Women’s ministry is a delicate subject. There’s a lot of good happening right now when it comes to building up women in the faith. We have more female authors who hold fast to biblical theology over feelings-based ministry than we’ve had in the past. There’s a welcome push in local churches to train women to teach the Bible and to lead. The problem is it’s often mixed with “fuzzy,” diluted theology that intends to draw out emotions but too often leapfrogs over the harder and messier parts of Scripture, which can make navigating theology confusing at best and distressing at worst. 

At the retreat I attended, this fuzziness mixed good things like reminders of how fruitless we are outside of the vine of Christ with not-so-good things like how we need to chase after Jesus (why is he running away in the first place?) and extensive “take home” lists on how we can do better to serve him in our daily lives. There were songs about how Christ promised to save us mixed with songs about us promising to choose him. All of these were wrapped in flowers and served to us as if they could fit in the same vase together and not choke each other out. Where’s the connection between getting a swag bag — free stuff! no strings attached! — and “Christian” teaching that sounds like anything but free?

And we wonder why women in the church are so exhausted. 

Throughout my life, I have been at the helm of a few different women’s ministries. I’ve been the one making the decisions about what we teach and what we send women home with. Looking back on it, I see how easy the trap is to fall into. I know that I too often offered self-help instead of Christ’s broken body, and platitudes instead of dependence on Jesus. It felt validating when women would tell me that they could use those things to become better versions of themselves. But I look back on it, as a woman who has been humbled greatly by a brokenness that uncovered self-reliance that posed as righteousness, and I cringe. My intentions were good. But now I see that if there were women in my care who were desperate like I am now, which there undoubtedly were, I may have been only rubbing salt in an open wound. I pray that God met them where I could not at that time in my life, and I trust that he did. 

It’s all too common to try and elevate women by urging them to be more like the women they see in the Bible. Be dependent on Jesus like Ruth, be firm in your faith like Esther, fight against evil like Jael, etc. These can be good things, but when they’re overemphasized, made into islands, or unhinged from Christ’s one-way love to us, they give us that hit of dopamine that doubles down on the belief that we’re something when we’re nothing, which is never a good thing. And the more we do it, the more we rely on our habit-building, our perfect church attendance, or our ability to give of ourselves unselfishly and unrestrained, the more white-knuckled our grip will become. Fatigue sets in, followed by panic, followed by desperation, followed by emptiness. And the thing about us humans is that we repeat this cycle endlessly, always believing that we’ll do better next time. I grieve just writing this, understanding how stuck in this cycle so many women are – myself included.

But what would it look like if we turned up the volume on where Scripture truly focuses our attention? Before we hold Ruth up as an example for us to emulate, the New Testament wants to proclaim over us how she’s a picture of Christ clinging to bitter and broken sinners like us the way Ruth clung to her bitter and broken mother-in-law. What if this good news was the first thing we wrapped around the women we serve, around ourselves? The ‘therefores’ we’re going to draw based on this view of Ruth will look far different because we’re not the main character, which is good news to bitter and broken people. It gives women joy, unadulterated joy, in knowing that Christ ran down the holy hill of his glory to pull them from the miry pit, and that kind of grace creates the space to come alongside them as they begin the life-long process of taking themselves out of the center of their universe and letting Jesus take the throne instead. Looking at Scripture this way reminds them, and us, that we will never graduate from the grace of God. That grace will always be what we desperately need. 

In the “women’s ministry of Christianity,” the swag bag of the gospel really is free and isn’t followed up by heavy-handed teaching or endless lists of high expectations for our post-conference spirituality. He’s the main subject of our lives, and of all Scripture, whether we fully live as though that’s true or not. And we never do. But thankfully, his generosity always trumps our impulse to pay him back. His scars speak a better word, one that invites us to sit at his feet and to receive from him grace upon grace (John 1:16).

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But recently, along with twenty other fellow believers, I’ve been taking a Biblical Theology class at my local church. Each week we approach a different genre of Scripture, seeking to understand how it illuminates Christ and his suffering (Luke 24:25-27). Last week, we looked at the five books of the Old Testament that comprise “wisdom literature” which to my surprise includes the Song of Solomon.

