Romans 12:1 - I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.
In the Christian life, we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. We are not saved by our works. The Gospel is not a list of suggestions or commands. It is an announcement of News, of Good News. It is a proclamation of a Story that has deep meaning for us. And when the Holy Spirit grabs our hearts through that Story - Jesus death, burial, and resurrection to save us for our sins - we are saved and changed.
If you are saved, you know about the battle that is the Christian life. We still have indwelling sin. We are still finite and sinful creatures. We still do things that displease God. Romans 7 is a telling illustration of this internal battle. If you are saved, you now have a principle within you that really hates sin because it is displeasing to God. You want to please God now, not in order to be saved, but simply because you love him. And you want to be done with the things that weigh you down. This battle makes me long for heaven when sin is no longer present in any capacity. What a sigh of relief and joy will come then.
Faith that saves is also faith that sanctifies. If your faith does not lead you over time to increasingly hate your remaining sin, it probably isn't real faith. Our faith may be tested by our fruits. Jesus' pictures in Matthew of those who are not fruitful are quite scary. (Jesus talks about hell a lot more than modern pastors, I think.) The faith that unites us to Jesus is the same faith that sees us through, that sees us growing.
What is the nature of that initial move of faith? It is seeing what Jesus has done for us and believing it, knowing and stepping into the knowledge that he died for me. And I couldn't have saved myself. I am incapable of it because I am a poor sinner. Without God's help I never would have found him or followed him. Saving faith is a faith that trusts in Jesus and despairs of any attempts at self-salvation. And I think sanctification involves that same basic look to Jesus. As we look to Jesus and see what he has done, as we contemplate the grace he has shown us, as we see the true meaning of the cross and empty tomb, we are changed for the better. We fall in love with God more! And from that love we properly bear fruit where we were before fruitless.
I think it does work that way, but I wanted to write this blog post because of a way I have seen myself look at things one-dimensionally. The Gospel is deep and I never want to move beyond it, or set it aside, or feel like I have mastered it. Contemplation of the Gospel is something I should do everyday for the rest of my life. And I expect God will grow me through that.
But what then to do with the law? What to do with all the things God commands? I am not talking, even, about all the Old Testament laws and what the new covenant does to our interpretation of that. I am talking about the Sermon on the Mount and Romans 12 and Ephesians 4. God clearly expects things of us. He expects our obedience. What place do these passages have in the way I look at things now? One way - a correct way I think - of looking at it is like I described above. We are saved by belief in the Gospel and further contemplation of the Gospel melts our hearts so that they become loving. And this love is the fulfilling of the law, which will mean that we more naturally fulfill these commandments out of renewed hearts.
But God works in many ways. He is up to a lot of things. And he can use a lot of different things to great effect in our lives. And far be it from me to think I have figured out all the ways he can press the Gospel into his people...
Let me describe some periods of growth for me...
My walk as a Christian is not uniform. It goes through periods of dryness, periods of great joy, periods of falling back into sin, and periods of refreshing and repentance.
Seasons of dryness and sin are also typically seasons where I have been little in the Word and little in prayer. I think they go together like oil and water. I don't think we are ever sitting still. We are either moving towards God or away from him, either slowly or quickly. But we are not sitting still.
In some of the times of refreshing, I look back at something that sparked it, and it is not always a straightforward contemplation of the Cross. Sometimes it has been that I have read a good biography. (I think Hebrews commends this idea.) I listened to Eric Metaxas' 7 Great Men to my benefit. It had short biographies of people like George Washington and Jackie Robinson and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It wasn't scripture, but my heart was encouraged. Doing this made me want to be a better man, and that desire was fuel for helping me to actually become a better man.
I also have been distinctly helped by the writings of CS Lewis. I mean writings from any genre. I have read Mere Christianity probably three times now, and each time God speaks to me afresh. I am emboldened to not go about my Christian walk out of duty but out of delight. Reading the Chronicles of Narnia and The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters have all taken me into fictional worlds, but they have all, though fiction, helped me to see myself and my own world with fresh eyes.
Sometimes I am refreshed by an extended meditation on a particular verse. My Gospel-lens says I should connect every verse up to the storyline of the Bible, but I am not always smart enough about how to do that. And yet God blesses his Scriptures in my life, in spite of my dim-wittedness.
Sometimes it is through service to others that I am taken out of myself and refreshed and changed. I have experienced it and I know others have too, the sort of buzz that you get off mission work. God is with us as we are pursuing the Great Commission in the world. It is a fight coming off a mission trip to stay doing the right things at home, but that does not take away from the reality of God's presence that you felt in his mission in fellowship with his people.
And that brings me finally to a category that I want to commend to you. I have entitled this blog entry "Promises in Disguise". I want to commend God's commands as promises.
I have had the same experience, and perhaps you have too, of meditating on God's law or commands, on a picture of righteousness, and being changed for the better into truly desiring to be the kind of person who can do those commands. I think Psalm 119 is all about this. The Psalmist delights to set his heart and mind on the commands of God. In today's Gospel-centered subculture in the church, we will say explicitly that we should set our hearts and minds on the Cross and Empty tomb, but it seems foreign to our lips to say that we will set our hearts and minds on the law. Isn't that what Jesus came to save us from?!
But I don't think that is an empty phrase to put on our lips. Or an empty action to take. We should set our hearts and minds on God's good commands.
What does it mean that God has given us commands? The Israelites were proud of the law in a good way. It meant that God had not been silent towards them. It meant that in love he had not left them to their own devices and moral confusion. God's Law will either look precious or repugnant based on what you're looking for. In our modern world, we are often looking for unfettered freedom, in which case the Law is going to look horrible and burdensome and... just let me look the other direction. But if you have come to the point that you really want to do right, you want to be good, you hunger and thirst for true righteousness... you will delight if the one who knows the answer lets you in on the truth and shines a light for you into your moral darkness.
