Tag Archives: Hebrews

How can I be pleasing to God?

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Though I’m not big on controversy, I aroused some when I guest blogged on a friend’s website. Ostensibly about church attendance, the underlying question was one I’ve thought about, pondered, and prayed over many times and much over the past months and years: How can I please God in my day-to-day life?

The Bible describes actions that are pleasing to God. Does that mean that He’s always checking up on me to see how well I’m doing them? That I’m gaining His smile or His frown based on my efforts rather than on what Christ has done?

The thought was abhorrent to me even before I fully understood it or could put it into words. How can I say that my efforts (be they church attendance or something else) are pleasing to God if they don’t spring out of faith in Jesus Christ? After all, Enoch pleased God not because of his efforts but because of his intimate relationship in faith. Because without faith it is IMPOSSIBLE to please God.

So I’m posting here some of what I wrote at the very end of that post on my friend’s website.

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Can a woman who has a sterile relationship with her husband decide that she’s going to produce a baby to please him? She could produce a lifeless doll (dead works brought forth out of dead faith) and pretend that it’s a baby. Maybe many people around her will even pretend along with her, because they’re all carrying their own lifeless dolls. Maybe that’s all they know.

But the real baby, the fruit of the womb, will be produced when the wife gives herself fully to her husband in joyful, trusting submission, in that intimate trusting relationship born of mutual love. The loving husband is pleased, really pleased, in that intimate relationship. Then, ultimately, the husband is pleased in the beautiful fruit born out of that intimate relationship: a living, breathing human being. Living works produced by living faith.

Though there is effort involved in having a baby (just as there is effort involved in the outworking of the Christian life), a woman cannot produce that fruit of the womb in her own strength: that fruit of her life is a gift of God. Just so, the fruit of my life that is well-pleasing to God is the works that are born out of my intimate, loving, trusting faith relationship with Jesus Christ, “Christ in you.” The Holy Spirit of Christ works within me to grow this fruit, to bring forth these natural works.

Those works, those living works, pouring out of a life of intoxicating love, result in a sweet savor in the nostrils of God. This isn’t because I have produced them from my own efforts, it isn’t because I try to discern the will of God and then try to carry it out. Instead, it’s because they spring out naturally, produced from the intimate relationship of mutual love.

Though church attendance or any other effort might ultimately be wood, hay, stubble or a filthy rag, my confidence can rest assured in the truth that in Christ my life really can be pleasing to God.

Help, Lord

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As far as I can see, there are two kinds of help. One is assistance. One is deliverance.

When you call out for help with a task that needs three hands, you already have two of the hands you need, so you’re asking for assistance.

But when you call out for help because you’re in a burning building and can’t get out, you’re crying for deliverance.

Hebrews 4:16 says that because of Jesus Christ we can come to the throne of grace with confidence so that we can receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

That “help” is the deliverance kind. It comes from two Greek words put together: cry and run.

I cry. He runs. Help. The cry-run. Deliverance.

There it is again, in Hebrews 13:6. “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?” He delivers me. I cry. He runs. When I truly remember that He is always faithful to run when I cry, I will not be afraid.

And so we listen and respond to the cries from Haiti, not only today, but throughout the coming days—cries for help, for deliverance. They cry. We run. But even more, God runs. God runs.

And so, because of Jesus, God listens and runs to my own cries to Him, not only today, but every day, even every moment. Am I simply asking for assistance, because I can almost do the job myself?

No, I’m asking for deliverance. Deliverance from sin. Deliverance to the power and glory of my Lord Jesus Christ, through whom I receive mercy and find grace.

I am desperately dependent on the one who will run when I cry.

The Bible isn’t my daily manna

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I heard it many times growing up. “Your daily Bible reading is your daily manna. Yesterday’s reading won’t suffice for today. Read the Bible every day to receive fresh bread of life.” I never questioned it.

Until recent years. Several things brought me to the point of questioning this oft-repeated maxim.

For one thing, during some significant trials, the rich food that I gained from one day’s Bible reading sustained me for many days when I was unable to read the Bible.

For another thing, I began to see that in the “Steps to Knowing the Word of God”—that is, hear, read, study, memorize, meditate, and apply—some crucial concepts were missing. Drastic, gaping holes.

