This Is A Fire Door Never Leave Open - Psalm 31

Honesty and transparency is hard some come by. We can really hardly ever find it in others much less ourselves. We are so unwilling to open up and say we are at a deficit and are hurting; that we are struggling to move on forward. I even stutter when I know I need to be and reluctantly relent to the truth. David says:

9 Be merciful to me, Lord, for I am in distress;
my eyes grow weak with sorrow,
my soul and body with grief.
10 My life is consumed by anguish
and my years by groaning;
my strength fails because of my affliction,
and my bones grow weak.

Prayer is powerful. It helps us to understand ourselves in relation to God and pushes us to be honest. I find it harder to lie to myself when I'm praying than any other time. I really think it isn't possible to worship the Lord, to reach to grasp the master, until we have let go of ourselves. Pain and struggles have a tendency to show us ourselves. It shakes our foundations of self confidence. I believe it is there to wake us to conscientiousness, to wake us from our selfish slumber, in order for us to seek out something (really someONE) that is trustworthy to hold onto. Unfortunately in a society of defiant self-reliance, we are told to scream our uniqueness and toughness over the proverbial affliction. We wear shirts that say "I beat cancer" or post things about "proudly being an introvert" that subtly (or not so subtly) imply "I will gladly sacrifice my brothers and sisters in Christ on the alter of my self comfort." Is it awesome that you have recovered from a disease? Yes! Did you really beat it? Is it cool that you know something about yourself? I think it is. But is it really something to be celebrated? No. It has a set of strengths and a set of weaknesses that need to be overcome same as being an extrovert. When we celebrate impediments, or suffering we've "overcome" we really defeat the Divine purpose of it. I want to admit my failings and my need, thereby freeing my hands of myself to grasp on to Him. Think about this line of thinking looking at the concluding verses of this psalm.

21 Praise be to the Lord,
for he showed me the wonders of his love
when I was in a city under siege.
22 In my alarm I said,
“I am cut off from your sight!”
Yet you heard my cry for mercy
when I called to you for help.
23 Love the Lord, all his faithful people! (the call)
The Lord preserves those who are true to him, (the promise)
but the proud he pays back in full. (the warning)
24 Be strong and take heart (in Him),
all you who hope in the Lord

Let us abandon ourselves and grasp on to Him. Confess, repent and praise Him for He loves us and has forgiven us!

In Christ,
paul



music for the week (as usual: no claim of being not "offensive" but it is really good):

Last Call - Psalm 30

I think probably the single greatest praises we have come as a result of answered prayer. And particularly the prayer of helpless surrender brings salvation; starting the road that is narrow. It is almost the easiest time to sing His praise. Often we call back to our conversion to fuel our song.

1I will exalt you, Lord,

for you lifted me out of the depths...

2 Lord my God, I called to you for help,

and you healed me.

3You, Lord, brought me up from the realm of the dead;

you spared me from going down to the pit.

I think that is good but I think that is a bit shallow when it comes to singing to Him. I mean look at it, only singing about things we have received by prayer is the short end of the stick so to speak, because what happens when they aren't answered or they aren't answered with a comfortable response? Our worship subtly becomes about us and it takes more and more just to get us singing. Greater heights, more lights and eventually herecy. Manufacturing gold dust and feathers to be "moves of the Spirit" become the norm and claiming nonsense as our own. To appeal to ourselves is truly the lowest common denominator. It feeds our pride in order to do what we ought. Lewis puts this well in Mere Christianity:

"Teachers, in fact, often appeal to a boy's Pride, or, as they call it, his self-respect, to make him behave decently: many a man has overcome cowardice, or lust, or ill-temper, by learning to think that they are beneath his dignity—that is, by Pride. The devil laughs. He is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride—just as he would be quite content to see your chilblains cured if he was allowed, in return, to give you cancer. For Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense."

It may be a more satisfying and subtle devil but it is still the devil none the less. I definitely lean more to our freedoms in Christ but knowing how sadistic pride is, even the music of those churches, divorced from their pastor's heretical teaching, still makes me uneasy. I'm not going to say people can't worship the Lord correctly by singing a Bethal or Hillsong song but it definitely makes me weary. My pride loves to be fed no matter where it comes from.