We read Chapter 2 in class, which is about a man going to great lengths to get to his bride. In verse 8 we read, “The voice of my beloved! Behold, he comes, leaping over the mountains, bounding over the hills.” You feel the groom’s thrill in pursuing and moving toward his soon-to-be wife, displaying a longing and eagerness that refreshes the reader as we imagine ourselves in her place. It bids us to imagine “if only someone pursued me in that way.” But remember! This is a letter that is reflective of Jesus and the church, a love letter God wrote to his people. Instead of reading it as a how-to guide, or an old-fashioned story about traditional marriage, we get to read this as Jesus’s traveling at great lengths to get to his church, that is, this is the story of God’s very pursuit of you. Jesus didn’t bound over literal mountains and hills – he bound the chasm of heaven itself. He leaped down to earth to die for you to bring you back into his unending, never-breaking love.  

This passage could be re-written in a manner that depicts Jesus all the clearer:

The voice of my love, here he comes. Leaping over the greatest chasm, from heaven to earth, to be with us. He is full of grace, the perfect man. He has arrived and he is calling my name. 

He says to me, Get up, my love, the one I delight in, and come to me. For all the deadness of your winter has passed, it’s been nailed to the cross. And now, through my resurrection, life springs forth from the earth. Restoration of all creation is knocking at the door. The time to worship God forever is now here. Get up, my love, the one I adore, and come away with me. Do not hide, for there is no longer shame, but instead, come out in the open. I long to see your face, to hear your voice. 

I am yours and you are mine.

As I reflect on that truth, I think back to my twenty-something-year-old self and wish this was the picture someone would’ve painted for me, instead of telling me this book was off-limits until marriage. In that moment it felt as if I wasn’t worthy to read the book, when instead that is far from the truth! This book is a beautiful display of God’s intimacy toward his people and how sex is an illustration, not the fulfillment or purpose of love. Now, as someone who is married, this book bids me to see how marriage can’t be my God because my husband will not satisfy or fulfill the desires only God can fulfill. Marriage, and the Song of Solomon, is a reflection, pointing to a far more intimate and satisfying relationship, which is in Christ alone.

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Why include such a petty detail here at the apex of the story? Some argue it adds a layer of forthrightness to the scriptures that make it more believable. In other words, while religious texts often seek to paint their followers in a positive light, this one doesn’t hide from seeing people as people. 

Undoubtedly this type of honesty strengthens the trustworthiness of the text, but it still doesn’t answer the question of why it’s here – at such a pivotal moment in the story. There is an abundance of sights and sounds from the first Easter Sunday to choose from so why land on this offhanded, gloaty comparison?  

One possible answer can be stated in the form of a question: instead of reading these words as John bragging, what if we consider him to be confessing?  

John has a front-row seat to the most exciting moment in history and yet he’s still stuck thinking about himself. Imagine sitting courtside to watch Caitlin Clark break the NCAA all-time scoring record, but you don’t clap because you’re trapped in your own head considering the ways you’ve made better life choices than your sister…or how that dumb friend from high school’s salary is double your own…or how the emotional intelligence of your supervisor could possibly be that low… or on and on we go. The scores we keep may be petty, but their grip on our thought life is undeniable. 

And maybe that’s the point. John’s confession is one of many invitations from God heading into Good Friday and Easter. Our intuitions during Holy Week often include doing spiritual things to feel closer to God. John’s approach here is to show how the doorway to things above, that is, holy (literally set apart) activity is never what we expect because it’s upside down. God is not saying to step up or speed up, to moral high ground, but instead to step down from the ladder of our ideal versions of ourselves and back into reality – to look at who we actually are in the dark recesses of our own hearts. Holy Week is all about acknowledging the things we actually think about because here is where we find our great need for rescue.    

Jesus died on Good Friday to deliver us from our daily scorekeeping and petty comparisons. He passed us up in our race to self-deification and showed us the end of those things is only death, but he rose again to bring us into a new reality, never again to be marked by our place in relation to others. Freedom looks a lot like self-forgetfulness, and the surest way to forget about yourself is counterintuitive: confess the scores you keep and watch them lessen their grip because the last will be first. Jesus wasn’t in the tomb awarding John with a first-place ribbon. Our races don’t flatter him, he’s never at the finish lines we expect, because he’s already out there working to find us apart from our best efforts. 

