Beneath The Dirty Hood

A holy bone-fire

Vance Havner — from The Best of Vance Havner (out of print):

“Becoming a minister is not a matter of looking over an assortment of professions—law, medicine, physics, music, and then saying, “I think I’ll be a preacher.”  God is not running a cafeteria where you choose your favorite piece of pie.  Jeremiah had a holy bone-fire.  He did not merely have to say something—he had something to say.  There is a lot of difference between pouring out one’s heart and getting something off one’s chest.”

How to spend a $75 gift certificate from Bass Pro Shops...

…without getting anything sports related:

The little things can really get you

David won't touch him.  The guy wants to kill him, but David has so much respect and honor for God putting this guy in authority, that he won’t do anything to influence changing things.  Even when the guy’s life is handed to him and his friends tell him (basically) these circumstances prove it’s God’s will! he won’t make a move.  And the fellow has been harassing David for years, for nothing.  Later, David executes a guy who does take things into his own hands the way David wouldn’t.  What strength and consistency in living according to your convictions, even at great cost to yourself.  Incredible.  What a man.

Then in a second he’s ready to go into a rage and kill Nabal, for a one-time rude snub.  Won’t help us with a little food and supplies?  You die!  Wow.  Ever put up with something from someone for so long, and one day you lash out at someone else who doesn’t have anything to do with it?  That’s this.  Venting pressure.  So real life, so typical.  You meet the big challenge, then something smaller sneaks up on you and gets you.  Elijah stands up to 400 opposing prophets and a crowd…then runs from one woman.  Peter is ready to take on a few hundred soldiers with one knife…then can't give a straight answer to a little servant girl.  Sometimes the most dangerous time is right after a big victory or a time when you really had to be dependent on God.  Maybe that’s why Jesus' example (and Israel's in the desert) was give us THIS day our daily bread.  God’s strength and presence and grace isn’t stored-up, like a battery, for use later.  He makes us be dependent constantly.

"Hence it is the saint who is the object of the greatest favor who needs to be on his guard, that he allow not his eye to rest on himself where the favors are sent, but on God from whom they come. If his eye turns to himself because of the favor, then the favor has been the means of turning his heart from God to a mere gift of His."  (Hungry Heart #6–16)

Why we do what we do

That explains it!

I've often noticed there's a place where I get with God when I've been thinking and reading and listening and praying for 30 minutes or an hour or more.  And there's no shortcut.  I can't get there in 5 minutes.  It's like after 5 minutes it's blue and then later it's green and after an hour or more it's red.  I do the 5 minutes all the time, but if I don't do the longer I never get to red.  And I need red. 

Jason Fried is a software developer and in talking about working alone, he (inadvertantly) explains why arrow prayers and 5-minute quiet times with God are not enough.  Incredibly, he even calls it Getting Real: the alone time zone:

Getting in the zone takes time which is why interruption is your enemy. It’s like REM sleep — you don’t just go to REM sleep, you go to sleep first and you make you way towards REM. Any interruptions force you to start over. REM is where the real sleep magic happens. The alone time zone is where the real productivity happens.

(Thanks Lifehacker)

"The gracious trauma of a shattered shell"

The new Christian Carnival magazine is on the shelf now at Daddypundit.  I liked Dr. Bob, beautifully reflecting on the past year:

How many gifts do we have, buried under a hardened armor, awaiting the gracious trauma of a shattered shell? One can only imagine–one fears to imagine.

Especially when they don't deserve it

Do you calculate your tip?  I do.  And I'm ashamed to say I realize I've been doing it almost to the nearest dime or quarter!  Worse, most of the restaurants we eat at are in the $20 range (for both of us!); so there I am figuring 15% service = $3 or 20% service = $4 making sure I don't give one precious dollar more than deserved!  I've been changing my thinking on that (it's almost conviction), and now here's Roy Williams (who understands the idea of undeserved favor) jabbing even deeper:

"I have a theory about leaving tips on tables at restaurants: the size of the tip isn't really an expression of your judgment regarding the quality of service you've received. It's an expression of your generosity, the bigness of your heart. It's not really about the waiter or waitress. It's about you.

