The Joy-Cup

We are commanded in scripture to fear God…to know that God works all things after the counsel of His own will...giving us love and desire for what He loves and joy in whatever He sends...or does not send; and then preparing a table of abundance in the wilderness where there was nothing.

All the "if's" and “why’s” in the lives of men are guaranteed and certain in their final results in the mind of God. Knowing this is the obedience of the heart to the will of the Spirit. It is our right worship of almighty God, the understanding that makes us whole and the faith that is none of our own making. Summer or winter, working or resting, alone or befriended, wealthy or wanting, nothing can satisfy apart from Him.

So we pray that “If the allure of anything, however "good", draws me from Him, let it be struck from me, so that even the pain of pruning draws me to Him.  So let everything about me die...the loves and hates, the body and will...only let Him be my shield and my eternal great reward.”

This is the eternal rest of salvation, the storehouse in which all meaning is garnered.

This is the joy-cup He makes to overflow.

Independence Day

For the last week, we have commemorated the 150th anniversary of that great tragedy the battle of Gettysburg and for me history has rarely been more alive. Today is Independence Day ... a day of thanksgiving ... though many have forgotten exactly what it is we are to be thankful for. We visited the Pennsylvania State Capitol building in Harrisburg this afternoon. The legislature is not in session and the effect of the deserted grounds was almost chilling.

The city of Harrisburg feels rather more weighted than distinguished by the emerald-domed edifice. Even with a crowd about it, that capitol seems dead. For a moment, with the sun baking my face and my neck kinking so my eyes could scale the summit and the gold image that crowns it, the architecture transported me to stand before the crumbling ruins of Rome and Athens. "Confidence of man in man is the fundamental sanction that upholds every secure title to wealth," one inscription read. Here man has made a name for himself...and here he tears himself down with his own hands.

"He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision."

Here rubbish littered the bottom of dry fountains and so "Like a muddied spring or a polluted fountain is a righteous man who gives way before the wicked." There we crossed the street before wide stone stairs scaling the height to great carved doors and in the shadow of imposing Corinthian columns and gleaming white statuary a shiftless character sprawled unconsciously across the crumbling steps of a tumbled-down shop. Now we read an inscription beneath the honorary statue of John Frederick Hartranft, the minion of tyrants, now a vague mention of knowledge as the seat of justice over some leaf-strewn bench.

Such strange ironies are scattered over the stone and wood of this thing made with man's hands. Here a lion spews water fiercely from a drain pipe across from a door carved with images of productivity and industry. There an eagle, that flagrant emblem of aggression and coercion, perches over a gate along with the face of the god-fearing William Penn, the father of this commonwealth that is his namesake.

"Let tyrants and slaves submissively tremble
And bow down their necks neath the juggernaut car"

The capitol's stark white walls glared wearily on the grimy streets and buildings before it, almost as if were tired of housing an empty shell. It is the Fourth of July...our Independence day...and yet while the white opulent structure, supposedly the seat of the defense of justice - the state - looks vacantly out of bared doors and window sashes sporting cobwebs, a rock concert shakes its foundation from two blocks away.

Last to be paused before is a complete replica of the Liberty Bell, bound by some pragmatist advocate of certain kinds of public silence to hang still and silent, yet with the ringing words of almighty God emblazoned on it nonetheless..."proclaim liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitant thereof." I can knock on it with my hand and its voice sings...muffled like the distant tolling of a lament, echoing over the public square. One day perhaps it will ring again once more...if it is allowed to endure until that time when all things are made new. When the last stones of man's dead works are shown to be what they always were and lie crumbling in the dust before the piercing glare of the living God, we will no longer need these sobering reminders to fear and obey Him.

"Down with the eagle and up with the cross!
...Shouting the battle cry of freedom!"

“Woe to him who builds a town with blood
and founds a city on iniquity!
Behold, is it not from the LORD of hosts
that peoples labor merely for fire,
and nations weary themselves for nothing?
For the earth will be filled
with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD
as the waters cover the sea."
~Habakkuk 2:12-14

The proclamation of true freedom is certainly a battle cry.  To what end do you build this Independence Day?

The Peony

Kissed of the sun and damp with dew

Gauzy robes and lustrous hue

I met her...

Her blushing laughing gauzy face 

Toward heaven’s dawn drew mine apace

Breathed glory 

Glory glory a happy fragrant song.

And they danced, the exuberant throng,

In worship,

With Her sisters bent in the breeze together.

