and brought you into his marvelous light (1 Pet. 2:9). He has grafted you into his family, making you his very own son or daughter (Rom. 11:17). Who is this God who rescues sinners and adopts them as his own?

The Lord Who Made Heaven and Earth

Recently I was teaching a class on what the Bible says about immigrants and refugees. My wife walked in a few minutes late after dropping our kids off, so she sat at a table in the back with one other woman. We paused for discussion and they got to talking.

My wife discovered the woman was here as a refugee after fleeing persecution for her Christian faith in Eritrea. We asked about her family. One of her brothers-in-law is in prison for his faith; the whereabouts of her mentally ill brother are unknown, she told us through tears.

The next day my wife wanted to text her and let her know we’re praying for her. But what do you say in a situation like this?

My wife sent her Psalm 124 and told her we were thanking God that she escaped and was able to come to America. The psalm meant so much to the woman that she read it to a group of Eritrean ex-pats who pray regularly for their country, then they prayed the song for their loved ones back home.

OUR CREATOR AND COMFORTER

The final verse of Psalm 124 tells us, “Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” Yahweh, the great “I Am,” is our rescuer. He is our strength and shield, our shelter from the storm. He is the omnipotent, omniscient one who created heaven and earth. He is not a weak god incapable of saving but an Almighty God with whom all things are possible (Matt. 19:26).

This is who our help is in! Our Creator is our Rescuer. “He made heaven for us, and he will keep us for heaven,” Spurgeon wrote. He will not abandon us forever, though for a short time we may suffer. This is the God—the truth—to whom we point desperate disciples in times of great need and trouble. This is the truth to whom we point ourselves when in desperation or despair.

When we praise the God who made heaven and earth, we start to see our lives in the proper perspective. We begin to realize God is shaping and forming us through our suffering into men and women who look like his Son. When we worship God as Creator, we increase our trust in God as Comforter.

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Grayson Pope (M.A., Christian Studies) is a husband and father of four, and the Managing Web Editor at GCD. He serves as a writer and editor with Prison Fellowship. For more of Grayson’s writing, check out his website or follow him on Twitter.

God Rest My Soul: Finding Rest in Service to the Master

After a few minutes of scrolling through social media or flipping through the news, it’s easy to feel overcome by evil in our world. It attacks us on all fronts—politics, natural disasters, crime, injustice, disease—all the way down to our own sin-scarred relationships. As we leave the safety of our slumber each morning, we’re jolted to the reality that sin is not only present and  working to make us weary but is entirely against us.

In moments like these, Psalm 123 is a welcome reminder to our tired hearts. When faced with difficulty, these four short verses reminded the Israelites of their true hope and shifted their eyes to the Lord, their Master. We may not be on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, as these Israelites were, but the reminder that we are not our own is one we can find great hope in singing each day.

The Hands of Our Master  

Perhaps it seems strange that hope can be found in realizing we belong to someone else. Evidence of abusive leadership surrounds us. We’re familiar with jobs where management seems concerned only for themselves, or we’ve worked in environments of instability and poor leadership.

Yet even in these difficult environments, we can find hope. This is exactly what the Israelites did to bolster their strength:

Behold, as the eyes of servants

look to the hand of their master,

as the eyes of a maidservant

to the hand of her mistress,

so our eyes look to the LORD our God,

till he has mercy upon us. (Ps. 123:2)

Male servants looked to their master for direction; maidservants to their mistress. Servants looked to their master not only for work but for protection and livelihood.  The psalmist juxtaposes these cultural realities for Israel with their need to gaze toward the Lord their Master and his great mercy.

Along the same lines, we can look with joy at our master because he has shown us his good and perfect character. When we look to his hand, we turn to the hand that has provided for his creation since the beginning of time. He not only supplies for our physical needs (Ps. 104:14) but he revives our hearts by the daily bread of his Word (Deut. 8:2-3). The hand of our Master doesn’t demand anything he won’t graciously supply, because he is the source of strength in our lives (Phil. 4:13; 2 Pet. 1:3).

Like any good master, God not only supplies us with our physical needs and strength but also our safety. Israel was told repeatedly throughout their history not to find protection in their own strength but to rest in knowing that the Lord was with them (Isa. 41:10; Josh. 1:9). He is still this same refuge and strength to our weary hearts today (Ps. 46:1). Amidst a world of uncertainty and change, we can find hope that we are firmly held in the grip of our Father’s hand (John 10:28). If we are in Christ we have been sealed by the Spirit (Eph. 1:13), and we can be confident that the Spirit will carry his work of sanctification in our lives amidst the difficulties (Phil. 1:6).