But most importantly, I read John 6. I really read John 6. And there, in a passage that I’d probably read hundreds of times, I finally realized that my daily manna is not the Bible.

It’s Jesus.

He says it clearly, plainly, over and over. “I am the Bread of Life. I am the Bread from Heaven. I am the Living Bread. I am the True Bread.”

I cried out to God, “Lord, what in the world does this mean? How am I supposed to receive the manna of Jesus? How can I eat His flesh and drink His blood?” For days I read and prayed and read and prayed, crying out to God.

I knew my Bible reading had something to do with it. It had to. After all, I can’t even know who the Living Word is outside of the vision of Him I see through His written Word.

As I read and prayed, I remembered the indictment in Hebrews 4 against the Israelites in the wilderness: “the word preached did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it.” I knew that the word “mixed” there was the same word used for the process of digestion that breaks down food so that it can be sent as nourishment to all parts of the body.

And then I saw. As the written Word is ingested, the Living Word can be digested. But only with the digestive juices of faith. I must read with a heart actively believing, seizing on truth. This is what transforms the written Word in my head to the Living Word pulsating in my very life.

The Bible reading that sustained me for days afterwards? Through Colossians I had received a clearer vision of Jesus, and in the darkness and difficulty of the following days I was able to close my eyes and focus my heart once again on Him.

The drastic gaping holes? Crying out to God for understanding, rather than simply relying on my own intellect and assuming God would help me. Believing what I read, with passion rather than passivity. Do you say these go without saying? I think not. How can absolute imperatives go without saying?

For years I followed the hear-read-study-memorize-meditate rule without crying out for understanding, for a gripping of my heart. For the most part I believed, and God did certainly work in my heart through His written Word, but the faith was more passive than active. When I began to approach the Word with an active, desperate faith, I began to see Him work in my life in new ways.

And now, when I come to the Word of God, instead of my old intellectual “This-is-God’s-message-to-me-and-by-jiminy-I’m-gonna-learn-it” approach, I come to it with longing to see the beauty of Jesus Christ, to be filled with the love and power and joy of Jesus Christ, to experience a life of bringing glory to God through Jesus Christ.

He is our True, Living Bread from Heaven.

Birthday reflections

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In honor of my fifty-second birthday season this past week, I re-read some old journals (always an instructive venture). I went back to 2003, as far back as they go on my current computer.

I found the entire year, with the rare exception of an occasional glimmer of peace, to be filled with anxiety, teeth-gritting, knots in the stomach, frustrations, barely-contained impatience. I was worried and stressed about money (not enough), stuff (too much), scheduling (too much to do), homeschooling (too much to teach). This, in spite of the fact that I was leading a successful homeschool group and reaching out to others, presenting a fairly (I think) confident outward appearance. As much as I wanted to look to Jesus myself, somehow it wasn’t translating to the words I wrote in my journal.

But something fundamental has changed.

What is different? Our financial situation, from a human perspective, looks pretty bleak, maybe as bleak as it has ever been, but, I pondered, why am I not worrying about this? It’s because since 2003 the Lord has taken me to the tops of mountains and to the depths of valleys and shown Himself faithful in every particular.

In the midst of major downsizing, why does it seem so much easier to just get rid of the stuff? The verse from Hebrews 10 that convicted me so greatly back in 1994 (“you received joyfully the destruction of your property, knowing that you have in heaven a better and more enduring substance”) has come closer to being a reality to me.

How is it that I can look at the schedule ahead, all the (really worthwhile) things that I’ve optimistically written in my book to be accomplished in the next few weeks or months, and not feel the familiar old knot in the stomach, the jaw grinding uptightness?

Instead, in all these things, I’m filled with joy. Because God has opened my spiritual eyes in such a way that I see something more clearly that before I saw only dimly. I more clearly see Jesus Christ as all my Riches, all my Substance, the Empowerer of my life, the Guardian of my Soul. These are not just words now. These are reality.

I know this is not me. This is a work of God. I stand in awe and amazement of what He has done in one so stubborn, weak, and failing, and of what He is continuing to do.