The post That Weird Easter Footrace appeared first on Red Tree.

It’s not surprising to see the in-between show up all over the Bible. Maybe our lives consist of these spaces in between precisely because they show up in God’s story first. Take the lives of Isaac and Ishmael or Jacob and Esau, where blessings and inheritances live for a short time in between the oldest sibling: the rightful heir, and the youngest sibling: the unexpected inheritor. Or how about David’s anointing as the God-chosen king happening well before the end of Saul’s people-chosen reign? God moves in and through it, but there is a moment in time when both kingships are propelled forward simultaneously. Then there is the time when the prophets Elijah and Elisha overlap, one fading out while the other rises up. We even see it in the engagement period in the Song of Solomon — a space between the bride being chosen and being wed – the in-between is where most of the book’s drama unfolds. 

But the ultimate transitory space in God’s story can be seen in the lowly backwater town of Bethlehem. Jesus of Nazareth is born as poor and weak as any infant who had come before him, and yet his birth begins the transition from the old covenant born at Sinai to the soon-to-be-born, new covenant when his blood will pour down an old-rugged cross. It’s easy to forget how his life is one big transition, an “already, not yet” moment in time. It is the fleshing out of the book of Hebrews’ insistence that “what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away” (8:13). Before he dies, the Law hangs over the heads of God’s people, but Jesus methodically begins to dismantle its curse, urging his disciples to pick food for themselves on the Sabbath, touching and healing lepers and insisting that their cleanliness came from his mere word and not from the priest’s levitical rituals, and even stepping in between an adulteress and her law-demanded stoning.

These three years where he moved in and among not only the people of God but also the Gentiles is the space between the inhale and the exhale. The Israelites had spent thousands of years inhaling, hoping to take in enough air on their own in order to be able to live in the presence of a perfect and holy God. While the incarnated feet of God walked upon our earth, our breath was held, until it was irreversibly intertwined with the last breath of Lamb of God that trickled through his tortured lungs on the cross. And that’s when we could finally exhale too, but in a different way. It’s when we could release our white-knuckle grip on the idea that our salvation, our reconciliation to our Creator, was up to us.

The old gave way to the new that day, which led to a short but important transitional period where Christ lay dormant in his grave for three days. The power of sin and death had been broken, yet followers of Christ were left in the in-between space between death and life. Their encounters with the risen Lord would firmly place them in the “after”, forever closing down the possibility of going back to the “before”. 

And so we live our lives now, post-death and resurrection, but pre-full and complete redemption. Our sin continues to boil over, harming ourselves and those around us. We often find ourselves caught in the chaos of the “middle,” like Paul’s existential confession in Romans 7. Our desperate need for Christ remains, and always will. And yet, we can take comfort in this space because of how faithful our God has been in leading his people from one era to the next. Christ stepped willingly into the tomb, into this groundbreaking space in between. His willingness to breathe his last allows us to take our first breath on the other side, inhaling his grace instead of working our lungs to death in a fruitless attempt at making things right with our works. It is with our death in Christ, in our figurative burying of our old selves that we see in our baptism, where our final transition begins, which will end in the full light and embrace of the eternally scarred hands of who was, at one point in history, just a squalling child birthed by an unknown woman in an uncared for town. And so, all along we’re reminded that it’s not up to us to resolve the tension of the “in-betweens,” but to believe in the one who steps into it himself, who bears our “old” and who becomes our “new,” so that we can walk these last few miles on a road paved with the grace-filled blood of Christ, unburdened and unchained.

The post The Space In-Between appeared first on Red Tree.

But it’s this element of finding love particularly in small towns that’s got me thinking this year. I suppose, if you’d prefer, instead of Hallmark it could be Austenian images of Mr. Darcy traversing the countryside to court Elizabeth. My wife’s a big fan and we’ve watched our share of Austen films together. (Our daughter Jane’s name was inspired by one of the sisters in Pride and Prejudice.) But it’s hard to miss the pronounced theme in Austen’s novels of finding and experiencing love in the outskirts.

Well, you might be surprised to know that the Bible has a compatible view of love, and where to find it. But its story is anything but predictable. It goes against every bit of human intuition and appears (at least at first) in the unlikeliest of places. 

