three days of headlines

Last week was a news-maker, to say the least. I didn’t envy those sitting at the anchor desk trying to sort out which stories to cover first, but it wasn’t particularly easy to sit in the audience, either. Not only is it hard to absorb the headlines, it is hard to know how to behave in light of them. Of the many stories we were deluged with, here are four from just the last three days, and what I pray to learn from them.

Practice True Religion

On Friday, June 26, the funeral of Reverend Clementa Pinckney was held. Pinckney was one of nine African Americans shot at a prayer meeting in the basement of a Charleston church. James, the brother of Jesus tells us that true religion expresses itself by looking out for widows and orphans in their distress. It is significant that he makes this point to introduce his admonition not to show partiality. Reverend Clementa Pinckney leaves a wife and two daughters, a widow and orphans created by that familiar old-time false gospel of partiality we know as racism. How heavy a task for our President to deliver that eulogy, himself no stranger to racism and death threats. How could he possibly look into the eyes of Pinckney’s wife and daughters without seeing his own? Lord, may partiality not be found among the people of God. Grant me empathetic eyes to see and hands to serve the widows and orphans, the marginalized and voiceless in my own spheres of influence. Teach me to practice true religion. And should I see my deepest fears confirmed in someone else’s tragedy, may “Amazing Grace” be my anthem.

Embrace the Rainbow

On Friday, June 26, with the SCOTUS ruling to legalize gay marriage in all 50 states, my social media feed filled with rainbows and vitriol. Even among believers, fresh water springs spewed salt water. That ancient traitor, the tongue. “With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.” For the believer, the rainbow is God’s everlasting sign to remind us that mercy triumphs over judgment. Whatever else it may be used to represent, it will always be that. Lord, help me to bear that sign on my head and my hand. In thought, word and deed, may I be an instrument of mercy rather than judgment. May your rainbow color every line of my status updates and every syllable of my conversations.

Scale Your Flagpole

On Saturday, June 27, Bree Newsome taught us about civil disobedience when she climbed the flagpole in front of the South Carolina State House and removed the Confederate flag.  I had to smile that she wore a helmet and appropriate climbing gear. Even in its riskiness, hers was the picture of a rational act. Upon her descent, she announced matter-of factly, “I am coming down. I am prepared to be arrested.” When Henry David Thoreau was imprisoned in 1846 for refusing to pay a poll tax that violated his conscience, his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson visited him and asked, “Henry, what are you doing in there?” Thoreau replied, “Waldo, the question is what are you doing out there?” As I watched the coverage of Ms. Newsome I asked myself what matters of conscience I was willing to draw disapproval for. Lord, help me not to crave the approval of others or the safety of anonymity. You have given me proper gear and a message that needs to be heard. When truth needs a voice, may my lips not be found silent.

Don’t Aid Convicts

On Sunday, June 28, police apprehended the second of two convicts, dangerous murderers, who escaped a maximum security prison in Dannemora, New York, paralyzing the state with fear. My first reaction to hearing of their escape was to wonder how on earth they had pulled off such a miraculous exit. The unsurprising answer soon became clear: They had had inside help. Winning the confidence of prison employees, they wielded the tools of charm and bribery every bit as well as the actual tools they secured. The longer I thought about their story, the more I detected a spiritual parallel: How often have I been willingly cajoled by a dangerous sin pattern to set it free from the bonds of sound judgment? How often have I disregarded God’s law to aid and abet my past sinful inclinations in going on a spree? Lord, teach me not to flirt with sin. Help me to see it for the killer that it is. Let its conviction stand and its sentence be fulfilled. And should it escape its bonds, help me to give it no quarter for the good of my soul.

The headlines can leave us feeling overwhelmed and impotent at times. It’s true we don’t control the seasons and times. But we do control our response to them, by the grace of God. I want to remain mindful of that. The headlines of the past three days will wither and fade, replaced by a new crop tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. But the word of the Lord stands forever. Among the myriad hymns Charles Wesley wrote is one that reflects on the ever-changing nature of life. When the headlines shout that the earth has been shaken to her foundations, its closing lines remind me of an unshakable truth:

And all things, as they change, proclaim

The Lord eternally the same.

how salvation brings freedom

I grew up in the Bible Belt where, by mid-elementary, most of the kids in my peer group could point proudly to a note written in the front of their Bibles announcing the exact date they Got Saved. At junior high youth rallies the Rededications began, along with a smattering of I-Thought-I-Was-Saved-But-I-Really-Wasn’t's (scribble over that first date and write in the new one). Through all seven verses of “Just As I Am”, and all four years of high school, we children of the Bible Belt battled our doubts and bustled our backslidden selves down aisles to altar rails. Maybe, we thought, this time just maybe the Saving will stick.