So gracious yet fleeting; while we forever

Blessed bend

In reverence and sing before a worthy Master

Who clothes us both, our heavenly Father

And Creator.

While she blooms bright and fades in time

We, in His luminous robes, kiss the Son sublime;

Bloom brighter

And look to a fuller light - His everlasting day.

~EKL

Be Still - The Sabbath of Fellowship

There is a kind of communication in fellowship that holds a special power...it is silence.

Silence is always full of something...it is another language without words.  The pause of contentment in conversation at the end of a good meal, the weighty silence of sorrow in pain and grief, the companionable stillness while surveying with awe some glorious view in creation or the quietness charged with joy in moments of glad communion are things that cannot be replaced with mere words.

We are, in fact, enjoined to silence before our God.  Psalm 46 says “Be still, and know that I am God...” This is not a suggestion or a request.  It is an imperative command...a required service of worship to God by His people.  It follows an admonishment to consider the works the Lord has done; to survey with Him together the pleasure He has made for Himself through commanding all things after the perfect order of His will.  He finishes the command with a declaration of His right to exact such service from men: “I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!” -Psalm 46:10

Consider: Sunday is a reminder to us to rest and rejoice in the God of our salvation for the wonderful work He has done for us through His Son, Jesus Christ.  He tells us as a Father that it was made to be holy because He rested on the seventh day after speaking the world into being.  We as His children should not always be disappointed in the silence with which our Maker sometimes answers our prayers.  We should rather see it as a special gift of fellowship with the Creator of the universe...a sabbath rest in the accomplishment of His work for us when the glory of His sovereignty is most eloquent.  In times of "silence" we are pressed to rest in His sovereign will and commune with Him by confiding quietly in the promises He has abundantly provided.  It is here in the ceasing of our strivings that the Possessor of all wisdom and knowledge shows us how one Word is yet enough to provide for our every need.

The Christian need not and must not always strive within himself.  We, the children of God should rejoice that He cares for us so much as to desire communion with us in stillness and obey.

"Through a glass, darkly..."

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
1Corinthians 13:12

The verse has troubled me for some time.  Or rather, I should say, its common use in contrast to its true import has troubled me.

Culturally, among Christians, it is quoted often with the ennui of a common truism and dressed up with the sparkle of interest and a butterfly that identifies references as “inspirational” and worthy of featuring on a Hallmark Card.  Read sonorously at uncountable weddings, it becomes the part of tradition which we hear without hearing...at once bereft of any but superficial meaning and tied up with the perfunctory bow of an enigmatical concept called love.

In any case, one gets the vague impression that being really known would be uncomfortable, so this verse must be referring to that best-buddy kind of knowing that makes you feel “understood” without baring more than a few select extracts from the heart censored for security of pride.  After all, if someone really knew us what room could there be for love?  There we often let the verse lie.

.....

I remember vividly the day I understood.  For perhaps the first time, I was consciously remembering and it frightened me.  A circumstance, itself inconsequential, settled a new yoke of responsibility on my seven or eight-year-old self and because I could recall a time when I was free of it, I was unaccountably terrified of going any further in my short lisp of a life.

Every child comes to this time...where childishness becomes conscious, even while it has yet to become maturity.  A mother mourns that first loss of the baby lisp, the stumble over a word.  Then others will watch in vain for childish communication with all its frank, winsome naiveté and haphazard rambling.  The three year old hardly knows what he means when he presents his three chubby digits for your smiling inspection, and no one grudges him the privilege of ignorance on that score.  Soon enough the five year old will be proud to tell you how big he has grown and you will almost unaccountably miss the unpretentious baby in the self-conscious boy.

To our dying day, every one of us has the same insatiable desire to understand, and a dread of what will happen when we do.  The thought of knowing brings with it the shrinking of our childhood from the brink of understanding because we only know in part.  Our human heart, peering through the grand score of God's Word as an amateur musician, struggles to trace out the infinite scope of power and complexity with finite eyes seared by the burning glory of it.  The indwelling Spirit leans over our shoulder and points out the feeble lines of our own parts with surety and love, humming the music until it fills our being with its beauty.  Shut the score, though, and the thought of remembering your part in the symphony with all its intense import and and excellence can cause any one of us to throw aside our sheets of music in despair.  

This is the knowing in part.  But partial knowing carries a heavy responsibility.  The reflection in the glass, dim though it may be, was never meant to be a high thought set aside for moments of euphoric reflection on the swing at sunset.  Jarring as the thought may be, far from moving us to apathy and futility, 1 Corinthians 13:12 is an imperative call to maturity.  The Father did not give us the promise in His Word and send us His Spirit to bear witness to the fulfillment of His promises so that we could languish in the waiting.