The best way to ensure we sing and we sing rightly is to sing of the works of the Lord. Not what we get, but rather what He has done. Making Him the focus of most of our worship songs fuels and reorients our hearts. So whether what comes is hard or easy, painful or pain relieving, it is all His work. We can get to the point where we can say as Job did, "though You slay me, yet I will praise you." Look for the work of the Lord in the psalms, and the songs we sing.

4Sing the praises of the Lord, you his faithful people;

praise his holy name.

5For his anger lasts only a moment,

but his favor lasts a lifetime;

weeping may stay for the night,

but rejoicing comes in the morning.

In Christ,
paul





music for the week (as usual: no claim of being not "offensive" but it is really good):

Deeper Well - Psalm 29

Ascribe to the Lord, you heavenly beings,

Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.

Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name;

Worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness.

The Lord sits enthroned over the flood;

The Lord is enthroned as King forever.

The Lord gives strength to his people;

The Lord blesses his people with peace.

This psalm begins with a call to worship and then ends in actual worship. You would think it would be opposite. Paul talks on and on about theological topics, showing the length and breadth of the gospel. He then on occasion breaks into song. Here is the other side of the peak of praise. One side is stating the truth, the other side is singing the truth. We dig into truth, realize that we should praise Him, and then praise Him for/by the truth we have dug into. When I feel it is hard to sing, when I feel the motivation isn't there, I think my instinct like all of us, is to just try harder; that is if you even desire to try if the feeling isn't there. We dig into ourselves and attempt to muster more strength to sing. That is, much like our sanctification, the wrong way to do it. We must dig into the Lord and what He is and what He has done in order to grow in our fuel for praise. When we dig into ourselves for strength, direction, and motivation, we dig into a dead well. There is nothing there. It is the fallacy of Pat Robertson/fundy crowd. It is faulty logic that if I just hid from the world, and do things like "pray the bad spirits out of goodwill sweaters," I will have enough strength to remove all the sin in my life. It will somehow remove all temptation from my life and I can just stop sinning all together. This. Is. Wrong. Thinking. No amount of isolation, and strength of my own will make me sinless. It is again, digging into a poisoned well. We must dig into a deeper well. The well that has no end. 

13 Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life." 15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”

John 4

Dig into Him and sing.

In Christ,
paul




music for the week (as usual: no claim of being not "offensive" but it is really good):

Just Give Up - Psalm 28

I often times think about the Christian life, salvation, and my life, trying to distill it down to it's most basic forms. I do this to try find a pin point; a place of motivation from my beginning to go to my end. It really involves being honest about myself and not trying to b.s. my way into an ever stipulated world where I feel better about myself, but a place where I cut the crap about where I am in order to move on. I think, it is important to strip away our excuses to get us down to the bedrock. We excuse ourselves with every identity label in the book. "I don't do that because I'm an introvert," "I avoid my neighbor because I'm busy," "I don't talk to that person because they have a habit of talking down to me," "I grumble about that person because they always 'look at me that way'," and on and on and on. In a society of ever increasing "identity culture" it's easy to forget our place before Christ and where we are and what we are commanded to do now that we are in Him. Now pretty much anyone who knows me and has had any discussion around this knows I am generally adamant about abandoning self reflection and introspection, but I don't really see this as the same. I look to see where I am excusing myself to elevate how I feel about myself for the express purpose of getting back to ground zero. I am full of pride, that is the root of all my sin, and that made me deserving of death. Others commend me to do that to find out the intricacies of myself; to find out more of myself or with the foolish thought that I have any ability to purge sin from my heart. It really ends, in my opinion, in a place where I am, whether directly or indirectly, feeding the root. That root is the extent of the power in my being, and it really just has the power to make death. Humility and Christian charity (love), is inherently outward focused. Even in 1 Peter 2, Peter even examples this perfectly in verse 21

...Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.