As we meditate on being a servant of God, we free ourselves from the immense pressure to provide in our own strength and guarantee our own safety. Psalm 123 reminds us we were never meant to carry these burdens in the first place. We are the servant of our Master and it’s his provision and protection we should run to.

Looking to His Hand

The reality of our servanthood also gives us peace of direction. Our world is full of overwhelming choices. It beckons us to tone our bodies, increase our platform, eat organic, travel the world, and make more money. We can often feel guilty for all we can’t do and all we can’t fix.  Yet while the world spins with demands, we find peace looking to the direction of our Master.

It is God who “sits enthroned in the heavens” (Ps. 123:1). It’s his directing hand we wait upon. This humble recognition allows us to serve in the tasks God has given us today with faithfulness. We will still grieve over sin and difficulties, but when we look to our Master’s direction, we remember to lay aside our expectations to be the savior we will never be.

Instead, we can walk with faithfulness in the works God has appointed for us (Eph. 2:10), whether that be in taking up a client’s case or taking up a neighbor’s garbage. Looking to the Father’s hand gives dignity to our work, whether that work is preaching a sermon or wiping a child’s face.

Recalling the purpose of serving our Master redirects the heart to a higher perspective and shapes the heart’s posture. The difficult co-worker, the frustrating neighbor, or the needy children are no longer obstacles to our own anxious plans; instead, we can see them as the specific direction of our Lord. We can love her today, forgive them right now, and serve their needs this morning for our Master, who has asked us to.

The Master of Mercy

While we find hope in the God who supplies grace, protection, and direction—these would be nothing if our Master lack mercy. And it’s mercy that the psalmist cries out for and waits expectantly, “Have mercy upon us, O Lord, have mercy upon us, for we have had more than enough of contempt” (Ps. 123:3).

Matthew Henry remarks on this verse that “God’s people find little mercy with men; but this is their comfort, that with the Lord there is mercy.” The mercy of God is not like the mercy of people. It is far greater! His mercy is our hope as we enter each day. The mercy of the Lord holds us during a day of battling the ornery, sinful will of a stubborn child; it’s our hope when we feel the sting of a friend’s words or when we feel the weight of sorrow as we turn on the news. And this mercy is our only hope when we stand face-to-face with the sin in our own hearts.

We are servants who have failed and servants who will fail again, but our Master is merciful. Mercifully, he provides for our life and breath, and he provided us with eternal life in his own Son (Eph. 2:5).  Not only does he give us direction, but he cares enough in his mercy to correct us and keep us from returning to the filth of sin (Heb. 12:6; cf. Jer. 5:10). He is merciful to protect us; more than that, he is merciful to forgive us. When we had nothing but rebellion to offer, Christ in his mercy forgave (Eph. 2:1-10; Tit. 3:5).

LOOKING TO HIS MERCY

Time and time again, the Israelites saw the sovereign provision and steadfast mercy of their God. Despite their utter revolt, their Master would have compassion, restore their fortunes, and gather them back to himself (Deut. 30:3). This song is the hope our hearts need to sing each day!

How has the Lord shown himself good today? How have we seen his faithfulness amidst our specific difficulties? Amid the sinfulness of our world, the answer is not in finding our independence, but instead resting as a dependent servant.

The weight of sin may bear down on us, but let’s lock our eyes on our Master’s hands. Let’s preach his unchanging promises to our hearts, search the scriptures for his faithful character, and commit to the tasks he has given us today.

Above all, let’s join the psalmist in not only waiting for mercy but actively searching for it. Let’s linger in the mercy that is great enough to provide hope for the darkness of sin inside of us and the world around us.

When our soul has had more than enough of conceited disdain (Ps. 123:4), we look to the hands of our humble Master whose scars hold our hope—and the unfailing mercy we need.

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Brianna Lambert is a wife and mom to three, making their home in the cornfields of Indiana. She loves using writing to work out the truths God is teaching her each day. She has contributed to various online publications such as Morning by Morning and Fathom magazine. You can find more of her writing paired with her husband’s photography at lookingtotheharvest.com.