Some of the Israelites took the Law and used it as a stepping ladder to try to fashion their own righteousness and please God by how good they were. But not all of them. Romans 4 talks about the way people were justified in the Old Testament, and it was the same way that they are justified in the New Testament, by faith. The distinction between the Old and New testament dispensations is not so radically different as you may have been taught. People in the Old Testament believed God and it was credited to them as righteousness.
The Ten Commandments were a precious gift to the Israelites. But God didn't give it to them as conditions for getting into heaven. They were more like house rules for a people who had already tasted salvation. The people of Israel had just been rescued from bondage and had been given the law. This type of logic is paralleled in the structure of Romans. God, in Romans 1-11, is gloriously working out a salvation for his people, and it isn't until chapters 12-16 that he gets around to telling them how to behave. God saves and then answers the question of how we are to live.
Why do I say that the commands are promises?
I think that some people have said "God won't ask you to do something that you are unable to do." And I don't exactly agree with that. I think God's moral law rests on our consciences before we are saved, and no one can keep the law. Apart from the Spirit of God we cannot please God. Our righteousness is as filthy rags. What is our condition before Jesus becomes Lord in our lives? No one does good. No one seeks after God. Our hearts are not merely sick, but dead, until the God who resurrected Jesus speaks life into us. To our dead hearts God says obey, and we cannot... until he graciously chooses to wake us up.
But I do want to say just that about the Christian - "God won't ask you to do something that you are unable to do." Of course, we can't do it in our own power. We need the Spirit's help. But as Christians we have the spirit, and we have a heart that is alive to God now. We do sometimes fail, and humility would ask us to admit that we will probably fail again in the future. But stepping up to any task of obedience that God requires, we now can meet that challenge in Christ. There is no temptation that is greater than the power of God to deliver you from it if you throw yourself upon Christ.
God is both glorified in and pleased with our obedience. He gets the glory because it is so obvious that we could not stand obediently apart from his grace and help. And our obedience is where our love is proven. God doesn't want throngs of people who feign love with their mouths but whose lives show that it is a mere moving of the lips.
So then, every time God asks something of us, we can look at it as a promise from him as help to perform it. You belong to the family of God because Jesus has purchased you with his blood. We are family. And the New Testament is filled with house rules because it is loving for God to guide his children.
When Christ died for his people, he was not merely purchasing their forgiveness, but also their sanctification and future glorification. We are being remade into the image of Christ. We are being transformed. Each act of obedience is helping to shape us into the picture of ourselves that God can already clearly see.
Let us treasure all of the Word of God. The Gospel frees us to appreciate the commands of God in new ways. Let us live lives of obedience, to the praise and glory of Jesus. Soli Deo gloria!
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Sunday, December 1, 2013
Refresh
I think every once in awhile we get caught in a rut. We get used to seeing things from one angle. We get comfortable in our relationships, in our position, in our faith.
Sometimes we become comfortable with sin creeping in.
Sometimes we become complacent.
I find that in those times I am not reading Scripture.
"The Bible will keep you from sin, or sin will keep you from the Bible." A proverb.
Go be with God as soon as possible. He is better than your other plans.
Sometimes we become comfortable with sin creeping in.
Sometimes we become complacent.
I find that in those times I am not reading Scripture.
"The Bible will keep you from sin, or sin will keep you from the Bible." A proverb.
Go be with God as soon as possible. He is better than your other plans.
Sunday, October 20, 2013
Hezekiah and Us
Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, "Hear the word of the Lord: Behold, the days are coming, when all that is in your house, and that which your fathers have stored up till this day, shall be carried to Babylon. Nothing shall be left, says the Lord. And some of your own sons, who shall be born to you, shall be taken away, and they shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon." Then Hezekiah said to Isaiah, "The word of the Lord that you have spoken is good." For he thought, "Why not, if there will be peace and security in my days?"
Hezekiah was actually one of the good kings in Israel's history. He walked in the footsteps of his father David. (Father, as in his ancestor.) But like David, we still see weaknesses.
Hezekiah had just gotten through showing off his wealth to an envoy from Babylon. He did not spare showing them anything. He was showing off. And pride goes before a fall...
But the fall, in this case, was prophesied to happen years later to his house, his descendants. The exile into Babylon is here prophesied. This is surely not good news to receive. How does he take it?
He seems to take it far too well. Hezekiah is happy just to realize that it is not going to happen to him. He breathes a sigh of relief to know that he isn't going to feel the consequences of his pride. His descendants are out of sight, out of mind.
I don't follow politics too closely. But it seems to me that in America we had a boom, we have had a lot of wealth, a lot of pride. We have flaunted it. And pride goes before a fall...
But maybe we could take the time to think about future generations. What sacrifices and what discipline are in order in the present to hand future generations a better America?
And what about the Great Commission? Many do not know the Gospel. How could they know without hearing it? These people become far too easily out-of-sight, out-of-mind for us. But our love should be for these peoples, not for our own skin or our own comfort.
Jesus bore the curse of the sin of hundreds of generations who were not even born yet, including ours... He thought of those future generations as he shouldered the cross in all that it meant. For this we should be thankful.
I thought this was just an interesting story from a part of the Bible I don't read very often, 2 Kings 20.
Hezekiah was actually one of the good kings in Israel's history. He walked in the footsteps of his father David. (Father, as in his ancestor.) But like David, we still see weaknesses.
Hezekiah had just gotten through showing off his wealth to an envoy from Babylon. He did not spare showing them anything. He was showing off. And pride goes before a fall...