Christ gave up Himself for us. Zacchaeus gave up his pride and status to see the Lord, and so did the blind man in Luke 18. It's quintessentially a letting go of ourselves to cry out for mercy to the Lord of all creation. It is an outright abandonment of ourselves to be near Him. All my excuses for my sin are just impediments to seeing Him. I would say that if we can't let go of ourselves, seeing our real state (our identity which is really that root of pride), to give Him all we have, we will never let go of "the sin that so easily besets us" to seek out others; to love them and serve them as Christ's example has shown us. What do we think "die to yourself daily" and "pick up your cross and follow me" means? The call of the Lord is always to do that. It is really, in my opinion, the distillation of the work of the Spirit: to call us to that by showing us the step above, and then empowering us to do that. It is like a force like gravity and we fight against it like a cartoon person hanging to a root on the side of a cliff. The call of the Lord is let go of the root of sin, and only with the power of the Spirit we can. We don't believe He will take care of us if we do....but the truth is He always does. So I'm left with the psalmists call:

1To you, Lord, I call;
you are my Rock,
do not turn a deaf ear to me.
For if you remain silent,
I will be like those who go down to the pit.
2Hear my cry for mercy
as I call to you for help,
as I lift up my hands
toward your Most Holy Place.

Lord I need your mercy now more than I ever have. Give me the strength to abandon myself on my cross, and to love and serve You, Your people and those who don't know you. Help me by your Spirit, and remind me by the time I spend with your people and by the songs we sing of You.

In Christ,
paul




music for the week (as usual: no claim of being not "offensive" but it is really good):

With Your Greatest Fears Realized, You Will Not Be Comforted - Psalm 27

I've had a pretty lame week. Since Monday I've been wreaked with stress because, as I like to put it, my boss likes to pour stress over me like syrup over pancakes. It's a lot of cutting me off mid conversation with the number one technician running one of the departments. A verbal post-it note stapled to my forehead accompanied with an actual post-it note, or a folder, or a file. It really gets under my skin and I lose my cool. It usually is a petty request for detailed information that will take me an hour to track down for an update, and it won't be specific or it'll be wrong, or whatever. It's adding hours to my day for something that won't really bring comfort or really information. I know why he does this. He is getting crazy pressured and the stress is rolling down hill per-se. I'm really no different. I'm a terrible at not dumping on others. I try really hard not to but it happens. My lovely wife talked me off a cliff today. I mean, look at that! A whole week ruined by, if I'm being honest, one day. All the accusing, and lost packages; bad information, and unanswered emails, didn't amount to anything. I actually had a fairly relaxed week, work load wise. What was I afraid of? Losing my job? Being told I'm as worthless as I already think I am? I don't really know. Maybe it's a combination of those and more. I just couldn't hear anything else but that pent up torture. I couldn't declare with confidence that I really trusted the Lord. I wonder sometimes if David didn't declare what he did as a way to talk himself into what he knew. To have faith as C.S. Lewis described it; to hold on with his mind and reason, the things that his fickle heart sometimes gives up on.

1The Lord is my light and my salvation—
whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life—
of whom shall I be afraid?
2When the wicked advance against me
to devour me,
it is my enemies and my foes
who will stumble and fall.

I don't think this is just brash confidence because he ends the psalm with:

14Wait for the Lord;

be strong and take heart

and wait for the Lord

David, in times of trouble does his fair share of fearing. He also does his fair share of reminding himself and us to turn to the remedy of our fear. A confidence in a sovereign Lord that has our best interest at heart. Many times not the most fun, or effortless times, but the best ones for us. What would happen if all my worst fears were to be realized? What one hope would or could carry me? Everyone and everything in this world can tear me down with failure after every cutting insult. Only my Lord has taken those cutting, tearing and hurt upon Himself....and that, for my sake. Ultimate power, and ultimate love, for me. I turn and remember that love every time I enter His house. When I sing His praise, I am at piece. When I resound a response, only then I am set at peace.