Why God's People Rejoice in Gathering

Imagine approaching your childhood home. You see a familiar sign on the front porch that reads, “Home is where the heart is,” though the “H” is missing, a couple other letters are broken, and others are so caked with pollen and dust they’re almost indiscernible. You’ve arrived at the house which was so full of life when you were a child, but years of vacancy and neglect make for a cold welcome. Where is the warmth that once filled this house?

We all long for a welcoming, safe home.

ABANDONED HOMES

While we may appreciate the aesthetic of a well-crafted house, what makes a house a home is the life within it. The same is true of the house of the Lord.

We see this clearly in Psalm 122, as the author begins with the invitation:

I rejoiced with those who said to me, “Let us go to the house of the Lord!”

Who is the "us" that invited him? It was the sojourners who would make their annual pilgrimage to the temple in Jerusalem. This psalm would become one of many they would recite as they made their ascent to the holy city.

What a shock to be a pilgrim who, upon arrival, finds the house of the Lord was empty. He makes the journey through “many dangers, toils, and snares,” only to learn the house is vacant—there isn’t a single light on in the whole building, not one person in sight.

Would the weary traveler still be glad about his invitation? Hardly.

The rejoicing hinges on the personal invitation. He is glad to make the journey because he makes it with others and plans to meet others there (v. 4). It's a family reunion of sorts, in which traveling disciples meet with other disciples. Their rendezvous is overdue, so they are eager to reconnect.

God makes a disciple by bringing a man or a woman to Christ. But that is only part of the work. God also saves them into a family, the church. Disciples are meant to rejoice and long to reconnect with their extended family each Sunday in worship and throughout the week. It's not the building that makes the church but the people gathered before the Word of God.

BROKEN HOMES

Abandoned houses serve as a memento of the life that once existed within their walls. They remind us that things are not as they should be.

This reminder is even more painful for those currently living in a broken home. Their house may be full of life, but not firing on all cylinders. Maybe a divorce or an untimely death is a constant reminder that the dinner table has one empty chair.

Part of God’s design for his covenant people is that the spiritual family can make up for the parts of the nuclear family that are demolished by death, disease, and depravity. God’s family should be united (v. 3), and those brothers and sisters and friends (v. 8) that comprise it should pray for its well-being (v. 6), peace, security (v. 7), and prosperity (v. 9).

Some of the most moving testimonies in the church involve mothers and fathers who stood in as parental figures for those who never had them or who live far away from moms and dads. Beautiful stories unfold when those have been abandoned by or have left behind their families find a new family created by the shed blood of Christ.

God makes disciples as they come into relationship with Jesus, but they are matured in the community of the Church.

CHAOTIC HOMES

Others may not come from a broken home or ever experience the emptiness of returning to an abandoned house. Yet what family has not experienced a season of chaos?

Perhaps your home is free from glaring and unrepentant sin and God has blessed you with a house that has been passed down for generations. But the reality is we will all face sins of varying kinds (Heb. 12:1) and seasons of busyness that border on chaos.

Some Sundays it may be hard for the modern pilgrim to drag himself to church because he worked a sixty-hour week. A mom of small children is likely putting in even more hours on the regular, and coming to worship on Sunday might seem impossibly difficult.

In Psalm 122, the pilgrim’s feet are standing within the gates of Jerusalem (v. 2). Those feet must have been tired, sore, and blistered, but to paraphrase Mother Pollard, “his feet were tired but his soul was rested.”^[1]

What is it that compels you to keep gathering with the saints?

Is it the chaos that seems to increase every time you get ready to head out the door to church on Sunday morning? Is it the weariness you feel after a long hard work week? Is it the spiritual apathy that creeps in?

Obstacles and temptations try to prevent us from gathering with God’s people, but push through and resolve to find nourishment for your soul. The body and its ailments will pass away, but God and his Word will last forever (Matt. 24:35).

The mature disciple begins to prioritize church, not just for her own needs, but because she recognizes she is called to multiply disciples and think beyond herself.

DWELLING PLACE OF THE LORD

To bring this all home (pun intended), a word has to be said about the relationship between the Old and New Covenants. It's commonplace to see preachers and theologians play fast and loose with the relationship between the Old Covenant temple and the New Covenant Church. To be sure, there are some commonalities. However, it is a mistake to draw a one-to-one comparison between the two.

The distinguishing mark of the Old Covenant temple was that it was indwelt by the presence of the Lord. The God of Israel himself inhabited their building of high worship.