But the fall, in this case, was prophesied to happen years later to his house, his descendants. The exile into Babylon is here prophesied. This is surely not good news to receive. How does he take it?
He seems to take it far too well. Hezekiah is happy just to realize that it is not going to happen to him. He breathes a sigh of relief to know that he isn't going to feel the consequences of his pride. His descendants are out of sight, out of mind.
I don't follow politics too closely. But it seems to me that in America we had a boom, we have had a lot of wealth, a lot of pride. We have flaunted it. And pride goes before a fall...
But maybe we could take the time to think about future generations. What sacrifices and what discipline are in order in the present to hand future generations a better America?
And what about the Great Commission? Many do not know the Gospel. How could they know without hearing it? These people become far too easily out-of-sight, out-of-mind for us. But our love should be for these peoples, not for our own skin or our own comfort.
Jesus bore the curse of the sin of hundreds of generations who were not even born yet, including ours... He thought of those future generations as he shouldered the cross in all that it meant. For this we should be thankful.
I thought this was just an interesting story from a part of the Bible I don't read very often, 2 Kings 20.
Thursday, October 17, 2013
Things the Enemy Wants for Me
1. To feel I am too busy for prayer.
2. To feel I am too unworthy for prayer.
3. To feel that prayer is meaningless.
4. To worry.
5. To wear myself out trying to get rich.
6. To assume I've already got all the Bible I need.
7. To feel guilty.
8. To fall slowly and stay stuck in patterns of sin.
9. To believe what my heart says over what God says.
10. To be too busy to spend time with my wife.
11. To find my worth and security in success, instead of God.
12. To be too busy to realize there is spiritual warfare happening.
2. To feel I am too unworthy for prayer.
3. To feel that prayer is meaningless.
4. To worry.
5. To wear myself out trying to get rich.
6. To assume I've already got all the Bible I need.
7. To feel guilty.
8. To fall slowly and stay stuck in patterns of sin.
9. To believe what my heart says over what God says.
10. To be too busy to spend time with my wife.
11. To find my worth and security in success, instead of God.
12. To be too busy to realize there is spiritual warfare happening.
Friday, October 11, 2013
Walking
I ran across walking as a metaphor for how we walk through life's pain and suffering while reading a chapter from Tim Keller's new book on the subject. I think this metaphor is helpful. Let me briefly explain.
God wants us in this moment. The past is the past, and the future is the future. It is far too easy to get sucked into either one. And life is long. Sure, it will go past in the blink of an eye, but as it is lived, it is lived one day at a time, a marathon, putting one foot in front of the other one.
I want to live a good life. I want to live a life that is honoring to God. But I have besetting sin. I have indwelling sin. I have real struggles. What to do?
My natural reaction is to want to have it all fixed at once. And I put all my emotional energy into some resolution about being actually godly now. But when I do that, I am relying on my own righteousness, instead of God's righteousness for me. I look forward to the rest of my life and think, "Oh, what an opportunity I have to fix myself and make up for all the bad stuff I've done and thought and said in the past." And I lean on that theoretical future as a way to make God happy with me.
But that is not what the Gospel is. That is not the way the Gospel motivates. I look at my sanctification as a sprint to get to the destination now - godliness - so that I may rest in it for the rest of my life and set up a nice clean record so that I will feel better about myself when I come to die. No good.
God is good, and he is sovereign over our sanctification. And I think walking is a good metaphor for showing trust and for showing the way God works.
By walking into the future a step at a time, I have an unhurried trust that God is with me and will care for me. Eventually, enough of these small, slow, deliberate, God-ward steps will add up to something. It will get me somewhere. But there is no short-cut teleportation to glorification in the Christian life. Oh well.
We are pilgrims. Let's go with God, and lets go with each other. Step by step. We are not perfect. But our God is.
God wants us in this moment. The past is the past, and the future is the future. It is far too easy to get sucked into either one. And life is long. Sure, it will go past in the blink of an eye, but as it is lived, it is lived one day at a time, a marathon, putting one foot in front of the other one.
I want to live a good life. I want to live a life that is honoring to God. But I have besetting sin. I have indwelling sin. I have real struggles. What to do?
My natural reaction is to want to have it all fixed at once. And I put all my emotional energy into some resolution about being actually godly now. But when I do that, I am relying on my own righteousness, instead of God's righteousness for me. I look forward to the rest of my life and think, "Oh, what an opportunity I have to fix myself and make up for all the bad stuff I've done and thought and said in the past." And I lean on that theoretical future as a way to make God happy with me.
But that is not what the Gospel is. That is not the way the Gospel motivates. I look at my sanctification as a sprint to get to the destination now - godliness - so that I may rest in it for the rest of my life and set up a nice clean record so that I will feel better about myself when I come to die. No good.
God is good, and he is sovereign over our sanctification. And I think walking is a good metaphor for showing trust and for showing the way God works.
By walking into the future a step at a time, I have an unhurried trust that God is with me and will care for me. Eventually, enough of these small, slow, deliberate, God-ward steps will add up to something. It will get me somewhere. But there is no short-cut teleportation to glorification in the Christian life. Oh well.
We are pilgrims. Let's go with God, and lets go with each other. Step by step. We are not perfect. But our God is.
Thursday, October 3, 2013
Evangelism
Christians are called to share the Gospel. This can be difficult when the message is sure to offend some.
This calls for a balance. Evangelism is telling people that they need Jesus, with as much conviction and as little coercion as possible. There is a nonchalance, too easy to slip into, that takes the bite out of our message, that makes it seem like we really don't mean it, or it isn't all that important. God is honored by our efforts to be wise, but I don't think he is honored by our efforts to be cool or liked. God calls us to be peacemakers, but we are not to do that by being cowards or doing away with a love for and duty towards truth.