Nestled deep away in the middle of the Old Testament, in Song of Songs chapter 3, we meet a young woman who is in despair because she can’t find her fiancé. At wits’ end, she says, “I will rise and go about the city, in the streets and in the squares; I sought him [there] but found him not.” But then after she passes outside the city gate, past the watchmen on the wall, she finds him — in particular Darcy-fashion — coming up out of the wilderness toward her, his heart brimming with joy. A happy ending, to be sure, but a notable contrast between her distress and her relief, divided by a simple city wall.

Now, for us, as modern readers, often conditioned to reading the Bible more scientifically than artistically, this can all seem so arbitrary. Why does it matter where he was found, but that he was found? Well, fortunately for us, God isn’t like us. He’s a much more creative storyteller and always has his eyes on the smaller details, catching us off guard with things that confound human reasoning. 

The truth is, it matters greatly where the woman found her husband-to-be because when it comes to the Bible’s hometurf, different locations symbolize different theological realities. The Apostle Paul isn’t shy about this in Galatians 4 when he likens the physical city of Jerusalem (and the temple therein) with Mt. Sinai, and with the old, lawful covenant of “Do these things and then you will live” (Lev 18:5). The woman is a poetic picture of something beyond herself, as is the rural landscape she finds love in. She’s a picture of the bride of Christ finding Jesus outside of or apart from the trappings of the Law. 

This is also why Jesus was born in small-town Bethlehem, grew up in the Podunk town of Nazareth, ministered to the tiny villages of Galilee, and even more, why he died for us “outside the city gate,” as the author of Hebrews so helpfully reminds us.

The apostles are adamant about this. The prophets insisted on it — both where he would be born and where he would die — for the sake of a pure, undiluted gospel. Because, law and love don’t mix. The law demands something from us; it remembers past offenses. But love gives, and keeps no record of wrongs.

The New Testament is more “Quaint Christmas village” than we tend to think. It’s a village far outside the city limits of our work, hectic lives, responsibilities, moral accolades, and the high expectations that so many people place upon us and that we place upon ourselves. The gospel tells us — and the stories show us — that the law is behind us, not in front of us. So, with a sigh of relief, we can rest in the countryside of God’s grace, knowing that he was restless to come and love us to the uttermost — to find us, in fact — by coming all the way down to our hometown and dying on a cross in our place.

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The flood in Genesis 6-8 is perhaps the closest thing to a Red Wedding in the story of the Bible. It’s one of the most substantial accounts of judgment and death we have on record. Things had moved from bad to worse since human beings one and two rebelled against God in the garden. Evil had filled every human being to the brim and the world once called good, even very good, needed a cosmic reset button that went as follows:

• Genesis 6: Instruction to build an ark
• Genesis 7: Judgment comes through an apocalyptic flood
• Genesis 8: Waters of judgment recede 

This is one of those sections in the Bible we may be tempted to skip over, censor, or even separate “The God of the Old Testament” from that of the New. Because let’s face it – it’s a dark passage. All that is alive that isn’t on the ark comes to an end: 

“The waters prevailed above the mountains…Everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died” (Gen 7:20–22). 

Like the Red Wedding, a massacre abruptly shows up in the presence of things that are good and beautiful, like a wedding. Indeed, here in Genesis, we’re only 6 chapters away from the very first wedding and scenes of celebration at the song of creation. But suddenly, things descend into violence and devastation. The loss of all, save the eight people on the ark. 

Unlike the Red Wedding, the author of this story doesn’t hide his intentions or reasons for the plot surprises. The judgment that happens here is neither capricious nor tribal. It’s an act of cleansing. The New Testament invites its readers to see accounts of passing through and over waters of judgment as a type of baptism (see 1 Corinthians 10), where that which belongs to an old empire of evil in God’s world is being brought to an end to make way for that which is new and eternal. 

This is the Apostle Peter’s reading of these events. He sees Noah’s account of water deliverance as a type of baptism. It becomes all the more intriguing when we see how. Far from saying don’t watch bad things or fast forward this part, the New Testament invites us to ponder deeply how you and I are not the ark riders, worthy of deliverance, but the villains – drowning in the sea of judgment. And if we’re the villains then who is the Noah in our story? 

