The Only Way to Carry a Heavy Burden
Written by Amy K. Hall |
Saturday, July 29, 2023
There are two related principles in Challies’s illustration and Habermas’s story for us to grasp and learn to live by. Don’t try to bear all the griefs and sufferings ahead of you all at once—especially not the imagined ones. Trust that God will give you what you need to bear your grief and suffering on the day when you need it.
I don’t need to tell you that life is hard. The older you are, the better you know this. The heavy burdens of past grief, present suffering, and anxiety about the future can easily overwhelm us, but they don’t have to. There’s wisdom about handling suffering to be learned from those who have gone through it before us.
Tim Challies, who wrote about the unexpected loss of his only son in Seasons of Sorrow: The Pain of Loss and the Comfort of God, had this to say about how to bear crippling grief:
My father was a landscaper, and he used to take me to work with him from time to time. I remember one day when he brought me with him to be an unskilled but low-cost source of manual labor. He showed me a skid of bricks that had been delivered to the end of a client’s driveway and then a walkway he was building to the front door. My job was to get the bricks from the first spot to the second. I remember gazing at that giant pile with despair. How could I, at twelve or thirteen years of age, possibly move what looked like a literal ton of bricks? I realized I would have to do it in the only way I could. Piece by piece, brick by brick, step by step, I carried each one to my father. He laid them as quickly as I could bring them to him until a perfect path led to the entrance of that beautiful home.
And just so, while God has called me to bear my grief for a lifetime, and to do so faithfully, he has not called me to bear the entire weight of it all at once. As the pile is made up of many bricks, a lifetime is made up of many days.
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On Dealing with Evil
So often we want to look down on others and think they are so reprehensible and deplorable while we are not. But we ALL are deplorables. We all are dirty rotten scoundrels (to mention another film). We all deserve eternal punishment for our sin. It is only God’s mercy and grace that makes it possible for us to avoid that.
As is usually the case, articles I write are often triggered by something I have just recently read or watched. In this case, a few days ago I had viewed part of some American true crime program on TV. The gist of it was this: a woman with four young children conspired with her lover to kill her husband and get his insurance money. They succeeded.
However, she was soon caught, tried, convicted, and sent to prison for life. Good! What a monstrous woman this was! Hating her own children and husband and happy to murder him! That of course was my immediate thought. But as a Christian I really had to quickly readjust and/or supplement my initial reaction with a few other truths. Two main biblical responses that also came directly to mind were these:
One. Yes satanic evil is alive and well. There most certainly is such a thing as evil – and evil people. We must never dismiss nor play down the reality of diabolical wickedness. It should always offend us and disgust us. We should never grow used to it nor become calloused by it. Evil is real – and it is horrible.
Two. ‘There, but for the grace of God go I.’ Are we really any different? As Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, if I hate someone, it really is the same as murdering someone (Matthew 5:21-22). Our outward actions flow from our inner attitudes and dispositions. Thus it immediately sprang to my mind that given the right circumstances I could just as easily have done something like this.
‘But,’ you might say, ‘you would not kill your spouse and be so cavalier about your own children, would you?’ Well, the fact that I am still so often so self-centred and selfish and sinful – even as a long-standing Christian – means that I have hated them at the very least. When I fully put myself first, I am putting others last. I am not loving them as I should but hating them. And that, Jesus said, is just like murdering them.
I shared some of this on the social media recently, and then said this: “In sum, we are to hate evil with a holy passion, but we are also to look into our own hearts. And we must pray for women like this.” All these points can be expanded on at length. So let me add a bit more to each one.
First, one Christian gal asked me a somewhat surprising question. She wanted to know how I would pray for this woman. I would have thought that was rather obvious. I replied: “That she repents and gets saved.” She does not deserve this, but that is what grace is all about.
Is she an evil monster who deserves to be locked up for life? Yes. But as I just said, so are all of us. We are all capable of great evil. And usually it is just social disapproval, fear of what others might think, and so on, that keeps us from committing really gross and horrid evils.