The arrival of Jesus in the first century A.D. flipped this whole paradigm on its head. He was indwelt personally by the Spirit of God (Matt. 12:18) and referred to himself as the new and better temple (Jn. 2:19; Matt. 12:6). What’s more, he promised that when he departed he would send that same Spirit to indwell his followers.

The New Covenant equivalent of the Temple is the church, to be sure, but only when we correctly define the Church—the people of God, the living stones (1 Pet. 2:5) that are built up into a spiritual house.

REJOICE TO GO TO THE HOUSE OF THE LORD

Do you rejoice to go to the house of the Lord? I hope you do. But hopefully it’s not because the music is superior or the aesthetics are amazing. The right reason to rejoice in going up to the Lord’s house is that his presence is there.

The house of the Lord is found in the midst of his people. There, Jesus is present and glorified.

Otherwise, it’s like walking into an abandoned house.

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Sean Nolan (B.S. and M.A., Clarks Summit University) was born and raised in Upstate New York where he is now working to plant Engage Albany, a church in the heart of the capital. Prior to that, he served at churches in Troy and Maryland and taught hermeneutics. He and his wife, Hannah, are raising three kids: Knox, Hazel, and Ransom. You can read all of Sean’s articles here.

^[1] Quoted in The Montgomery Bus Boycott: A History and Reference Guide, Cheryl Phibbs, 2009.

God Will Help You

I once survived a season of life when three of my daughters were ages three and under. It was nonstop sippy cups and naptimes and potty training and diaper changes and “Hey, that’s mine!” and “Share that toy right now or Mommy is going to take it away” My husband was pastoring a community of young adults at the time; he was gone almost every night. My best friend’s husband was a youth pastor and he also was gone almost every night. Her three kids were each two years ahead of mine. So nearly every evening was spent at the park, where two moms wrangled a total of six kids, running the children into exhaustion until we moms crossed the bedtime finish line.

Because my best friend was just ahead of me in the parenting marathon, I had the benefit of watching from behind how she handled the ages ahead. Each evening at the park I saw how she dealt with the fours and fives and sixes of her own kids.

As I watched her interact with her kids at the park, here’s what I heard her say over and over and over: “God will help you.” It was their family’s refrain, her motherly chorus.

A PARENTAL REFRAIN

“But, it's my turn!” God will help you.

“She pushed me!” God will help you.

“No! I don’t want to go home!” God will help you.

It probably sounds a little silly out of context like that. Of course she said many other instructive and helpful words. Of course she gave commands, doled out discipline, lavished warm hugs, and physically removed her children from harm.

“God will help you” wasn’t all she said. But she always said it.

I heard this truth so often that I began picking it up, too. It stuck in my mouth and sunk into my heart because nothing is truer. It’s no pithy, “Be nice . . .” or, “You can do it!” or, “Just obey, kid.” It’s real, robust truth.

There’s nothing I could say to my child, age one or twenty-one, that would be truer than the statement, “God will help you.” It turns out my friend was following the example of the Israelites.

Where Israel’s Help Came From

“God will help you” is the banner of Psalm 121, a Psalm of Ascent, which was corporately rehearsed by the Israelite pilgrims as they ascended the hill to the temple mount in Jerusalem for feasts three times a year.

Together, they sang, “I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth” (Ps. 121:1-2).

As they climbed, they confessed. The Lord—and the Lord alone—was the source of their help. He was there, in the temple above, and they looked up, seeking him, and remembering how he made heaven and earth and that he would help them, too.

Their confession of need and call for help morphed into a reminder of truth to each other. They moved from speaking in the first person to the second person, and proclaiming to each another,

“He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade on your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day nor the moon by night” (Ps. 121: 3-6).

It’s as if the pilgrims were first reminding themselves, and then one another, this is who our God is! He is our helper. He made the earth. He keeps our feet on the path. He never sleeps. Day and night he keeps us. God will help you.

The benediction is future-focused: “The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life. The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore” (Ps. 121:7-8).

Those ascending the hill were rehearsing these truths truth to one another. The Lord has kept you. He is keeping you. He will continue to keep you. He’s not changing. God will help you.

Where Does Our Help Come From?

My friend knew that her children needed the Lord’s help. She knew they were like the Israelites, helpless on their own. She knew that they most centrally needed help from God above, their maker, sustainer, and redeemer.