Where's the Freedom?

Our problem was this: our sinning had not ceased with our professions of faith. The salvation that had promised us new life in Christ had by all appearances failed to deliver. We still made all the same mistakes, and along the thorny path of adolescence we added fresh failures to the list. Damning evidence, or so we thought, that when we Prayed The Prayer we had somehow not done it right. Where was the freedom from sin we had been promised?

Looking back I wonder if, for many of us, our problem was not with salvation itself, but with our understanding of how the freedom of our salvation actually occurred. It was not until my early twenties that I gained any clarity on this issue. I knew I served a God who was and is and is to come, but I had yet to learn that I possessed from Him a salvation of which the same could be said. Salvation from sin can be broken down into three categories: justification, sanctification and glorification. For the believer, our justification was, our sanctification is, and our glorification is to come. We were saved, we are being saved, we will be saved. I've found the easiest way to understand these three forms of freedom is to remember the three P’s: penalty, power, and presence.

Justification: Freedom From Sin’s Penalty

When we came to saving faith in Christ, confessing our great need of him and asking for forgiveness from the punishment we deserved, we were met with God’s unequivocal “yes”. Christ bore the penalty for our sins, therefore we received freedom from that penalty for all sins past, present and future. We were justified before God our judge because our penalty had been paid. Those who have been justified never need re-justifying. We can look back to the time of our justification (perhaps written in the front of our Bible?) and know that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Our justification is behind us. It is a past occurrence. We were saved from sin's penalty.

Sanctification: Freedom From Sin’s Power

Now that the grace of God has been set upon us as a permanent seal, we are being made new. We are being set free from the power of sin by the power of the Spirit. God’s grace is restoring to us a will that wants what he wants. Before we were justified, our broken wills were utterly subject to the power of sin. We chose sin at every turn. Even when we made choices that appeared good from an external standpoint, because we had no higher internal purpose than to glorify self these choices were ultimately sinful as well. Now, the power of sin is broken in our lives. We have been given the deposit of the Holy Spirit. Though we once chose only to sin, now we have the power (and the growing desire) to choose righteousness. We who were once slaves to sin’s power are now free to serve God. We don’t always use our freedom. We still sin, but over time we learn increasingly to choose holiness. Our entire lives from that handwritten date in our Bibles onward are devoted to “working out our salvation” as we learn to choose righteousness instead of sin, to walk in obedience to God’s commands.

Our sanctification is ongoing. It is a slow-moving growth in holiness. We are being saved from sin's power.

Glorification: Freedom From Sin’s Presence

We will fight to grow in holiness our entire earthly lives. But when we have run the race and fought the good fight, we will enter into the presence of the Lord forever. We will be glorified. In His presence, our soul-rest will at last be complete, as sin and its devastation will cease to assail us. There can be no sin in His presence. Though now we are surrounded on all sides by sinfulness, though now sin continues to cling to our hearts, on a day not too distant we will go to a place where sin is no more. In our glorification we will at last be granted freedom from the very presence of sin.

Our glorification is future. It is the day we trade the persistent presence of sin for the perfect presence of the Lord. We will be saved from sin's presence.

Rest, Labor, Hope

If I and my childhood peers had understood these three aspects of salvation’s freedom better, we might have saved ourselves a great deal of anxiety and a few trips down the aisle. The knowledge that sin is gradually overcome across a lifetime would have been good news to the teenager who thought surely her ongoing sin invalidated her profession. The knowledge that sanctification is hard work would have helped her topple the myth of the effortless stock-photo Christian life. The knowledge that total freedom from sin was a future certainty would have helped her ask in faith for grace for her current failures.

Maybe you, too, have found salvation mystifying. Maybe you’ve wondered, “If I’m really saved, why don’t I feel fully free?” You’re not yet, but you will be. Our complete freedom from sin is certain, but it is not sudden.  So we rest confidently in our justification, we labor diligently in our sanctification, and we hope expectantly in our glorification.