4One thing I ask from the Lord,

this only do I seek:

that I may dwell in the house of the Lord

all the days of my life,

to gaze on the beauty of the Lord

and to seek him in his temple.

in Christ,
paul





music for the week (as usual: no claim of being not "offensive" but it is really good):

Vindicated - Psalm 26

Vin·di·cate
verb
[past tense: vindicated; past participle: vindicated]
    clear (someone) of blame or suspicion.
    "hospital staff were vindicated by the inquest verdict"
    synonyms:    acquit, clear, absolve, exonerate;

This is probably one of my favorite double meaning words from the psalms that is then filtered by the gospel. David screams to the Lord to vindicate him, because he thinks he has not done anything wrong, and that could be right, often in David when it is concerned with outward actions to Saul. David was upright in his relationship with Saul and his pleas are to the only one who can show him right but we know something else from the new testament authors: no one is right before the Lord. When David says in Psalm 26 "Vindicate me Lord" and we look at the following sentences, they aren't true before the Lord. Like Psalm 130 says "if You Lord kept a record of sins, who could stand?" The answer is no one. So when we look at David's petition "vindicate me Lord" it becomes a plea to be made right. The definition pivots its weight, and to "clear someone of blame" means something totally different. But isn't that what Jesus is? The great vindicator? God remains the only one who can vindicate us but to do so becomes, not totally different, but totally deeper! Jesus is the one who makes us right before the Father. He IS the one who clears us of blame before the holy and just judge: himself. He makes this true in the eyes of the Father.

"1 Vindicate me, Lord [He has by His obedience and sacrifice],
[therefore] I have led a blameless life;
I have trusted in the Lord
and have not faltered.
2 Test me, Lord, and try me,
examine my heart and my mind;
3 for I have always been mindful of your unfailing love
and have lived in reliance on your faithfulness."

Isn't that such wonderful news! Think of that as you sing. God has vindicated you, and not in a temporary way that depends on you but depends on Him. Praise Him!

in Christ,

paul



music for the week (as usual: no claim of being not "offensive" but it is really good):

They Look Like Strong Hands: Psalm 25

Over and over I run my own self into the ground. I try and hold my own ground. I trust that somehow, strength is inside me. It's like every time you swear you won't eat so much or [insert self control issue here] and you just end up doing that. I think "that porn site," "those cookies," "that shopping site/store," "my phone," "that couch," "that guitar," "that book," "those Netflix marathon"...those are just things. Inanimate objects, date, furniture. They can't hurt me, and they can't make me do anything I don't want to do. I just have to say "no" just like Nancy Reagan taught me to. That is totally true. Those things cannot do a thing to you and they cannot do a thing to me...that we don't want them to. But when the chips are down on the table, what do we do? We place our trust in ourselves, don't we? We think we can have strong bodies, strong minds, or strong hands and nothing or nobody can push us around!!! THAT, my friend was never the real problem. When the old testement and particularly the Psalms, talks about shame it means this: to be found to have placed your trust in something that failed you because it was not trustworthy.

Oh, and God forbid we ACTUALLY restrain. Say you say no to that extra helping; say you say no to those sweats that will for sure lead you to a minimum 5 hour Law and Order marathon. What then? How do you feel about that? What swells up within you? Your pride. The chief, numero uno, the big bad daddy that is at the root of all sin, and kicked off our fallen condition. You lay that beside the Cross. See Jesus in pain, and look that in the face. See what that puffy feeling feels like and that trust in yourself did. It should make you and me meek. Often enough, it does not, but when it does, truly does, it looks a little like this:

16Turn to me and be gracious to me,

for I am lonely and afflicted.

17Relieve the troubles of my heart

and free me from my anguish.

18Look on my affliction and my distress

and take away all my sins.

20Guard my life and rescue me;

do not let me be put to shame,

for I take refuge in you.

21May [the] integrity [of Christ] and [His] uprightness protect me,

because my [fruitful] hope, Lord, is in You

If and when we place our trust in Him, we place it in the only thing in the whole of creation that is trust worthy to save us....Jesus. The one who was not of creation but what all creation is from. Sing to Him your thanksgiving because:

"...no one who hopes in you

will ever be put to shame"

in Christ,

paul

music for the week (as usual: no claim of being not "offensive"):