She knew that if she only demanded good, achievable behavior, then she would raise pharisaical children—children who would become adults who would rely on their own efforts to produce outward results rather than inner change. She knew their human efforts would eventually ring hollow, that they would be unable to do more or try harder. She rehearsed to them from a young age the truth that they would need God’s help. She taught them their help must come from the Lord.

We live in an age of self. Self-help, self-empowerment, do-it-yourself. We want to be self-made men and women who reach down and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.

In this self-absorbed and self-reliant age, we need to be reminded that this same reality applies to us. You and I need to return to the truth of Psalm 121. It is God who made us. It is God who made heaven and earth. It is God who keeps us. It is God who will help us.

Self-esteem psychology says look within. The psalmist says look up.

Jesus says, “Come to me and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28-30). He harkens back to the psalm. The Son’s offer of rest reminds us that he is God saying to us, “I am the maker of heaven and earth. I hold your feet to the path. I keep your life. I never sleep. Come to me.”

Good News for a Weary Age

What do we need help with right now? Where are we striving after with our own efforts and energy? Where have we run dry, come to the end of ourselves? Where do we need to stop looking within and start looking up?

Both this psalm and the gospel of grace say, “behold” (v.4), not “behave.”^[i] The call of Scripture is to look up—look up to where our help comes from. It comes from the Lord.

God, through his Son and by his Spirit, will help you.

The words “God will help you” never grow old and never fall short. They are true and they are able.

To the woman in my church whose husband is unfaithful: God will help you heal. To the young man oppressed by addiction: God will help you be free. To the adult daughter whose mother is dying: God will help you let go. To the pastor whose faith feels burnt-out and dry: God will help you be refreshed. To the lonely single: God will help you rejoice. To the poor, the sick, the needy, the sad, the desperate: God will help you.

As you and I ascend, as we climb, as we journey like pilgrims in this life, let’s remember Israel and her song. Let’s lift our eyes to the hills. Let’s remember that God made heaven and earth. He holds our feet to the path. He does not sleep. He will keep us. He delights to help his children.

In this age of self, let’s return to the rhythms of the covenant community ascending the temple mount. Let’s confess that we are not enough on our own, but the Lord is. Let’s remind ourselves and each other, God will help you.

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Jen Oshman is a wife and mom to four daughters and has served as a missionary for 17 years on three continents. She currently resides in Colorado where she and her husband serve with Pioneers International, and she encourages her church-planting husband at Redemption Parker. Her passion is leading women to a deeper faith and fostering a biblical worldview. She writes at www.jenoshman.com.

[i]I am indebted to Jared Wilson’s book The Imperfect Disciple for this phrase.

The Blessing of Being Wrong

“YOU’RE WRONG!” Several middle school students I once ministered to competed in regional debate tournaments twice a year. They were well prepared on the topic of debate: they knew the rebuttals and oratory tactics to land their points, and how to demonstrate the logical flaws in their opponents’ arguments. Neatly dressed and armed with little index cards of research—and cut-throat for winning the competitions—these students were preparing for debating and defeating contrasting world-views.

When it was time for a tournament, I would famously offer any student debating in the competition $20 in hard cash if they would, in the midst of their debate, stand up, point at the other side, and yell “YOU’RE WRONG!” and then quietly sit down again, thus ending the debate.

Whether they wanted to avoid the scolding and potential embarrassment of losing the tournament for such a brash tactic, or whether they were unsure of my ability to pay, I don't know. But no one ever took the risk.

Hearing “YOU’RE WRONG!” is an awakening. I for one don’t like it. But I need to hear it. “You’re wrong!” forces me to look at my situation or point of view and assess where I may have missed a turn. Sometimes, being told I’m wrong leads me to hunker down into my convictions and stand my ground. No matter what, it’s always an awakening moment. There’s a blessing in being wrong.

Painfully Aware

The poet of Psalm 120 had a moment of awakening: “In my distress I called out to the Lord.” The weight of discovering he’d been wrong was startling and traumatic; it crushed his soul. He felt misery and anguish, a blend he called “distress.” Before we can appreciate the psalmist’s awakening, we have to understand his story.