How must evangelism work in the modern world? First, I think it must be said that it doesn't work in a way fundamentally different than any other time. We don't need innovation for the sake of innovation. People are people, and people are lost. God works where he will, and he awakens faith in people's hearts, and the Gospel message is news about something that has decisively happened. We preach the sufficiency of the resurrection of the Son of God yesterday, today, and until he comes back. And God is pleased to awaken faith through the preaching of this message.
Nevertheless, we are called to bring the message into our time among the people we are with. That requires some thought.
The secular pull in our world, in our country, in our time is powerful. I imagine that to the average secular person, if I tell them the Gospel, they probably will not feel that they need it. They probably will have questions and assumptions lurking in the back of their mind that are roadblocks to taking the Gospel seriously. It is hard to feel that you need a God that you don't really believe exists.
How do we work towards making the Gospel seem at least plausible when it is heard? I have three thoughts. They come from the conviction that, while God may sometimes work through a single conversation or relationship to bring another to faith, more often it happens over time, over wrestling, in a web of various relationships.
1) We need to cast our net wider. There are plenty of Gospel conversations to be had outside of one that includes a "You need Jesus. Would you pray this prayer?" If we let the culture drift without showing that God is real and relevant, we are making our job in evangelism harder. I do not mean that we need to shoulder the burden of making the wider culture Christian or perfect. Rather, I think we ought to have the courage to speak the truth winsomely at different points. To point out the absurdity of the world's way of thinking where we find it. These don't need to be fights to the death; they are not the main thing. We want to put a pebble in the world's shoe, one that is at least a small reminder that there is another Way. Though we will probably convince few people in these conversations, we want them to be aware that there is a real, self-consistent, intellectually rigorous, and existentially satisfying solution and explanation to things. And that more than an explanation, there is a Person. We, with patience and grace and courage, take every thought captive for Christ.
2) We need to live in a spirit of love. Jesus says that love is the most important thing. Jesus says that love for each other is how they will know that he was sent from the Father. Love is the greatest apologetic. Love is what will let people know that all the conversations we had pursuant to #1 above was not a mere moving of our lips, a running of our mouths. How we love is the dish that we serve our message on. If it stinks, our message will be a stench as well. Authentic love will show people that there is something real here, something worth investigating, something worth having. I think there is also a social aspect to the way people think and make decisions, and the Gospel will seem more plausible when we invite others into a community that has been truly shaped by the Gospel. And the evidence of whether it has been shaped by the Gospel is whether there is love.
3) Salvation is supernatural. There is a Holy Spirit. He has a lot to do with all of this. There is a spiritual battle to be fought. We ought not to think we can win people simply with the persuasiveness of our arguments, or with anything really, if Christ is not in the midst of our efforts. He must do a work. We are dependent on Him. And this ought to drive us to prayer. The unbeliever will not admit this - they will claim intellectual neutrality - but in evangelism there is a battle for the heart as well as for the mind. The unbelieving heart is in charge of its own destiny and it likes it, and it does not want to admit a God that could have control over it. The heart will put the mind to the service of preserving this status quo. And such an unseating will be difficult. Satan will not want it to happen. The other person will not, at the time, want it to happen. The world will not want it to happen. God is the only one powerful enough to make it happen.
These are my thoughts. I don't know why they were on my mind. I haven't had much blogging time lately, but I hope you are edified.
This calls for a balance. Evangelism is telling people that they need Jesus, with as much conviction and as little coercion as possible. There is a nonchalance, too easy to slip into, that takes the bite out of our message, that makes it seem like we really don't mean it, or it isn't all that important. God is honored by our efforts to be wise, but I don't think he is honored by our efforts to be cool or liked. God calls us to be peacemakers, but we are not to do that by being cowards or doing away with a love for and duty towards truth.
How must evangelism work in the modern world? First, I think it must be said that it doesn't work in a way fundamentally different than any other time. We don't need innovation for the sake of innovation. People are people, and people are lost. God works where he will, and he awakens faith in people's hearts, and the Gospel message is news about something that has decisively happened. We preach the sufficiency of the resurrection of the Son of God yesterday, today, and until he comes back. And God is pleased to awaken faith through the preaching of this message.
Nevertheless, we are called to bring the message into our time among the people we are with. That requires some thought.
The secular pull in our world, in our country, in our time is powerful. I imagine that to the average secular person, if I tell them the Gospel, they probably will not feel that they need it. They probably will have questions and assumptions lurking in the back of their mind that are roadblocks to taking the Gospel seriously. It is hard to feel that you need a God that you don't really believe exists.
How do we work towards making the Gospel seem at least plausible when it is heard? I have three thoughts. They come from the conviction that, while God may sometimes work through a single conversation or relationship to bring another to faith, more often it happens over time, over wrestling, in a web of various relationships.
1) We need to cast our net wider. There are plenty of Gospel conversations to be had outside of one that includes a "You need Jesus. Would you pray this prayer?" If we let the culture drift without showing that God is real and relevant, we are making our job in evangelism harder. I do not mean that we need to shoulder the burden of making the wider culture Christian or perfect. Rather, I think we ought to have the courage to speak the truth winsomely at different points. To point out the absurdity of the world's way of thinking where we find it. These don't need to be fights to the death; they are not the main thing. We want to put a pebble in the world's shoe, one that is at least a small reminder that there is another Way. Though we will probably convince few people in these conversations, we want them to be aware that there is a real, self-consistent, intellectually rigorous, and existentially satisfying solution and explanation to things. And that more than an explanation, there is a Person. We, with patience and grace and courage, take every thought captive for Christ.