Be assured of your justification. It was. One day, you were freed fully from the penalty of sin.

Be patient with your sanctification. It is. Each day, you are being freed increasingly from the power of sin.

Be eager for your glorification. It is to come. One day, you will be freed finally from the presence of sin.

has failure become a virtue?

“Christian, you cannot obey the Law. Your certain failure is a means to show forth the grace of God when you repent.”

“We don’t need more lists of how to be a better spouse/parent/Christian. We need more grace.”

“My life strategy for today: fail, repent, repeat.”

Sounds good, doesn’t it? These sorts of statements comprise a growing body of commentary that finds the Law of the Bible to be a crushing burden, not just for the unbeliever, but for the believer as well. Enough with “checkbox Christianity”, these voices tell us. No more “how to‘s” on righteousness. In the righteousness department you are an epic fail, so toss out your checklists and your laws, and cast yourself on grace.

failure gets a makeover

In recent years church leaders have rightly spoken out against moralistic therapeutic deism, which is really just a fancy name for legalism – the idea that we earn God’s favor through external obedience to a moral code. Moralistic therapeutic deism, as in the days of Jesus, pervades our culture and even our churches. And it’s as harmful today as it was when Jesus spoke against it two thousand years ago.

As a response to this skewed view of Law, some have begun to articulate a skewed view of grace - one that discounts the necessity of obedience to the moral precepts of the Law. I call this view “celebratory failurism” – the idea that believers cannot obey the Law and will fail at every attempt. Furthermore, that our failure is ultimately cause to celebrate because it makes grace all the more beautiful.

These days, obedience has gotten a bad name. And failure has gotten a make-over. 

Interestingly, Jesus battled legalism in a different way than the celebratory failurist does. Rather than tossing out the Law or devaluing obedience to it, he called his followers to a deeper obedience than the behavior modification the Pharisees prized. He called for obedience in motive as well as in deed, the kind of godly obedience that is impossible for someone whose heart has not been transformed by the gospel. Rather than abolish the Law, Jesus deepened his followers’ understanding of what it required, and then went to the cross to ensure they could actually begin to obey it.

set free to obey

The gospel grants both freedom from the penalty of sin and freedom to begin to obey (Rom 6:16). And what are we to obey? The Law, that once gave death but now gives freedom. God's Word teaches us that behavior modification should absolutely follow salvation. It just occurs for a different reason than it does in the life of the unbeliever. Modified behavior reflects a changed heart. When Peter says we have spent enough time living as the pagans do, surely he means that it is time to stop disobeying and begin obeying. Paul tells us that grace teaches us to say no to ungodly passions, not merely to repent when we fail to say no. He goes on to say that we are redeemed, not from the Law, but from lawlessness (disregard for the Law). If, as John attests, all sin is lawlessness (disregard for the Law), ought we not to love the Law and meditate on it day and night, as those who desire deeply to cease sinning? When Jesus says “Go, and sin no more,” don’t we think he means it?

Any profession of faith that is not followed by evidence is an empty profession. And faithful profession without faithful obedience is spiritual schizophrenia. It is to affirm that God exists and then to turn and live as if he does not.

Celebratory failurism asserts that all our attempts to obey will fail, thereby making us the recipients of greater grace. But God does not exhort us to obey just to teach us that we cannot hope to obey. He exhorts us to obey to teach us that, by grace, we can obey, and therein lies hope. Through the gospel our God, whose law and whose character do not change, changes us into those who obey in both motive and deed. Believers no longer live under the Law, but the Law lies under us as a sure path for pursuing what is good, right and pleasing to the Lord. Contrary to the tenets of celebratory failurism, the Law is not the problem. The heart of the Law-follower is.

Obedience is only moralism if we believe it curries favor with God. The believer knows that it is impossible to curry favor with God because God needs nothing from us. He cannot be put in our debt. Knowing this frees us to obey out of joyful gratitude rather than servile grasping.