Three times a year the Hebrews were required to leave their homes and journey to Jerusalem holy days of festival celebration. Their pilgrimage was an embodiment of the life of faith. Moving to Jerusalem was “ascending the hill of the Lord,” all the while asking, “Who can do this?” (Ps. 15; 24). As they traveled, a liturgy took shape to remind and provide “a guidebook and map” for the journey of faith, as Eugene Peterson would say. This liturgy was captured in fifteen Psalms—Psalms 120-134—affectionately known as the “Psalms of Ascent.”

Every so often I realize that an important date is so quickly approaching that unless I shift into high gear, there is simply no way I’ll be prepared. I’ve never waited to buy Christmas presents until Christmas Eve, but there have been a few close calls for birthdays and other holidays. The thought of missing the date gives me a much-needed awakening.

I imagine there were some busy Jewish families that would share that moment of sheer fright when they realized the festival was merely a day or two away. Pulling together a few essentials and getting out of the house was hectic and hurried. The frustration of living so far away and making the journey is heard in the psalmist’s cries: “I have stayed in Meshech . . . I have lived among the tents of Kedar,” as if to say, “I am so far from the city, so far from God’s place, so far away from being who I should be.”

The journey to Jerusalem was hard and perhaps painful, but necessary. Realizing our distance from God can get us moving. We hear “YOU’RE WRONG!” and realize we’re so far in the wrong direction that unless we get moving right now, we’ll never catch up. Welcome to repentance.

Becoming aware of his distance from God was the only way the psalmist could be changed. Awakening to his reality was the only way he could be moved. This is exactly what God wants for us.

The Refreshment of Repentance

Repentance is described by many as an emotion. We often hear of repentance in terms of sorrow, anguish, or contrition. While the awakened sense of wrongness that comes with repentance does bring true sorrow, repentance isn’t merely an emotional response. In the psalmist’s case, there is anger at his own decisions, disgust over his apathy, and desire for a new life. But his emotions don’t tell us he’s repenting. His actions do.

The singular verb, “called,” of Psalm 120 tells us how to respond to God when awakened to our sin. It directs us to action. After hearing “YOU’RE WRONG!” he realized the sinfulness of his hometown had worn off on him, and he called out for help: “In my distress I called to the Lord.”

Left to himself, he’d always be stuck, always be distant from God, always among those who love war. That was the painful realization of his heart and soul. He longed for peace, for justice, and for nearness to God.

Repentance must be an action for us too. We have restitution to make, changes to implement, steps to take. But repentance cannot and will not be real and refreshing until we make the first step—crying out for help.

So many self-help systems are geared around willpower; washing your face, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, and other simple strategies. But growing near to God though takes another path—helplessness. The false notion that “God helps those who help themselves” falls short. God helps those who cannot help themselves, and so they cry out to him in desperation.

The refreshment of repentance is not in the actions we take or the sorrow we feel. The refreshment of repentance starts with the awareness that “YOU’RE WRONG!” coupled with the cry “GOD, HELP!” We can’t fix our wrongness but we can cry out for help.

Promised Reprieve

The full opening verse of Psalm 120 speaks for the whole: “I cried out to the Lord, and he answered me.” He was wrong and weary, misguided and messy. Far from home and far from God. Yet God answered him. This is the blessing of being wrong. But it’s only for those who are aware they are wrong and need some help. God answers those who realize they’re wrong and cry out to him.

What resounding hope and help this is for stagnated and sedentary disciples like you and me! No matter how wrong we are, no matter how painful the awareness of our sinfulness, God is there to meet us when we cry out. He’s there to bring a blessing when we are wrong.

Instead of self-importance or righteousness or religious performance, all we have to offer God is a cry for his help. He meets all our weakness with all his strength. This is the promise for those of us who hear, “YOU’RE WRONG!” and answer, “Yes, it’s true! God help me!” For those who will cry out in need and desperation for help and rescue from their sin, God promises he will answer. His answer gets us moving. His grace silences the shout of “YOU’RE WRONG” and tells us “Come, home!”

What are we waiting for? The loving, open arms of the Father are open to us. Let’s allow the painful awareness of our sin to urge us to cry out for his help, and let’s start on the road to God. He’ll not only meet us on the way, but he will also bring us the whole way there.

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Jeremy Writebol is the Executive Director of GCD. He is the husband of Stephanie and father of Allison and Ethan. He serves as the lead campus pastor of Woodside Bible Church in Plymouth, MI. He is also an author and contributor to several GCD Books including everPresent and That Word Above All Earthly Powers. He writes personally at jwritebol.net. You can read all of Jeremy’s articles for GCD here.