 For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer,

he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass:

For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was.

James 1:23-24

To be in the midst of assembled believers and shudder over the raw grating dissonance and muddiness of the collected notes is to look in the glass and see the shadow of our natural face with all of its flaws and scars.  What natural man wouldn't wish to forget that natural face?  How easy it is to say then, “I saw the music once, and that is enough.  It is in my heart, and this is all that matters.”  How great a travesty is the secret of the eternal song carried about as a shadow in the depths of Christian souls and never learned or played simply because we all knew that in this life we could never perfect it.

The truth is, we are so concerned with the natural face peering out of the glass at us, that we forget the glass itself.   If we are honest, our sin, when held up to the light, fascinates us; not always, we can flatter ourselves, with the hardened inclinations of a dead conscience, but with the secret pride that says, "Mine is truly ugly."  The rehearsal is full of discordant sounds, and the first one to look up from the jungle of notes before him and say, "I can't possibly do this, it is too horribly difficult," has essayed to raise his "I" to a higher level than the symphony.  There is a great measure of pride in the one who indulges in self-deprecation by believing the music must stop because he has deemed his part to be beyond help or recall.

“For as the rain comes down and the snow from heaven, and do not return there, but water the earth, and make it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater,

"So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it."

Isaiah 55:11

The perfect law of liberty was not composed for our especial benefit.  The divine artist writes to His own pleasure and glory, and His work does not exist merely so we can enjoy its sublime beauty on the mirror in our closet.  It is not the kind of symphony that can be made futile merely because we prefer not to participate, or play our part in secret so that no one may observe the wavering our touch makes in the reflection.

Any student of music can tell you that it does no good to dabble in music with self-fulfillment in mind.  There is no place for neutrality or, ultimately, the expressing of your own will.  In the same way, you must rest in the assurance that you can only begin to know your life-part because you are already fully known by Him.  Your heart must so submit to the hand of the master that you no longer know your hand to be pulling the bow, but you are at once certain of His hand pulling yours.  The beating of your own time must cease to wander stumbling off the steady rhythm of His music and instead be bound to it by His sure hand. 

This is to look into His perfect law of liberty, to see the reflection of true freedom in very submission and to continue in it.  

The compelling reality about the music of the perfect law of liberty is that one must not only hear, but listen... and not forget, but play.  

The overpowering weight of the score, after all, does not rest in our hands, nor even is the completion of our part given into our keeping. 

The secret to playing a symphony is to simply play the notes before us in obedience and 

trust the author to make the symphony.

In the waiting for completion we cry out with Paul:

“O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”

A girl of especially stormy passions and vivid imagination, I cried the day I knew what I could never forget again.  I told my mother with an almost pettish desperation that I wanted to go back to being a little girl.

My dear mother...from my earliest memories the sensible, sympathetic constant that anchored my tempestuous emotions.  I will never cease to be grateful that she was usually undaunted by the wild outbursts of joy or sorrow that rocked my self-aware little world.  That day my tears brought a quiet smile to her face, not unlike the smile I imagine God harbors over our knowledge-bereft wailings.  Before she said a word, I knew she understood, and then she spoke comfort that I didn’t entirely understand, but accepted with the faith that children have in good mothers.  “When you have grown up, you will be glad that you were never able to go back.  You will learn to love growing older.”  And of course she was right.

To this day she still reminds me early and late of the words another wise woman, Elizabeth Elliot drew from this poem, “Do The Next Thing:”

"At an old English parsonage down by the sea,
there came in the twilight a message to me.
Its quaint Saxon legend deeply engraven
that, as it seems to me, teaching from heaven.
And all through the hours the quiet words ring,
like a low inspiration, 'Do the next thing.'

Many a questioning, many a fear,
many a doubt hath its quieting here.
Moment by moment, let down from heaven,
time, opportunity, guidance are given.
Fear not tomorrow, child of the King,
trust that with Jesus, do the next thing.

Do it immediately, do it with prayer,
do it reliantly, casting all care.
Do it with reverence, tracing His hand,
who placed it before thee with earnest command.
Stayed on omnipotence, safe 'neath His wing,
leave all resultings, do the next thing.

Looking to Jesus, ever serener,
working or suffering be thy demeanor,
in His dear presence, the rest of His calm,
the light of His countenance, be thy psalm.
Do the next thing.