Imagine telling your child, “I know you’ll fail, but here are our house rules. Let me know when you break them so I can extend grace to you.” We recognize that raising a lawless child is not good for the child, for our family, or for society as a whole. We don’t train our children to obey us so they can gain our favor. They already have our favor. We, being evil, train and equip them to obey because it is good and right and safe. And how much more does our Heavenly Father love us?

moving beyond “fail and repent”

We must not trade moralistic therapeutic deism for celebratory failurism. Sanctification is about more than “You will fail, but there is grace for you.” Growing in holiness means that we fail less than we used to, because at long last we are learning to obey in both motive and deed, just as Christ obeyed. There is a difference between self-help and sanctification, and that difference is the motive of the heart.

Earnest Christians look to their church leaders and ask, “Teach me to walk in His ways.” We owe them an answer beyond, “Fail and repent.” We owe them, “This is the way, walk in it.” The way is often delineated by lists – a list of ten don’ts in Exodus 20, a list of eight do’s in Matthew 5, a list of works of the flesh and spiritual fruit in Galatians 5, and so on. These are lists that crush the unbeliever but give life to the believer. They make straight the paths of those who love them, and though the way they delineate is narrow, it is the way that leads to life.

The Law becomes a gracious means of conforming us to the image of the Savior. We love the Law because we love the God of the Law, who has engraved it on our very hearts. We do not start our days planning to fail, nor do we celebrate failure. Rather, we set our faces like flint and resolve by the power of the Spirit to obey.

I delight to do your will, O my God;

    your law is within my heart.”      Psalm 40:8

FAQ: should i make my child apologize?

Parents frequently ask me if it is wrong to require their children to apologize when they are disrespectful or disobedient. Usually, their concern is that, by doing so, they might be training their child to lie. Wouldn’t it be better to wait for the child to apologize on his own when he feels genuine remorse, rather than to just repeat an apology he has been taught?

It is definitely commendable to want your child to speak and act only out of right motives. And yes, godly obedience goes beyond just saying the right words – godly obedience is right actions plus right motives, doing the right thing for the right reason. Godly obedience is what Christian parents want to instill in their children.

But how is godly obedience instilled? How is it trained? The answer might surprise you. Unlike adults who learn by reasoning, young children learn by doing. Adults want to be convinced that a course of action is the correct one before they will pursue it. Children, on the other hand, learn to perform the correct action before they are developmentally able to assess the reason it is correct. Doing the right thing actually precedes understanding why it should be done.

Parents intuitively understand and employ this “training truth” with young children in many areas:

• We train them in the language of courtesy before they desire to be courteous (please/excuse me)
• We train them in the language of gratitude before they desire to be grateful (thank you)
• We train them in the language of respect before they desire to be respectful (ma’am, sir, Mrs., Mr.)
• We train them in the language of prayer before they desire to pray (“God is great, God is good”, The Lord’s Prayer)

In short, we teach our children the language they need to interact with others well before they have any real concept of or value for why such language is necessary and good.

Because of this, I would answer the question “Should I require my child to apologize?” with an emphatic “Yes.” If we faithfully equip our children with the language of courtesy, gratitude, respect and prayer, why would we not also equip them with the language of forgiveness? Is it not equally important for them to know? How would training them to apologize encourage them to lie any more than training them to say “Thank you” before they are truly thankful? Would it not seem unloving to leave them verbally empty-handed when facing a situation where forgiveness needs to be sought?

the liturgical child

Children are wonderfully liturgical creatures: they love repetition. This accounts for their ability to enjoy the same book or video over and over again, their attachment to a bedtime ritual or a particular pair of socks, their tendency to shout “Again, again!” when they ride the carousel. Children are wired for repetition because repetition helps them to learn.

 

Just as a pastor in a church that uses a liturgy each week would not assume that his congregation possessed genuine faith because they repeated the Apostles’ Creed, we parents do not assume that our child feels genuine repentance just because she has been trained to apologize. But we give her the right words trusting that the right motive will attach to them as she matures.

Just as the congregation needs to witness their pastor live out the truths of the liturgy as he ministers to them, so our children need to witness us live out the truth of the language we teach to them. A child who sees his parents apologize with genuine remorse when they have wronged him learns quickly to do the same. Every time we apologize to our children we give them a picture of what mature, genuine apologies sound like: “I am so sorry I hurt you with my words. If I were you I would have felt so scared and sad that Mom yelled. It isn’t right for me to speak to you like that. You are precious to me. I love you so much, and I don’t want to do that again. I didn’t honor God and I didn’t honor you. I’m praying God will help me to stop. Can you forgive me?”

older children and apologies

Should we require older children to apologize? As our children grow, they become developmentally able to link right motive to right action. They become capable of seeking forgiveness without prompting and without memorized words. An older child who has demonstrated genuine remorse in the past (and has seen it modeled by parents) is probably ready for a different approach when an apology is needed.