This idea can be especially fun when you receive truly abominable service. That's when you can leave a tip that's totally over the top and then smile all the way to your car as you contemplate all the different ways the story might end:

1. The waiter, recognizing the tip as a gesture of love, pulls himself together and has a much-improved day, giving everyone exceptional service. Your ray of sunshine touches 276 lives before it fades into the memory of yesterday.
2. The waiter, misinterpreting the tip as proof that it doesn't really matter whether or not he does a good job, continues his slacker attitude and reaps the life of mediocrity he deserves. But sometimes, late at night, he is haunted by the memory of the strange day he received a 20 dollar tip for serving a 7 dollar sandwich. What was that all about?
3. The waiter, shamed by the monster tip he knows he didn't deserve, assumes it must have been meant for the cook. Your gift has now triggered a crisis of conscience. Will the waiter pass the tip along to the cook and grow as a human being? Or will he "steal" it and forever know himself to be a thief?
4. The waiter, desperately needing the extra cash, accepts the tip as a gift from God. Congratulations, you are now an angel, God's messenger, a finger of His divine hand.
5. The waiter, truly stupid, believes he deserves the tip and pockets it with bravado. Let him have his sad moment of glory. There won't be many like it in his life.

The bottom line is this: People need love. Especially when they do not deserve it. And in the words of Iome Sylvarresta, "Love isn't something you feel. It's something you give."

Private verdicts

Telling the truth is one thing, but sometimes it doesn’t matter because of the one doing the telling.  If my behavior seems inconsistent, and my life doesn’t give credibility to what I say, I can be seen as a hypocrite.  Result?  There’ll still be convincing and persuading going on, but not of what I intended:

The witnesses who were the heart of the case against Michael Jackson wound up serving as inadvertent stars for the defense, convincing jurors through their dubious credibility that the pop star was the victim of liars and profiteers.

Sometimes witnesses are the only thing people have to go by; the subject of the witnessing may not speak for himself:

Jackson himself…was no more than a supporting player to the jurors, who said they paid little attention to him.

There’s always a jury watching, measuring credibility.  Often those jurors will actively look for anything that can discredit the witness.  That way they don’t have to take the witness seriously or listen to what he says. 

The amazing combination of pride and self-loathing

You would think those two couldn’t go together at the same time.  Well, I’m sittin g here right now praying and recognizing the general self– consfidence I continue to hang onto and at the same time loathing my total inability and failure in about every area of life.  No one else would say I’m so arrogant or incapable, but no one knows like me.  And I’m trying to read the Bible to get into a spiritual mood, without dealing with God about it, and it’s not working…

Lord…it’s you…all you…no man is saved by the size of his army…

honesty…honesty…agreeing…the wisdom of the prudent is to give thoguth to their ways, but the folly of fools is deception…I argee last night the whole time I was writing the thing on Unpuffiness I was mad, and puffy…embracing the right to be mad for no reason; just because I could…I insist on being saved by the size of my army, yet I know my army is pathetic…I admit I AM my own point of reference…

his divine power…lay down…really, on the floor…quiet…not just introspection (self-centered)…

One hour…Psalm 131, Proverbs 14, 1 Thessalonians 3–5…and Hungry Heart #6–14:

You can be sure that you are in the will of God when He keeps you dependent upon Himself, walking in the Holy Spirit, and abiding in the Lord Jesus Christ.

"Often all we think of is, having our need met; but how little a thing is that with God! It would cost Him nothing, we may say, to meet the need of a lifetime in a moment; and a lesser love than His would supply it at once, and get rid of the constant burden.

"But that is not His way. To supply the need is a small thing; but to supply it in such a way as to make us feel in each seasonable supply the Father's heart never withdrawn from us, the Father's heart ever employed about us--that is what He means. 'Give us our daily bread': is it not much more than to ask, 'Give us now, that we may not have to come again?'"

"The God-given experience of the Spirit's working many a time passes away, and leaves the soul apparently dull and dead. This is only until the double lesson has been fully learnt: (1) that a living faith can rejoice in the Living God, even when feeling and experience appear to contradict the promise; and (2) that the divine life only predominates as the life of the flesh is held in the place of death, inoperative. The life of the Lord Jesus is revealed as His death works in us, and as in weakness and nothingness we look to him."

"Knowing this, that the testing of your faith worketh patience" (James 1:3).

How to build a WAL-MART (week 3)