2) We need to live in a spirit of love. Jesus says that love is the most important thing. Jesus says that love for each other is how they will know that he was sent from the Father. Love is the greatest apologetic. Love is what will let people know that all the conversations we had pursuant to #1 above was not a mere moving of our lips, a running of our mouths. How we love is the dish that we serve our message on. If it stinks, our message will be a stench as well. Authentic love will show people that there is something real here, something worth investigating, something worth having. I think there is also a social aspect to the way people think and make decisions, and the Gospel will seem more plausible when we invite others into a community that has been truly shaped by the Gospel. And the evidence of whether it has been shaped by the Gospel is whether there is love.
3) Salvation is supernatural. There is a Holy Spirit. He has a lot to do with all of this. There is a spiritual battle to be fought. We ought not to think we can win people simply with the persuasiveness of our arguments, or with anything really, if Christ is not in the midst of our efforts. He must do a work. We are dependent on Him. And this ought to drive us to prayer. The unbeliever will not admit this - they will claim intellectual neutrality - but in evangelism there is a battle for the heart as well as for the mind. The unbelieving heart is in charge of its own destiny and it likes it, and it does not want to admit a God that could have control over it. The heart will put the mind to the service of preserving this status quo. And such an unseating will be difficult. Satan will not want it to happen. The other person will not, at the time, want it to happen. The world will not want it to happen. God is the only one powerful enough to make it happen.
These are my thoughts. I don't know why they were on my mind. I haven't had much blogging time lately, but I hope you are edified.
Sunday, August 25, 2013
Statement of Purpose
I will always remain sinful and will fall short of the ideals and goals I set for myself. I will never fully live up to a statement of purpose. Wow, what an pessimistic way to start out a post like this, you might say. I just know myself too well.
But at the same time I have Gospel hope. He who began a good work in me will bring it to completion in Christ. There are innumerable unfinished storylines in my life, weaving themselves together. The same is true for you.
I also believe that our God is a God of order. We experience cause and effect in our world because he set it up that way. All the order we perceive in the world is a reflection of the ultimate order that actually exists within God himself. As the Creator, his creation manifests and displays this truth about him. God is also a God of truth, so we become Christians by believing in Jesus. We have to know something about him in order to believe. We learn this through sentences and words, under-girded and brought by the blood-sacrifice of Jesus and the blood sacrifice of martyrs and missionaries who have given all to see these glorious truths go forth. We don't catch Christianity like we catch a cold. We must hear the actual truth of Jesus preached, and we believe, and the Spirit takes residence in us, and we are changed into the likeness of Jesus. There is an order and a necessary truth element to all of this.
So based on the orderliness of the way the world works and the hope that I have in God, I believe it is helpful to be thoughtful. He calls us to love him with all our mind, in addition to heart and strength. My thoughts shape the way I live. Your thoughts shape the way you live. And we ought to live in a way that is useful and pleasing to God. We ought to live for his glory and not our own. If our thoughts shape the way we live, and if we are to live in such a way that pleases God, thinking as clearly as possible about God's glory and desires for us is of great importance.
Praise be to God that we are not left in the darkness. He has spoken. He has given us his Word. He has not remained nameless and faceless in the dark, but progressively out of love he has revealed more and more of himself, and he has done so ultimately in the person of Jesus, God and man. It is to him that we are to be discipled. His Word and his words are to shape the way we think about how to live with God and for God and by God.
All of our lives are different. There is no single Christian life that we are all called to live. We are not Stepford Wives. We are not robots. We are to live in strict conformity to the way everyone else is. God paints with many colors, some of which we have not even imagined yet. The beauty and challenge and excitement of the Christian life is that Jesus is real and true, he loves us, he wants to be in relationship with us, and he gives freely His Spirit to take up residence in us and live the Christian life specifically from our own spot. I am not meant to be the next ____________. I am meant to be Daniel Richardson, follower of God.
I think, based on all these things, that it is helpful to come up with a statement of purpose. I know that my life is more complicated than may be captured in this sort of thing. But I do not think it is worthless, and only time may tell how helpful it would have been. It is good, nevertheless, at any stage to think about what is really important.
Here goes...
My purpose: To love God by worshiping Jesus, submitting to Him as Lord, enjoying fellowship and prayer in the Spirit, and daily growing in reverential knowledge of the Word. To love Nicole and others sacrificially by placing their needs above my own. To consistently disciple others, share the Gospel unashamedly in all opportunities God grants, and sacrificially support the spread of the Gospel to all peoples. To become a good, well-balanced, hard-working lawyer who cares deeply about justice for orphans, widows, and others in distress.
Maybe a little long, but it covers all the important things, I think. They will be good reminders...
But at the same time I have Gospel hope. He who began a good work in me will bring it to completion in Christ. There are innumerable unfinished storylines in my life, weaving themselves together. The same is true for you.
I also believe that our God is a God of order. We experience cause and effect in our world because he set it up that way. All the order we perceive in the world is a reflection of the ultimate order that actually exists within God himself. As the Creator, his creation manifests and displays this truth about him. God is also a God of truth, so we become Christians by believing in Jesus. We have to know something about him in order to believe. We learn this through sentences and words, under-girded and brought by the blood-sacrifice of Jesus and the blood sacrifice of martyrs and missionaries who have given all to see these glorious truths go forth. We don't catch Christianity like we catch a cold. We must hear the actual truth of Jesus preached, and we believe, and the Spirit takes residence in us, and we are changed into the likeness of Jesus. There is an order and a necessary truth element to all of this.
So based on the orderliness of the way the world works and the hope that I have in God, I believe it is helpful to be thoughtful. He calls us to love him with all our mind, in addition to heart and strength. My thoughts shape the way I live. Your thoughts shape the way you live. And we ought to live in a way that is useful and pleasing to God. We ought to live for his glory and not our own. If our thoughts shape the way we live, and if we are to live in such a way that pleases God, thinking as clearly as possible about God's glory and desires for us is of great importance.