The answer rests at the very heart of reality, indeed the Apostle Paul calls it a profound mystery that has now been revealed. The Bible’s true and better Red Wedding flips the script on both the Noah story and The Game of Thrones when one man dies in place of the many. This is how God always planned to bring evil to an end, not by crushing his enemies, but by transmuting the evil of his enemies onto himself to die and rise again — out of the stormy waters of judgment to unite himself to his bride forever. All the things that leave a wake behind you in your life have been drowned in the storm of judgment at the cross of Calvary. And like the waters subsiding under Noah’s ark, your old self has been drowned at the bottom of the ocean and you have been lifted out. So, take heart today in the Redder Wedding of the gospel and in the arms of a God who let his blood mingle with our sins in order that we might be brought up onto the dry land of salvation. 

The post The Red Wedding and the Flood of the Earth appeared first on Red Tree.

Recently I was reading the New Testament encouragement from the Apostle Paul to “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, and give thanks in all circumstances” and it hit me that I fall far short of living up to that standard most of the time. If my Apple Watch measured the urgency and vitality of my prayer life instead of my standing hours or the number of steps I take in a day, I don’t think I’d appreciate the technology very much, and the findings would be ugly. In fact, whenever the topic of prayer even comes up, my thoughts usually devolve into: “I’m terrible at prayer, I don’t pray enough, and I’ve got to get better at it.” While all of that may actually be true, I was recently relieved to see that Jesus doesn’t think about prayer in the same kind of me-centric, measure-y way that I do. And contrary to my approach, he doesn’t simply tell me to try harder.

In Luke 18, Jesus shares a story of a persistent widow. In so doing, he decidedly does not take the “close your exercise rings” approach to improving our prayer life, nor does he put forward a “how to hack your way into regular prayer habits” like you might expect to hear today. Instead, he uses story to slow us down and help us see underneath the many reasons we don’t pray. He paints a portrait of a widow who continually seeks justice from a self-involved judge who eventually caves to her demands due to her persistence. He surprises us by relating God to the unjust judge in the story and pointing out in a lesser-to-greater style argument that if the judge will grant the requests of the widow, how much more will a good God will listen to the cries of his chosen ones and care for us.

What’s unexpected for “spiritual vitality measurers” like myself about the approach Jesus takes is what Luke tells us the point of the story is meant to teach us. In Luke 18:1 it says, “Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up.” Luke tells us that Jesus wants us to learn to pray continually and not give up. But he “shows” instead of tells. He isn’t a solicitor at our front door trying to sell us something to improve our lives, rather, he’s like a family member or close friend who always uses the side door.

Jesus knows that our wills are often more resistant to the things of God than we like to believe, particularly because an appeal to our will normally teaches us to look to ourselves. The words “try harder” give us a fresh chance to buckle down and finally be more spiritual. But a story doesn’t work that way. Instead, a story compels us to respond. When I watch the beginning of the movie “Up” and see the love story between Carl and Ellie, including the pain of the loss when Ellie dies, my heart is compelled to love, cherish, and appreciate my wife all the more. 

But reading the Bible goes a step beyond example-setting – and so does the story of the persistent widow. The main character leaves the screen and enters our lives, making the story not about our prayer life but about his, and that makes all the difference. In the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus prays “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” He is the true persistent widow who tirelessly assumes our place and receives the justice we deserve on the cross. It’s this story of God’s one-way love that knocks at the side door to our hearts and compels us to turn from self and experience in Jesus a greater joy and refreshment than we could ever find on our own.

The post A Knock At The Side Door appeared first on Red Tree.

Now, on this side of having kids, my mornings are a bit more…charged. The second my husband and I open the door to our girl’s room, the rigamarole begins. Before we put our hands on the doorknob, we sometimes exchange “the look.” Maybe you know the one. It’s the look of “Are you ready?” or maybe “Are you sure we can’t wait five more minutes?”  

As we head in, our eldest daughter pops her head up from her bed and doesn’t miss a beat: “Mama, Dada. Hungry, Addy. Pancake, banana.” As I squat down to give her a morning squeeze, she passes right on by me and makes a beeline for the kitchen. She is consumed with the thought, “Food cannot come fast enough, I need it now,” and her requests for food play on repeat until her blush pink plate touches the table.

