Searching for JOY - Part 2

Monday, June 26, 2023

Every time I think of you, I give thanks to my God.  Whenever I pray, I make my requests for all of you with joy, for you have been my partners in spreading the Good News about Christ from the time you first heard it until now.  And I am certain that God, who began the good work within you, will continue his work until it is finally finished on the day when Christ Jesus returns.      Philippians 1:3-6

We ended yesterday’s thoughts with the question:  Can you really experience joy?  We can all probably agree on the definition of joy; the main question is:  what produces it, and how can we have joy in our everyday life, continuously? 

I want to show you two realities about joy – first, the characteristics of our contemporary culture’s stab at joy; then, tomorrow – the Apostle Paul’s thinking. 

Culture Characteristic #1 – We are ALONE

Philosopher Thomas Wolfe said, Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.^[1]  In the contemporary scene we are isolated behind our air-conditioned walls, transfixed moth-to-light-like, to our blaring computer games on Smartphones and DVD players; we are protected from interruption by our straight-to-voicemail.  Isolated from, and insulated against human touch, we find out about ourselves from the nightly news.  And the news is lonely!  There's little joy in that Mudville.

Culture Characteristic #2. We are ASSERTIVE

From the first stamping of little, two-year-old feet that don't want to go where mother said, to the constant mashing of the horn buttons on freeways, assertiveness is the America we've come to know and despise.

 Sacrifice and service have become foreign words in America; corporate raids and takeovers make billions, and no longer does it matter what happens to the person on the assembly line, or the family having to stand in line for a handout.

Culture Characteristic #3. We are AMBIVALENT

Ambivalence is a strange development for a land of such passionate beginnings.  America was born in the hearts of people with fire in their bellies.  There was a sense of right and wrong; of good and evil.  Today’s culture is as dependent upon the direction of the prevailing winds, as on any code of morals or values.  A newspaper columnist pointed out how this slide towards ambivalence has made us a nation of orphans where child-guidance is concerned:

We are infinitely more comfortable dealing with each other in the gray vastness of 'how does it feel for you?' than in terms of right and wrong.  One look at the status of our children and we know that what we are doing isn't working.  Children need right and wrong.^[2]

One of the reasons our children take drugs, take little interest in life, and take other students’ lives is that they see no firmness of commitment to an ethic, ideals, or to each other.  Options dominate our thinking. 

·       If I don't like this circumstance I'll change it. 

·       If I can't change it I'll go elsewhere, where it feels better to me. 

I like you alright, but if you do something that displeases me I just might 'option you out' with a .357 magnum – or a divorce -- or an abortion – or some cocaine – or even just a glance.  Hey!  I can take you or leave you, dude! 

For You Today 

Alone…Assertive…and Ambivalent is our culture.  But we were created for better than that; we are hard-wired for community and its’ blessing…more tomorrow.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO (read by author)

There are about 2,500 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.  

 

Title Image:  via Pixabay.com   Images without citation are in public domain.   Unless noted, Scripture quoted from NLT^©  

---

[1] Thinkexist.com

[2]Edwards, Drew, Article, VIEWPOINT, (Jacksonville, Fl, The Florida Times-Union, Oct 3,1992)

 

When You Are Not Sure

Monday, February 13, 2023

If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you.  He will not rebuke you for asking.  But when you ask him, be sure that your faith is in God alone.  Do not waver, for a person with divided loyalty is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is blown and tossed by the wind.  Such people should not expect to receive anything from the Lord.  Their loyalty is divided between God and the world, and they are unstable in everything they do.  James 1:5-8

When it comes to difficult choices which harbor a nagging conflict, a strong pull on two (or more) sides, how can you be sure?  King Solomon had that on a scale none of us would ever want.  Two women were hauled before the king for a decision.  The infant child of one of them had died, and she was claiming it wasn’t hers, but the other woman’s, who was claiming it as her own.  What to do?  It’s a very familiar passage in 1 Kings 3.  Solomon calls for a sword and declares the child must be cut in two.  The real mother of the child is horror-stricken, and pleads for the child’s life…don’t kill the child…she can have him.  Only the real mother would give her child to another, if it meant life for the baby. 

End of story.  

But what of the backstory that explains how Solomon knew what to do?  The story before the story of the women with a dilemma, helps us understand how the king, with a child’s life in his hands, and an unknowable fact to be decided, uncovered truth.  It’s found in the prayer of a young, new king who felt overwhelmed:

“Now, O Lord my God, you have made me king instead of my father, David, but I am like a little child who doesn’t know his way around.  And here I am in the midst of your own chosen people, a nation so great and numerous they cannot be counted!  Give me an understanding heart so that I can govern your people well and know the difference between right and wrong.  For who by himself is able to govern this great people of yours?”  The Lord was pleased that Solomon had asked for wisdom.  So God replied, “Because you have asked for wisdom in governing my people with justice and have not asked for a long life or wealth or the death of your enemies—I will give you what you asked for!  I will give you a wise and understanding heart such as no one else has had or ever will have!  1 Kings 3:7-12

Recognizing his calling was too great, too demanding, and too important for relying only on his own strength, Solomon called on God to bless him with an understanding heart.  God responded to the open-mind and heart, with blessings of wisdom and great resources. 