The little girl in me no longer casts longing glances over her shoulder.  There can be no mourning for imperfections done away when every look into the mirror is a brush with the perfection that we long for.

But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

1 Corinthians 13:10

The time darkened glass, serene and expansive, unerringly casts back shadows of the light from timelessness.  The fading of it as it shifts away from a touch awakens the painful longing for it to be still it forever.  Here stands the briefest sliver of time, yet this space, thin enough to shatter at a brush from eternity, stands yet adamant before the mortal, an impenetrable testimony to a sure fulfillment...fulfillment that will engage the whole being un-impaired by sin.  At last to know as we are known, to truly commune with God, face to face.  What joy it will be to no longer reach out over the deep waters of His glory and see the muddying of our sin-tainted hearts obscuring them.  So into this glass, “this substance of things hoped for and evidence of things not seen,” we look again and again.

"But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty,and continueth therein,

he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work,

this man shall be blessed in his deed.

James 1:25

The faith of a man who has cast himself entirely on God…

(As quoted in A Word in Season, vol. 2, pg. 5-7, by R.J. Rushdoony)

"What made St. Patrick great when many men of far greater ability are today forgotten or barely known? There were many church men of far greater learning than Patrick, better trained for the job than he was, and in every human respect his superior. While Patrick was a superior man, if we had been living in his day, we would have picked a number of other men as far more likely to make their mark and achieve greatness.

There were, however certain things which set Patrick apart. First of all there was his faith. R.P.C. Hanson in his book, St. Patrick, writes, “Patrick realizes perfectly well that God's providence is quite compatible with his meeting disaster and death. He is prepared for the worst to happen. His faith in God is not a faith that God will always work a miracle to save him, but a conviction that he can entirely trust God to bring about a good result whatever may happen, the faith of a man who has cast himself entirely on God."…

It was said of St. Patrick that he was a man of one book, the Bible, not because he was an ignorant man, or one not versed in the thinking of his day, but because all his learning and experience were brought to focus on one thing, knowing and proclaiming the Word of God… St. Patrick knew that his God is the true and great God, Lord of all creation, and at all times he acted in the certainty of God’s victory. Other men were more impressed by their obstacles and enemies and less impressed in practice by God, and despite their great abilities, they failed to accomplish what St. Patrick did. What impresses [us] most, God or our problems?”

Praying we would always act in the certainty of God’s victory!

Amiability...

"I make up my mind to be very good an amiable, and the next minute let anyone, big or little, child or servant say any thing crass or disagreeable, and my spirits ooze out, until my only safety lies in flight, and if I want to regain my equanimity of temper I have to run away and sing Dixie, or Keep your Ark a-moving, before I make another sortie...
"...considering how much the happiness of those around us depends on our loving words, and kind feelings towards them, how whole days may be made miserable by one cross word or thoughtless deed, how a dozen merry faces can be clouded by one ill tempered or anger one - considering how we are responsible to God for every evil influence which may cause other to sin, cultivate amiability, Sarah, as you would the rarest talent bestowed on you prize it above all things...
"If ill humor must have a vent, make faces at your looking glass; but when you enter the family circle, do as our dear father did; throw all care and annoyance to the winds, have a pleasant word for all, for you enter the Holy of Holies - Home - the least and lowest can add a new pleasure, or a new disturbance, the duty of contributing to the common happiness is encumbent on all. Let the home circle be the place for the exchange of pleasant thoughts, let all disagreeable ones be put away.  Ours was a happy home; father’s example should influence his children.  O Sarah my dear! if you are ever inflicted with a large and interesting family - which Kind Heaven forbid! - teach them to cultivate amiability as the only safeguard of happiness.  Teach it, preach it, incessantly.  Yes! and by the time my “interesting family” is brought up in the way it should go, I will not have the amiability enough myself to make a respectable appearance! So much for theory without practice!"
~Sarah Morgan - from The Civil War Diary of a Southern Woman

The Wells of Salvation

"Therefore with joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation." Isaiah 12:3

Snow-light warmed my face this morning.  In the night Creator God opened His “treasure-house of snow” and “caused the dawn to know its place,” glowing on an earth that reflects back a new radiance.  "At rest" aptly describes the demeanor of this new world.  Laid by, set apart, covered, white, made new.  The Spirit's life ever growing in us by the grace of God, bears the same fruit. In the past weeks I have been reading passages of Isaiah at every day’s end; drinking in at once fitting wrath, beauty of justice and imminence of redemption that gives fullness of joy.  The Word can carve marks ages deep on human hearts.