In that sense, I have often referred to the 1993 film Falling Down starring Michael Douglas to make my point about all this. If you don’t mind, I actually like what I wrote 13 years ago about this, so let me share part of that article here:
It tells the sad story of a man who slowly lost the plot. Everything was going against him, and it took its toll.
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Why Church Consultations Fail
Church members often expect a silver bullet. I’ve learned over the years that church members can see a consultation to be like taking a car to be serviced and repaired. Once a few issues are handled, the car (or the church) is like new, and they can get back to business as usual. Church members are ready to accept change until the change affects them. When church members hear the caution that a consultant will likely recommend changes for the church, they often accept that they are fine with it. And they are fine with it until it affects them personally.
I did my first church consultation in 1988. Since then, I have been involved in hundreds of consultations of different ilk and varying depth.
I am not the brightest person, but I can lead a church consultation with ease. I am glad, because we had more consultation requests in 2023 than I have ever seen in my experience in this ministry. The ease by which I consult is not due to my intellect, but to the fact that I have done so many. Patterns develop. Solutions become obvious. Objections can be anticipated.
When a church leader contacts us to discuss a consultation, that leader often asks us about our “success rate.” For most church leaders, they define success as a numerical turnaround. Others have a specific problem they want us to solve. For them, the consultation is a success if the problem goes away.
So, how do we answer the question? What is our success rate? If you define success like church leaders did in the previous paragraph, our consultation success rate is only about one-half.
In case you did not read closely, I want to say it again. We only succeed in our consultations in one out of two cases. That is 50%. That is abysmal.
But on the positive side, we’ve learned the one major factor that most often determines success in church consultations. Let’s look at that one key factor. You might be surprised.
The Main Factor
I love my primary physician. He is not only a great doctor, he’s a very good friend. Though I don’t frequent his office that much (I am thankful for good health), I do enjoy (most of) the visits. Recently, we got into a discussion about his “success rate.” He is considered one of the best diagnostic physicians in the business.
Though my doctor did not give me a quantitative success rate, he did tell me that it is lower than he wishes. Of course, I asked him why.
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The “Leading” of the Spirit
Written by Nicholas T. Batzig |
Wednesday, September 29, 2021
God is committed to conforming His children into holy sons and daughters. In order to do this, He gives us His Spirit to lead us to mortify sin. The leading of the Spirit then is not a special mystical experience reserved for the few, but a present reality for all true believers in Jesus Christ.Deep down, we’re all intrigued by the mystical. Many find it to be more “spiritual” if they experience something working powerfully and inexplicably upon them. This, no doubt, is partially the reason why charismatic views of the Holy Spirit prevailed throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. There is everything right about wanting to experience more of the power and working of the Holy Spirit, provided we rightly understand the biblical teaching about the power and work of the Spirit. Two of the most frequently misunderstood and wrongly interpreted passages of Scripture with regard to the work of the Spirit are Romans 8:14 and Galatians 5:18: “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God,” and “If you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.” Many have intimated that these verses speak of a personal, supernatural guidance by which God directs those who are living in a close and intimate relationship with Him. Without in any way wanting to diminish the privilege believers have of living in a close and intimate relationship with the triune God, I do wish to correct misunderstandings about the “leading” of the Spirit in these passages. So, what is the “leading” of the Spirit about which the Apostle speaks?
B.B. Warfield once explained that many misunderstand the concept of being “led by the Spirit” by suggesting that it is referring to “something sporadic, given only on occasion of some special need of supernatural direction.”1 Rather, Warfield insisted, it is “something continuous, affecting all the operations of a Christian man’s activities throughout every moment of his life.” How did Warfield arrive at this conclusion?
When we consider the contexts in which these verses occur, and specifically the context of Romans 8, we will have to conclude that the “leading” of the Spirit is related to our sanctification. Romans 6:1–8:14 forms a pericope about the place of holiness in the lives of believers. Giving consideration to the immediate context, Warfield wrote,
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