Early last week, I was in a meeting and someone read Luke 12:22-34 from The Message paraphrase by Eugene Peterson. It contains one of Jesus’s more famous teachings about anxiety and worry, how the birds and flowers don’t worry, so neither should we because we are of even more value to God. 

The Message uses the word “fuss” instead of worry. And this is what felt heavy, but revealing to me about it: who fusses?! Everyone! (Despite how much we may pretend the contrary.) We fuss about the weather (Minnesota winters, anyone?). We fuss over our current lot in life, whether that be jobs, relationships, or overcommitted schedules. We can even fuss about preferences toward the everyday like food and clothing, as Luke 12 suggests. But the reason we do so is a little more complicated. The underlying reason we fuss is that we believe in just a tiny bit of karma, so when something doesn’t go our way, even though we’re doing all this good, fussing flows from the injustice that we feel has been committed. It’s a tiny, albeit fruitless attempt to right all wrongs…in our favor.

Jesus adds, “What I’m trying to do here is get you to relax, and not be so preoccupied with getting so you can respond to God’s giving. People who don’t know God and the way he works fuss over these things, but you know both God and how he works.”

Bringing this back to the daily routine of my insatiably hungry daughter: her perpetual morning fussing is a picture of how it’s built into all of us, from birth — this desire to self-justify. The angst-ridden cry of “How dare things not go right for me!”, at its core, is sourced by the belief that we deserve the good thing.

It reminded me of how Old Testament Israel — just days after the Lord freed them from slavery in Egypt — grumbles and complains about the menu, their leaders, the inhabitants of the promised land … the list goes on. In fact, it’s one way to summarize the entire story of Israel: through the lens of the fussing people of God, which, again, is fertilized by the belief that they were good people who deserved good things. Even after the law came in to help pump the brakes on their propensity to trust in themselves, they used it to throw gasoline onto the fire of their arrogance and misguided sense of self.

Yet, in the midst of all of this, the Lord, shockingly, unfairly, yet persistently meets their needs. He was preparing his people for a great unveiling. As they continued to fuss about their circumstances and miss (or forget) his small provisions, the Lord readied his people for his greatest provision, his Son, Jesus Christ. Like the loving Father He is, He gave us the very kingdom itself through the life, death, and resurrection of His Son. Our greatest worry, eternal separation from God, was satiated on the cross. 

Maybe most important here is to see that the cross wasn’t a pedestal or a lectern for Jesus to simply tell us to try harder at not fussing. Instead, it was there that he bore our worst — our most strenuous complaints, our resistance to his offer of grace, and his insistence that salvation was a gift, not a trophy. On that dark day, when Israel grumbled about the True Manna of Jesus’s body itself, we all cried out with them, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” But it was through our acts of evil, that God worked for good and fed us with his grace.

Addy’s morning rituals, Israel’s wilderness wanderings, the Jews’ crucifying of Jesus — they’re all my story. And yours. The good news is that he feeds us anyway. But his plate isn’t blush pink like Addy’s, it’s blood red, full of unconditional love — the only power in the universe that can help turn our fussing into humble trust.

The post Why We Fuss appeared first on Red Tree.

“Bread, again?”
I say this to myself today, as I prepare to administer communion on Sunday.
It’s the day of my sweet mother-in-law’s visitation, which means I have to interact with people and in so doing realize that her death is real.

People ask me for prayer for their healing and the healing of the ones they loved. I can’t manufacture healing with magical words which enable my will to usurp the will of God.
I feel odd calling what happened the “will of God.” God hates death. God’s will is to reconcile all things in Christ.
Yet there is nothing that happens outside of God’s watchful eye. He ordained the death of Christ; how can I say that my mother-in-law’s death is outside of his will?
There I am, thinking theology again. Shouldn’t I have the answers to these questions?
People come to me for answers, yet what I have to give them is bread.