“Bind up the testimony,

Seal the law among my disciples,

And I will wait on the Lord,

Who hides His face from the house of Jacob;

And I will hope in Him.

Here am I and the children whom the Lord has given me!

We are for signs and wonders in Israel

From the Lord of hosts,

Who dwells in Mount Zion.”

~Isaiah 8:16-18~

Isaiah knew what it was to know the hand of the Lord laid upon him...the mystery and pain and wonder and humbling of divine intervention and upheaval displacing the finite world of a man.  For His pleasure and glory, He makes what He made to live again, and kills what must die.  In Him frail flesh is at once sustained and mortified to the end that on that Day it will be nearly unrecognizable to all but Himself.  Then we shall know fully as we are fully known.  Growing less and less familiar to this waiting-place, we become the signs and wonders of Almighty God.  The mingling of enrichment and abasement is staggering.  Therefore the children of God fall on their faces before the throne and worship and therefrom is the zeal of their labor born.

Isaiah 12 expresses the jubilant rapture of a people freed from the chains of sin and death and captives in God, their salvation:

And in that day you will say:

“O Lord, I will praise You; though You were angry with me, Your anger is turned away, and You comfort me.  Behold, God is my salvation, I will trust and not be afraid; 

For Yah, the Lord, is my strength and song; He also has become my salvation.

Therefore with joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. 

And in that day you will say: “Praise the Lord, call upon His name;

Declare His deeds among the peoples,

Make mention that His name is exalted.

Sing to the Lord, for He has done excellent things; this is known in all the earth.

Cry our and shout, O inhabitant of Zion,

For great is the Holy One of Israel in your midst!”

The wonder is not so much in the words of joyful thanksgiving alone, as in the fact that they can follow closely upon those of just judgement.  The incarnation of God on earth, Jesus Christ, is most wonderful because it is a divine act of justice on the grandest scale. Isaiah’s words concerning the Messiah can only rightly follow upon the tale of a people in dire need.  Destitution and misery of spirit, imprisonment of the soul, bend in agony before the fire of impartiality from the throne and are miraculously lifted by the power of atoning sacrifice.  What wonder and glory to the name of God that this divine provision searches us out of the wasteland and gathers us up into lasting fellowship.  

In this knowledge, days of home and quiet industry are made to establish a newness of deep joy in the Spirit.  Here where self-satisfaction and pride, a painted mask of happiness, and profusion of words empty of meaning are wiped away.  Understanding of an eternal debt paid in full is an everlasting well of joy indeed.

“Good Christians, fear, for sinners here

The silent Word is pleading... 

Hail, hail the Word made flesh...”

"Can God Prepare a Table in the Wilderness?"

In suffering, we learn the nature of our confidence in God. Proverbs tells us “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge…” What is it that cringes in us, when we stand on the threshold of understanding, but our fear of losing control, fear of the opinions of others, fear of understanding the nature of the battle we are in? It is, after all, comfortable to enjoy the position of a reserve. Our plans fit comfortably in the small secure foxhole, our weaknesses are safe from scrutiny because they are un-known, and the dim roar of battle, while loud enough to make us feel important, is dull enough to feel “safe.” Most soldiers can look relatively capable in a foxhole…its getting out of one that we all fear. In short, we are remarkably good at fearing everything but God.

The Israelites are the chief testimony in scripture to Solomon’s assertion, “There is nothing new under the sun.” The chosen nation’s ungodly fears are easy to criticize and moralize over until we lay them side by side with our own. In Psalm 78, their response to the raging and often deadly cultural battle and the fears that accompanied it are laid out in detail. Being the chosen people was no piece of human cake. Their flesh didn’t relish the idea of being holy and set apart more than the modern man’s. When Moses brought the declaration from God and identified who they were, they balked; even though chattel-slavery was probably not their profession of choice.

Admittedly, the cosmic –sized coup with which almighty God “brought them up out of Egypt” and the wonders that He showed restored some confidence in their identity. But the Psalm states that they “forgot.” In other words, they did not truly fear God. They enjoyed the “magic tricks”, mighty escorts of fire and cloud, and the mighty procession “going up” from slavery with carts loaded with Egyptian gold. Unfortunately, they missed God’s point. It was never really about them. It was all about Him.

Psalm 78 verses eighteen through twenty were like a bucket of cold water for me yesterday.

And they tested God in their heart by asking for the food of their fancy.
Yes, they spoke against God: They said, “Can God prepare a table in the wilderness?
Behold, He struck the rock, so that the waters gushed out, and the streams overflowed.
Can He give bread also? Can He provide meat for His people?”