• “That was a big outburst. What do you think needs to happen next?” {I need to apologize} “Yes. Would you like to do that now, or do you need a few minutes to think about what you want to say?”
• “I think you know what the right thing to do here is. I am praying the Holy Spirit will show you  your need for forgiveness. We’re ready to talk to you when you’re ready.”
• “You should apologize to your mom. Why don’t you take some time to think about what you want to say, and when you’re ready, come tell her how you feel about what happened.”

And then, yes, wait for genuine repentance to manifest. If it is slow to appear, you may need additional conversations about how unforgiveness harms relationships, and you may need consequences to drive home the point. But a child who knows the security of having a parent who quickly repents and forgives will typically run to do the same.

So, yes, require an apology from your young child. Don’t let fear of raising a liar keep you from training your children in the liturgy of repentance. Model what godly repentance looks like for them, train them faithfully in the language of forgiveness, and pray that the Lord will use your words and your example to bring about genuine repentance in their young hearts.

gazing on the good of good friday

How much pain? For how long? How much blood? How many layers of flesh removed by the lash? How heavy the beam he carried? How far the distance he walked? Between which sinews were the nails placed? How sharp the thorns? How precise the work of the spear? Tell me, was it death by suffocation or blood loss? Show me. Re-enact it. Film it. Paint it. Describe it in song lyric and sacred reading. Carve it in detail and hang it on a wall. Give me the sound, the smell, the spectacle of it. Take me back to those moments, and spare no effort to help me enter into the scene.

Because if I had just been there to see it I would understand - I would understand the extent of my sin and the miracle of the resurrection. Because if I could just register these images and speculations deeply enough in my psyche I might better celebrate the beauty of three-days-later.

But would I? Do I? Or shall I look beyond the suffering of skin, scalp, sinews, suffocation to the harder truth to which they point? Shall I look beyond the stock-in-trade of Good Friday observance, these CSI-worthy musings, capable of capturing only the smallest part of what transpired on the cross? For if I seek to internalize the suffering of Christ, surely I must look beneath the externals. If I seek to internalize the sufferings of Christ, surely I must look to his rejection.

Rejection. I have known it – I have known the visceral shock, the hot-and-cold nausea of learning that another human being believed me guilty of something I had not done, believed it to the core of their understanding, believed it to the exclusion of hearing any defense on my behalf. You hate me. You hate who you think I am. You wish me harm. You have passed your sentence on me. You will not change your mind.

Now it begins to come into view, what happened that day.  It begins to, yes, if I extrapolate the depth of that pain, multiplied out to the nth degree. Rejection to the multi-billionth power. The Passion Play, seen through this lens, begins to feel flat. The crucifix above the altar begins to look like so much wood and pigment. As hard as I gaze, it does not speak of this weight, this crushing weight, so much greater than a timber across the back. As intently as I focus, it does not render the sting of this scourging lash, so much more brutal than a cat-of nine-tails.

But I am not there yet, no – my understanding is not yet as awakened as Good Friday demands. For in my limited experience of human rejection, on the day that my fellow man turns his gaze from me, the loving gaze of my Father does not waver. On the day that my fellow man pronounces me cursed, my Father still shouts that I am blessed.  Blessed to the uttermost.

But not so, the Son. Not so, the sinless Son, rejected to the uttermost.

So my gaze is lifted to the great good of Good Friday: the Father’s face turned eternally toward me because it was turned from the Son. The sinner accepted, the sinless rejected. The punishment that brought me peace, no mere matter of thorn and nail. The curse that brought me blessing, no mere matter of blood and bone.

This Good Friday may the eyes of my body soberly acknowledge the blood and the nails. But may the eyes of my heart gaze on the rejection that secured my acceptance, and glory in the willing death that brought me life.

sundered and sealed

Why do you believe the Bible is the book it claims to be? Why do you believe it is the very Word of God?