This week a 14-year-old boy was murdered on 37th and Bryant.
On Sunday I will show up to church not with answers to our problem of violence, nor with a strategy for the Christianization of the Northside.
But I will show up with bread, again.
This work is difficult. It’s not difficult because writing and preaching are difficult. It’s not difficult because the days are too long.
It’s difficult because the days are not long enough.
I want to change the world.
I want to change the Northside.
But things seem to be getting worse.
And all I have been given is bread.

Is this my calling?
Surely there is an answer, a 5-point strategy, or some ministerial trick I haven’t learned.
“Surely the Lord can’t be calling me to minister to the exiles for 70 years?”
I ask myself this question like I am better than Jeremiah and like the people in my church are more important than the remnant of Judah.

So maybe this is it.
If I live as long as my mother-in-law, I have 28 more years.
That is before retirement age.

If my calling is to suffer with people who are suffering, I will suffer.
If my calling is to pray for prayers that are not answered, I will pray.
If my calling is to be horrified by increasing paganization, I will be horrified.

Lord, please make this not my calling.
But with my Savior I say,
“Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.”

Either way, I will hold the bread out to all who are suffering, praying, and horrified with me.
Until the day comes when You hold the bread out to us, and we share it together.
On that day there will be no suffering, nor will there be horror. All there will be is open-eyed prayer to our Savior who will speak to us face-to-face.

The post Bread Again appeared first on Red Tree.

Seminary’s main teaching strategy is to send you into the library to scour dusty books written by dead people, to evaluate and synthesize their ideas based on what the Bible says and why, and to bring all of this to bear on everyday life in all of its beauty and brokenness. The benefit of this process is that the ideas are not new and novel, but time-tested. In other words, they are “cold-takes” that have been through the ringer of real life. 

Which brings me to my five probably unoriginal “cold-takes” five years later:

1. Chronological snobbery will always be popular

C.S. Lewis coined the term chronological snobbery and it basically means the uncritical acceptance of the thinking climate common to our own age. In addition to being a great turn of phrase, chronological snobbery is helpful for seeing why all of us are pretty bad at having conversations about most things that are meaningful. It’s also why we desperately need a type of wisdom to come down out of heaven to us, rather than us thinking we only know how to progress based on our own intelligence.

For it is written:
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”

Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age?
Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?
1 Corinthians 1:19-20  

2. Grace is the change agent of life 

Religion creates a culture of suspicion everywhere it’s found. It’s easy to spot, because it always wears some form of “you have to do this in order to belong here.” Those who view themselves as ‘in’ have a tendency to master the transgressions in the lives of those who are ‘out.’ Unsurprisingly, this isn’t just found in churches, but everywhere where a code of behavior is required for membership, whether written or unwritten. 

Grace, on the other hand, is God’s change agent for life itself. It’s his one-way love to people who don’t deserve it. God’s clearest articulation of undiluted grace 2,000 years ago flipped the world upside down. The same message of one-way love reformed the church 500 years ago, and it continues to transform lives today – making people curious, not judgmental. 

3. Proclaiming is more effective than how-to hacking

Despite all our efforts, our quick fixes and DIY life hacks have failed to rescue us from our very real predicament. We are more anxious and depressed on the whole and less able to even hold a conversation with those we disagree with on important topics. Historically, preaching in the Christian church has not been about telling people how to behave. It’s almost the exact opposite of that – preaching is the proclamation of work that has been done by God. It’s about good news and it is for the afflicted, the downtrodden, the sick, and the broken. It heals precisely because it is not telling the drowning person to swim harder, but an announcement of rescue from God himself.

After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”
Mark 1:14-15

4. The gospel is the answer

Tim Keller died of pancreatic cancer exactly one week before we walked at the commencement ceremony. He was a professor at the school and an example to many of us in ministry in more ways than can be counted. The drum he beat until his dying breath was that the gospel really does change everything and is the answer to our deepest problems. More Tim Kellers would be great but more people going all in on the gospel for all of life would be even better.    

5. Jesus loves you, this I know

Your job doesn’t love you, your achievements can’t save you, and that next thing you think will make you feel better will leave you just as empty and wanting as you are right now. But this is why the gospel matters so much. Indeed, the thing the Apostle Paul resolved to build his entire life upon, was the love that is greater than death in the finished work of Jesus on the cross. Jesus really does love you, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.  

1 Corinthians 2:2-5
For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.  I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling.  My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.

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