Praise be to God that we are not left in the darkness. He has spoken. He has given us his Word. He has not remained nameless and faceless in the dark, but progressively out of love he has revealed more and more of himself, and he has done so ultimately in the person of Jesus, God and man. It is to him that we are to be discipled. His Word and his words are to shape the way we think about how to live with God and for God and by God.
All of our lives are different. There is no single Christian life that we are all called to live. We are not Stepford Wives. We are not robots. We are to live in strict conformity to the way everyone else is. God paints with many colors, some of which we have not even imagined yet. The beauty and challenge and excitement of the Christian life is that Jesus is real and true, he loves us, he wants to be in relationship with us, and he gives freely His Spirit to take up residence in us and live the Christian life specifically from our own spot. I am not meant to be the next ____________. I am meant to be Daniel Richardson, follower of God.
I think, based on all these things, that it is helpful to come up with a statement of purpose. I know that my life is more complicated than may be captured in this sort of thing. But I do not think it is worthless, and only time may tell how helpful it would have been. It is good, nevertheless, at any stage to think about what is really important.
Here goes...
My purpose: To love God by worshiping Jesus, submitting to Him as Lord, enjoying fellowship and prayer in the Spirit, and daily growing in reverential knowledge of the Word. To love Nicole and others sacrificially by placing their needs above my own. To consistently disciple others, share the Gospel unashamedly in all opportunities God grants, and sacrificially support the spread of the Gospel to all peoples. To become a good, well-balanced, hard-working lawyer who cares deeply about justice for orphans, widows, and others in distress.
Maybe a little long, but it covers all the important things, I think. They will be good reminders...
Friday, August 2, 2013
My Path to Law School
Dear readers of my blog,
I know that I am not a regular blogger anyway. I don't try to write something everyday. Sometimes I will write a whole lot in a month. Sometimes I won't write anything for three months in a row. Oh well.
In about ten days I am starting law school.
Why am I doing this?
Basically because I want to. I really want to. I could try to make it sound high and mighty and theological, but that wouldn't be true to reality. Last year I was becoming disillusioned with the idea of being a teacher for my life's work. Teaching is for some people and it's not for others. Some might say I didn't give it long enough. Perhaps that is a fair criticism. I don't know, and at this point I am going to law school either way.
In high school I did mock trial. It was an extracurricular that I put a whole lot of effort into, and I was good at it. I enjoyed the competition of it. I enjoyed the preparation of it. I went to college planning to do law school afterwards.
In college I developed some bad habits. In high school I was driven by the desire to succeed - and have a reputation for succeeding - at all the things I did. I did that pretty well. Going into college, I saw the emptiness of that, but I swung the pendulum too far in the other direction. I knew relationships were more important and I poured a lot of new time into my relationships with my fraternity brothers, with my girlfriend (now wife), and with God. I did ministry things. I listened to a lot of sermons. I didn't go to a lot of classes.
My GPA dropped, and to retain my scholarship I took a single class the summer after my freshman year. It was a pre-law seminar. I had just listened to a lot of Francis Chan, and the idea of Christian ministry and giving away (almost) all your money had been painted very attractively in my mind - though I had no money really to give away and obviously had not spent any actual time earning any real money. The seminar brought in practicing lawyers. They talked about long, hard hours. They talked about the difficulty of law school. They conveyed the importance of earning money. Working long, hard hours to earn it. Though I didn't see it at the time, I had become quite lazy, and the worldly idea of earning money just seemed sort of sub-spiritual.
And I decided to change career paths.
I started in on Industrial Engineering. I had good semesters and bad semesters. I never finally applied myself in the way that I know I can. I regret this. Though I went through and graduated with this degree, I knew towards the end that I had no taste for actually becoming an engineer.
What to do?
I wanted to find a job that would give me time for family, that would allow Nicole and I to live close to her mom, that would be fulfilling, in which I would feel like I was making a difference, a job that might give me time to pursue missions opportunities. I have always enjoyed math tutoring, and teaching jobs are necessary basically everywhere. Summers off would be awesome. I knew I didn't want to do engineering.
So I started going to Kennesaw and substitute teaching until I got a job teaching at Coahulla Creek in Dalton. I may do some complaining here, but I am actually very grateful for that job and that time in my life. It was their first year, and it was my first year, too. Many factors combined to make this a difficult year for me. It was my first year being married, and Nicole had a difficult time moving to Dalton. I was doing my grad school, so about three nights a week I would leave from school to go over an hour away to Kennesaw before returning home late. At Coahulla, I was teaching four classes out of four possible class periods, and I did not have a textbook to teach from. Mainly that was due to the modern shift in thinking about how we should do effective teaching. We should not rely on textbooks. Very well and good, but also difficult for someone strapped for time as I was. Probably the final straw that sealed my first year misery was the sheer class sizes, due I imagine to the fact that it was a public school. All my classes were around 25-30 students.
What did I learn during this year?
1. Margin is a good thing. It is not worth it to cram your schedule to the point of exhaustion.
2. Marriage is difficult but rewarding. It builds patience and rewards with joy.
3. Teaching is like marriage as described in #2.
4. I really enjoy math. I enjoy teaching people who are interested in learning. I do not enjoy the process of trying to get students interested in learning.
It was in the midst of that spring that I halted my Kennesaw classes and decided I wanted to go for law school. What precipitated this change?
1. I was dissatisfied with who I was as a teacher. I could not picture myself doing it for life.
2. I came to a more balanced view of the reasons for my original course change. I do not think hard work is to be avoided. I do not think earning money is a bad thing - as long as we do not make it an ultimate thing.