Scholars say it can be trusted because of manuscript evidence, archaeological evidence, prophetic accuracy, and the statistical probability that a message could be written so consistently across so many different authors and so many years. M-A-P-S. I’ve taught that acronym many times, and it is reassuring to think about even now. Knowing there is objective proof that the Bible is the book it claims to be appeals to my love of reason and my desire to keep reason and faith inseparably joined. But I have a deeper reason for believing the Bible is what it claims to be: I believe it to be the Word of God because it has done exactly what it said it would do.

“For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”

And this it has done: it has divided me. It has cut me to the bone.

It has severed the offending hand of my greed and gouged out the offending eye of my desire.

Over and over again.

{source}

True to its diagnosis, I am a creature of a thousand grasping hands and a thousand roving eyes. Yet it continues its ministry of a thousand faithful amputations, parsing the sin from the sinner, separating the lie from the truth, dividing the darkness from the light.

And in the dividing, miracle of miracles, it is rendering me whole.

So, yes. I believe the Bible is true. It says this is who you were and it is right.

It says this is who you are and it is dead on.

So when it says this is who you shall be I can readily hope.

And when it says this is who I AM I can readily worship.

No blind leap required. This book has not lied to me. Not once.

It knows me. I am known by it.

I thank God for dusty scrolls and artifacts and fulfillments and probabilities all raising their voices in a chorus of affirmation: this book is what it claims to be.

And I add my own voice to the clamor: “You have sanctified me by the truth: thy word is truth.”

I believe because I have been sundered. I believe because I have been sealed. Living Word, cut and cut again, that truth may be found in my innermost parts. Separate me from my sin. Seal me unto salvation. And what you join let none put asunder.

the death of idolatry

Gen 35:2-4 So Jacob said to his household and to all who were with him, “Get rid of the foreign gods you have with you, and purify yourselves and change your clothes. Then come, let us go up to Bethel, where I will build an altar to God, who answered me in the day of my distress and who has been with me wherever I have gone.” So they gave Jacob all the foreign gods they had and the rings in their ears, and Jacob buried them under the oak at Shechem.

Last week in our study of Genesis we watched Jacob come to terms with the price of idolatry. After a shocking display of his own inadequacy in chapter 34, Jacob renews his resolve to worship only God and commands his household to get rid of the foreign idols in their midst. Determined to put the past behind him and live in the truth that God is his only hope, he symbolically buries the idols under an oak tree. Why there? Because it was the place idol worship was practiced. With beautiful irony, the place for idol worship becomes a burial ground for idolatry. It is not until Jacob perceives clearly his need for God that he is able to bury his idols. Until that point, a “both-and” relationship has worked fine for him. I can relate.

For the unbeliever an idol is someone or something that takes the place of God in their affections. Believers, too, wrestle with idolatry, though perhaps not in the same way that unbelievers do. For the believer an idol is something that competes for our affection for God. Rather than replacing God in our thinking, an idol fills a gap in our ability to trust God. Idolatry is a “both-and” arrangement: I need God and I need my idol. I need God and I need a husband. I need God and I need outward beauty. I need God and I need my health. I need God and I need my stuff. We do not replace God with our idols – like Jacob we simply add our idols to God. And it often takes a crisis to point out our folly.

The summer I turned twenty-seven I joined my first women’s Bible study. I had just had my first baby and was feeling all the inadequacies of new-motherhood. The farther into the study I got the more I became aware of my complacency toward the things of God. I clearly remember praying and asking God to show me that He was all I needed – not a career, not the approval of peers, not high-school skinny, not a double income, just Him. As has always been the case, God’s faithfulness exceeded my request.

That October, six weeks pregnant with my second child, I was diagnosed with malignant skin cancer. Though the cancer was safely removed and I continue to have successful follow-up to this day, I learned something I had previously taken for granted: that each day is a gift from God to which I am not entitled. I learned, as A.W. Tozer says, that I am “a derived and contingent self”, dependent moment to moment on the grace of my Creator – given life by none other than God Himself. I learned to put to death and bury my idols that could neither give life nor sustain it. God answered more than my summer request – far better than showing me He was all that I needed, He showed me He was all that I had.