He does that a lot!

For You Today  

Consider the warning of James, when you contemplate praying like Solomon for wisdom and understanding…you need not be certain about a lot of decisions you’ll need to make in life, but you must certainly be sure about the ONE whom you will trust to lead you through all of them.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO (read by author)

There are about 2,000 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.  To dig deeper on today’s topic, explore some of these: 

Divided Mind  and  Difficult Choices 

Images:  Title via Wikimedia Commons   Images without citation are either personal property of the author, or in public domain.

Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©   

Ambivalence with Confidence

[1]

Friday, December 7, 2018

For to me, living means living for Christ, and dying is even better.  But if I live, I can do more fruitful work for Christ.  So I really don’t know which is better.  I’m torn between two desires:  I long to go and be with Christ, which would be far better for me.  But for your sakes, it is better that I continue to live.  Philippians 1:21-24(NLT)

Of the things of which I’m unsure about Paul is whether the Apostle packed a Christmas tree on his missionary journeys.  I am certain beyond a reasonable doubt if he did have a tree, he never had to deal with a tangled mess of lights in his Advent celebrations.  Not having electricity in the first century made this a non-issue!

Well, a number of years ago my distaste for dragging home a freshly cut pine tree (and the term “freshly cut” is up for interpretation) …well, it turned that yearly season of joy into something of an anguish-filled battle for how little I could participate in the decorating process and still be a pastor.  Between the sap of a dying tree all over my car’s roof and the interminable mess of pine needles littered everywhere for the next six months…not to mention the pine sap and scratches all over my arms from pushing/pulling the thing through doorways…there were times I considered investigating Judaism.  After all, you might run into fire code violations with an eight-stemmed Menorah candelabra, but the absence of a pine sap rash for a holiday gift that keeps on scratching might be worth it!

My bride made gracious compromises, taking over most of the decorating chores, as well as conceding a change from having a fresh-cut tree, to having a live potted tree we could plant after the festivities.  The weight of that 9-foot tree with its huge burlap ball full of soil forced an even bigger compromise the next year to our first artificial, realistic-looking plastic tree. 

Mercifully, here we will not recount for you the anguish over how much storage space that behemoth box takes up between January and November. 

I must add that the concession from a live tree to artificial was turned on its ear a few years later when a second tree (also artificial, but a little smaller than the Hoover Dam) was added to grace the back room.  We now set up two trees.  The kicker in this is that the back room means this tree sits right in front of my desk, making it the one thing I see from November to January when I’m trying to write sermons.  And the thing has angels all over it – made of OKRA.  Yup, that’s right…my arch-enemy, okra, that slimy menace, masquerading as a vegetable, is in my face for Advent.

Now, before you get the idea I’m a Grinch who despises Christmas, let me assure you this tale of Christmas woe is true, but not the end of the story.  I’m not really satisfied with my attitude about the tree business, and I do spend time and personal energy to overcome it.  I pray, asking God to help me be better than the sour old guy who ruins other people’s joy in the season. 

I’m working on it.  But attitudes – especially less-than-gracious attitudes – take time.  They’re like big ocean liners…you don’t turn an entrenched, selfish, loathsome mindset on a dime.  But, that said, it is possible!

Paul had a lot of questions rolling around in his Apostle brain about his immediate future.  He also had a great confidence that God was going to do just exactly what was best.  Paul had that love-hate ambivalence about the ordeal of sitting in a jail cell on death-row.  It was good that in that circumstance he could witness to the Roman guards, but he really wanted to be continuing his itinerant ministry, starting churches and helping people grow in Christ. 

And this is where my Christmas tree rubber meets the road of Christian service.  I really like Christmas trees; I just hate setting them up.  In the same way, the confidence Paul had in God’s handling all the details of what was going to happen was ambivalently-connected to his anxiety of not-knowing what that outcome was going to be.

Like John Wesley’s question about perfection – even though we’re not perfect yet, are we confident, even in our ambivalence – that we are going on to perfection, and will be made perfect in love in this life.  Paul was:

I don’t mean to say that I have already achieved these things or that I have already reached perfection.  But I press on to possess that perfection for which Christ Jesus first possessed me.  Philippians 3:12(NLT)

For You Today

For Christian believers, it’s never been a question of if you’ve got it all perfect; it’s always been the question of whether you’re perfectly confident, even in your ambivalent imperfection, that God has it all perfect…and that’s where you’re headed!          

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day.

Go to VIDEO

---

[1] Title Image: Russell Brownworth photo