3. I realized the things I enjoy doing are reading, writing, and arguing. Those are things I found myself doing on top of my normal job of teaching math. Law school and the practice of law, as I figured and still do, are basically this - reading and writing and arguing. A fit!
4. Twice in my relatively young life I have been called to jury duty and ended up serving on the jury. Both times it has given me an itch to get back in the courtroom. It has made me long for mock trial.
5. Since going to college, I have not scratched my competitive itch. I have suppressed it. The competition of a courtroom challenge is something I long after. The competition of law school is something I look forward to. Maybe my high school motivations were not simply depraved through and through but were a gift of God.
6. In teaching I was not making very much money. I did not have prospects to make very much money. I decided that I did in fact want to make more money, so that Nicole could stay home when we have kids, God-willing. I look to my own Dad as an example of how this can work well and be a thorough blessing.
7. I think I may as well disclose some of my baser motives, too. A shot at law school is a shot at redeeming myself in my own eyes. I ended at Georgia Tech well enough but below my standards for myself. In some sense, I want to prove to myself that I can still succeed academically and professionally. I know that this is dangerous and that my identity must be found in Christ and not in my resume or success. That can be a black hole. Nevertheless, this motivates me. And secondly, I think there has been some envy in my heart. Far more envy that greed, I may say, though the lure of riches will be something I must guard against, too. In regards to envy, I have seen friends continue on, and some of my mock trial colleagues go on to law school before me. While teaching, just the thought gave me an itch to go.
All of these things, the good and the bad, coincided to compel me to ask Nicole if we could do it. It has been one of the greatest blessings and most exciting parts of my life that she has agreed so willingly to this career change.
This last year we moved down to Brooks. We finished the basement and are living with Nicole's mom and their three dogs. I thought that this would be difficult - and certainly it has been sometimes - but for the most part it has been very good. I have been welcomed, and Nicole and I have been able to grow together.
I got a job this year - I couldn't go to law school yet - teaching at Trinity Christian School. I also coached. It was a much easier time for me this year, and much more enjoyable. I enjoyed smaller class sizes, more experience on my own part, and the Christian environment. I am glad that I have had a good year because this allows me to feel even more confident in my decision to pursue a law degree. For me, this means that I have not run from teaching because it has been all bad. I am instead pursuing something that I really want to pursue.
Applying to law school was a humbling and a lifting experience. I decided to go to Georgia State because it was the best and most cost-effective school closest to where we live. I will be commuting. Georgia State was the only one I applied to. All my eggs in one basket, I guess. My GPA was slightly lower than the average incoming GPA for Georgia State, so I knew I would need a higher LSAT score. I studied for it, took it, and immediately cancelled my score, knowing that I could do better. The Logic Games section was entirely novel to me, taking too much time, and having done poorly on an early section, I was distracted for the later reading sections. But I regrouped, gave myself three more months and took it again. I did well this time. I figured there was a decent chance I could get in, but I wasn't counting my eggs before they hatched.
I got an email that I was admitted! Nicole and I quit our respective jobs on the same day, and Nicole had interviewed for a Trinity job that she was offered later on. Financially we were stressed about how we could make it happen, but we knew we were going to try to do it either way. And then I got a wonderfully unexpected voicemail. I hadn't expected and hadn't even thought to pray for it, but the school awarded me a scholarship worth a whole lot of money! They apparently considered everyone who applied.
So I have spent the summer teaching summer school, relaxing, and doing some fun reading before I have do lots and lots of required reading. I am thrilled to be going. I know that God is going to teach me a lot and humble me a lot and use me in some ways unforeseen. This is all exciting. Please pray for me.
I said at the beginning of this that I am an infrequent blogger, and I imagine that in the near future I will become even more so.
Please pray that I will learn how to be good lawyer to the glory of God and that I will live for his glory and not my own during law school.
I know that I am not a regular blogger anyway. I don't try to write something everyday. Sometimes I will write a whole lot in a month. Sometimes I won't write anything for three months in a row. Oh well.
In about ten days I am starting law school.
Why am I doing this?
Basically because I want to. I really want to. I could try to make it sound high and mighty and theological, but that wouldn't be true to reality. Last year I was becoming disillusioned with the idea of being a teacher for my life's work. Teaching is for some people and it's not for others. Some might say I didn't give it long enough. Perhaps that is a fair criticism. I don't know, and at this point I am going to law school either way.
In high school I did mock trial. It was an extracurricular that I put a whole lot of effort into, and I was good at it. I enjoyed the competition of it. I enjoyed the preparation of it. I went to college planning to do law school afterwards.
In college I developed some bad habits. In high school I was driven by the desire to succeed - and have a reputation for succeeding - at all the things I did. I did that pretty well. Going into college, I saw the emptiness of that, but I swung the pendulum too far in the other direction. I knew relationships were more important and I poured a lot of new time into my relationships with my fraternity brothers, with my girlfriend (now wife), and with God. I did ministry things. I listened to a lot of sermons. I didn't go to a lot of classes.
My GPA dropped, and to retain my scholarship I took a single class the summer after my freshman year. It was a pre-law seminar. I had just listened to a lot of Francis Chan, and the idea of Christian ministry and giving away (almost) all your money had been painted very attractively in my mind - though I had no money really to give away and obviously had not spent any actual time earning any real money. The seminar brought in practicing lawyers. They talked about long, hard hours. They talked about the difficulty of law school. They conveyed the importance of earning money. Working long, hard hours to earn it. Though I didn't see it at the time, I had become quite lazy, and the worldly idea of earning money just seemed sort of sub-spiritual.
And I decided to change career paths.
I started in on Industrial Engineering. I had good semesters and bad semesters. I never finally applied myself in the way that I know I can. I regret this. Though I went through and graduated with this degree, I knew towards the end that I had no taste for actually becoming an engineer.