When life moves along smoothly I forget this truth. I forget the lessons of my times of crisis. I scrabble in the dirt beneath my oak tree to resurrect my idols. I begin to say again that I need God and comfort, God and financial security. I consider again the lie that my life is sustained by possessions, people, circumstances. I begin again to devote my heart, soul, mind, and strength to things that pretend to meet the needs only God can meet. When life is easy I appear as though all is in order, but if you look closely you’ll see the dirt beneath my fingernails.

I am a grave-robber. So though I do not look with pleasure on the prospect of trials or suffering I acknowledge that they are for my great good: burying what must stay buried, raising to life what God would see live. And though it is right to be thankful for times without trials I will celebrate them circumspectly, remembering the lessons of discovering my own frailty, praying for clean hands and a pure heart, praying that the cemetery of my idolatry harbors no empty graves.

There is only one empty grave that brings life - it is the empty grave of Christ, with whom I too have been buried and raised. May our worship and our work be solely devoted to the Chief Grave-robber, who has stolen us from death to life. He is not merely all we need, He is all we have. And He is enough.

Colossians 3:5-10 Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming. In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.

preservation and remembrance

Genesis 19: 24-26 Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven. And he overthrew those cities, and all the valley, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground. But Lot's wife, behind him, looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.

Everyone has a past. Some of us have logged spectacular moral failures, while others of us have managed to confine our sins to less horrifying categories. The longer we know Christ, the more we come to realize that all sin is spectacular when measured against the plumb line of God’s holiness. All sin is a spectacular exercise in self-focus and self-worship.

Saving faith frees us from sin’s power – it enables us to choose what God wants over what we want, and over time it aligns our wants with His. Instead of wanting to make much of ourselves we learn to want to make much of our Maker. But if we are honest, we still harbor places of self-worship in our heart of hearts. As we get better at setting aside one area of sin we often get better at concealing another. As much as we long to move forward in grace, we find that our past still pulls at us.

But it is not enough to recognize and regret our sin: to leave it behind, we must learn to hate it.

And this is where I begin to think about Lot’s wife. You remember her – raised a family in a city known for its sexual depravity, had to be physically dragged out of her hometown to avoid its imminent destruction, checked her rear view mirror, and presto-change-o: turned into your favorite popcorn flavoring. Pretty high up there on the “Weird Stories of the Bible” list.

But when we look at it closer, her brief story has much to teach. The sense of the phrase “But Lot’s wife…looked back” is that she regarded, considered, paid attention to. In other words, dragged free of her life of self-focus and set well on her way to freedom, Lot’s wife looked longingly and lingeringly on her past. Even as it was being consumed by the fiery wrath of God.

I think that a clue to understanding her demise lies in what she was turned into. God could have ended her life in any way, converted her to or covered her in any substance. But Genesis tells us specifically that she became a pillar of salt. To the modern ear salt is a reference to a popular seasoning, but this is because we enjoy the benefits of refrigeration. For thousands of years the primary function of salt was not as a seasoning but as a preservative. An apt metaphor for Mrs. Lot.

What if God had shown mercy to Lot’s wife? What if she had been allowed to flee the wickedness of Sodom to a better place, all the time harboring in her heart a love for her past? The virus of Sodom’s wickedness would have gone with her to her new home, preserved deep within her, waiting its chance to emerge and infect other lives. Rather than allow her to preserve the cherished memory of Sodom in a new place, God preserves her as a pillar of salt. She becomes a memorial for the preservation of evil, a warning to all who might see her frozen in her half-turned gaze of longing.

I am Lot’s wife. I preserve deep within me a memory of sin savored in years past. I see my sin, but I do not hate it. I linger on the idea of re-engaging it, even in my new-found freedom. And I risk spreading it to the lives of those around me. God have mercy.

If your spiritual gaze were frozen at this instant, on what would it be fixed? Every day is a choice to look forward toward life-giving grace or backward toward a sin-saturated death. Will you choose self-focus or God-focus? How will you be memorialized? As someone who preserved the pleasures of sin or the profit of sanctification?

My prayer is that the memory of our past sins would be laced with the pungent odor of the fires of Sodom – the reek of God’s wrath exterminating the godlessness of our former days, the aroma of God’s grace pointing us toward new life, eyes fixed on our Savior.

Luke 17:32-33 Remember Lot's wife. Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it.