The parting of the red sea, any one of the great plagues, or the miracle of water from a rock, which they cite themselves, adequately and silently mocks their sarcastic demands. Rather than fearing the God who did all these things before them, they “tested God in their heart” assuming they deserved compensation for taking the trouble to be His chosen people. Notably, God did not give them a pass on excuses of over-stress, recently thirst-afflicted, tired and cranky, or just-recovering-from-oppressive-slavery. Verse 32 and 33 clarify.

In spite of this they still sinned, and did not believe in His wondrous works.
Therefore their days He consumed in futility, and their years in fear.

Unbelief or failure to fear God is a sin He must mortify in us. My own heart has whimpered “can He provide meat?”

The fear of God is not a natural human reaction any more than it is an ambiguous emotion. In fact, our natural fears serve to confuse our understanding of the fear of God because our emotion-driven reactions to trouble are nothing like it. The Israelites manifested one version of human fear, i.e. complaining and questioning. The current, purely emotional response to pain so often yields vague platitudes of purported happiness, a high aptitude for “putting a bold face on it,” and a confusion of mind steeped in the murky waters of a self-conjured hope that is unreliable at best. To answer the question “How are you doing?” with a “Doing good!” is the commonly accepted response in lieu of the real answer which may be as helplessly vulnerable as “I have no idea.”

In contrast, the assurance of God’s goodness is not an exclusively emotional resignation devoid of knowledge. It is founded on a concrete belief in the sovereignty of our powerful God. But what about emotions? We know that God has emotions and that they are an integral part of who we are. How can we feel rightly without being enslaved to human “wisdom?”

Psalm 78 was one of my favorite Psalms before yesterday. I have always especially treasured the beginning verses because of the generational call that echoes from them down the generations as God’s battle plan of the ages:

Give ear, O my people, to my law; incline your ears to the words of my mouth.
I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings of old,
Which we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us.
We will not hide them from their children, telling to the generation to come the praises of the LORD,
And His strength and His wonderful works that He has done.
For He established a testimony in Jacob, and appointed a law in Israel, which He commanded our fathers, that they should make them known to their children;
That the generation to come might know them, the children who would be born, that they may arise and declare them to their children,
That they may set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep His commandments;

Now the passage has new meaning for me because of the following sixty-five verses of rebuke and warning beginning with these words:

And may not be like their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation that did not set its heart aright, and whose spirit was not faithful to God.

The King James Version translates the last “faithful” as “steadfast,” a word that speaks of firmness, establishment and confidence. These verses are the antidote to a disease of spiritual death in fear. Generational faithfulness is established through hope in God, not forgetting the works of God, and keeping His commandments.

God’s plan in the wilderness was not merely to perform mighty acts for the sons of Israel. He was building a nation and ultimately paving the way for His gospel and the saving of all the sons of men. His loving kindness is great enough that He can show love and compassion to every one of His children, and yet perfectly orchestrate the Plan before which all other plans dim in comparison. Neither our “help” nor the filling of our individual stomachs is necessary for the completion of His plan. Yet in perfect love, He redeemed us out of slavery and the death penalty for our sin, uses us for His glory, helpless though we are, and feeds us.

This then is the love of God for us. Until we recognize that we deserve nothing and that He gives us everything, even eternal life, there can be no right emotional response. The love that casts out fear is perfect. The oft-quoted verse is often referenced bereft of its context:

Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness in the day of judgment; because as He is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love. - 1 John 4:17-18

This is clearly a love unrelated to the formless and indistinct love of modern definition. Jesus defines our love for Him:

John 14:15 – If you love Me, keep my commandments.

In obedience we must fear God alone and nothing else. “I’m doing well,” can no longer mean unspoken platitudes, or that I am doing well. By the grace of God I am well, always and forever, even when I don’t feel so, because He is doing well in me to the praise of His own glory. When our obedience to believe reveals the magnitude of His bestowed love and mercy, true emotions of gratitude, contrition, and love cannot fail to follow.

“Jesus said to him, “If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes.”
Immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” - Mark 9:23-24

"A Horror Story About a Horror Story" - Visionary Daughters

"How Twilight is Re-Vamping Romance"

"Once upon a dark and stormy year, tens of millions of women and girls, all ages, all nations, all religions, fell under the spell of one 17-year-old boy…

"who was not even human…

"and was not even real."

To read this discerning and insightful article visit www.visionarydaughters.com