What to do?
I wanted to find a job that would give me time for family, that would allow Nicole and I to live close to her mom, that would be fulfilling, in which I would feel like I was making a difference, a job that might give me time to pursue missions opportunities. I have always enjoyed math tutoring, and teaching jobs are necessary basically everywhere. Summers off would be awesome. I knew I didn't want to do engineering.
So I started going to Kennesaw and substitute teaching until I got a job teaching at Coahulla Creek in Dalton. I may do some complaining here, but I am actually very grateful for that job and that time in my life. It was their first year, and it was my first year, too. Many factors combined to make this a difficult year for me. It was my first year being married, and Nicole had a difficult time moving to Dalton. I was doing my grad school, so about three nights a week I would leave from school to go over an hour away to Kennesaw before returning home late. At Coahulla, I was teaching four classes out of four possible class periods, and I did not have a textbook to teach from. Mainly that was due to the modern shift in thinking about how we should do effective teaching. We should not rely on textbooks. Very well and good, but also difficult for someone strapped for time as I was. Probably the final straw that sealed my first year misery was the sheer class sizes, due I imagine to the fact that it was a public school. All my classes were around 25-30 students.
What did I learn during this year?
1. Margin is a good thing. It is not worth it to cram your schedule to the point of exhaustion.
2. Marriage is difficult but rewarding. It builds patience and rewards with joy.
3. Teaching is like marriage as described in #2.
4. I really enjoy math. I enjoy teaching people who are interested in learning. I do not enjoy the process of trying to get students interested in learning.
It was in the midst of that spring that I halted my Kennesaw classes and decided I wanted to go for law school. What precipitated this change?
1. I was dissatisfied with who I was as a teacher. I could not picture myself doing it for life.
2. I came to a more balanced view of the reasons for my original course change. I do not think hard work is to be avoided. I do not think earning money is a bad thing - as long as we do not make it an ultimate thing.
3. I realized the things I enjoy doing are reading, writing, and arguing. Those are things I found myself doing on top of my normal job of teaching math. Law school and the practice of law, as I figured and still do, are basically this - reading and writing and arguing. A fit!
4. Twice in my relatively young life I have been called to jury duty and ended up serving on the jury. Both times it has given me an itch to get back in the courtroom. It has made me long for mock trial.
5. Since going to college, I have not scratched my competitive itch. I have suppressed it. The competition of a courtroom challenge is something I long after. The competition of law school is something I look forward to. Maybe my high school motivations were not simply depraved through and through but were a gift of God.
6. In teaching I was not making very much money. I did not have prospects to make very much money. I decided that I did in fact want to make more money, so that Nicole could stay home when we have kids, God-willing. I look to my own Dad as an example of how this can work well and be a thorough blessing.
7. I think I may as well disclose some of my baser motives, too. A shot at law school is a shot at redeeming myself in my own eyes. I ended at Georgia Tech well enough but below my standards for myself. In some sense, I want to prove to myself that I can still succeed academically and professionally. I know that this is dangerous and that my identity must be found in Christ and not in my resume or success. That can be a black hole. Nevertheless, this motivates me. And secondly, I think there has been some envy in my heart. Far more envy that greed, I may say, though the lure of riches will be something I must guard against, too. In regards to envy, I have seen friends continue on, and some of my mock trial colleagues go on to law school before me. While teaching, just the thought gave me an itch to go.
All of these things, the good and the bad, coincided to compel me to ask Nicole if we could do it. It has been one of the greatest blessings and most exciting parts of my life that she has agreed so willingly to this career change.
This last year we moved down to Brooks. We finished the basement and are living with Nicole's mom and their three dogs. I thought that this would be difficult - and certainly it has been sometimes - but for the most part it has been very good. I have been welcomed, and Nicole and I have been able to grow together.
I got a job this year - I couldn't go to law school yet - teaching at Trinity Christian School. I also coached. It was a much easier time for me this year, and much more enjoyable. I enjoyed smaller class sizes, more experience on my own part, and the Christian environment. I am glad that I have had a good year because this allows me to feel even more confident in my decision to pursue a law degree. For me, this means that I have not run from teaching because it has been all bad. I am instead pursuing something that I really want to pursue.
Applying to law school was a humbling and a lifting experience. I decided to go to Georgia State because it was the best and most cost-effective school closest to where we live. I will be commuting. Georgia State was the only one I applied to. All my eggs in one basket, I guess. My GPA was slightly lower than the average incoming GPA for Georgia State, so I knew I would need a higher LSAT score. I studied for it, took it, and immediately cancelled my score, knowing that I could do better. The Logic Games section was entirely novel to me, taking too much time, and having done poorly on an early section, I was distracted for the later reading sections. But I regrouped, gave myself three more months and took it again. I did well this time. I figured there was a decent chance I could get in, but I wasn't counting my eggs before they hatched.
I got an email that I was admitted! Nicole and I quit our respective jobs on the same day, and Nicole had interviewed for a Trinity job that she was offered later on. Financially we were stressed about how we could make it happen, but we knew we were going to try to do it either way. And then I got a wonderfully unexpected voicemail. I hadn't expected and hadn't even thought to pray for it, but the school awarded me a scholarship worth a whole lot of money! They apparently considered everyone who applied.
So I have spent the summer teaching summer school, relaxing, and doing some fun reading before I have do lots and lots of required reading. I am thrilled to be going. I know that God is going to teach me a lot and humble me a lot and use me in some ways unforeseen. This is all exciting. Please pray for me.
I said at the beginning of this that I am an infrequent blogger, and I imagine that in the near future I will become even more so.
Please pray that I will learn how to be good lawyer to the glory of God and that I will live for his glory and not my own during law school.
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