The Greatest

It’s a familiar scene. Jesus is asked what is the greatest commandment, and he answers by saying “Love the Lord your God with all you heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” And then he adds the second greatest commandment – “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

In The Discipline of Grace, Jerry Bridges points out that Jesus is actually quoting for the Old Testament – back to the Law, Deuteronomy 6:5. And in the context of the Deuteronomy passage, the subject and theme is obedience.

In everyday life, it is not in our nature to obey. We do it for a number of reasons – fear of consequences, fear of retribution, hope for gain or recognition or even escape from recognition. But we don’t obey because we want to. Obedience doesn’t come naturally. And if you doubt that, watch a toddler. Or a teenager. Or an adult.

Bridges recognizes this, and then asks, then how are we to love God? How are we to do something that feels unnatural?

We are to observe God’s commands, keep and them and be careful about obeying them. We are to teach them to our children and constantly talk about them.

Bridges draws n analogy about cruise control and racing. Cruise-control obedience is obedience on autopilot – obeying without really thinking about. Race-car obedience is a total focus on obedience, in much the same way a race-car driver is totally focused on his (or her) race.

“To love God with all our heart and soul and mind,” he writes, “…means to obey Him with all our heart and soul and mind.” And it’s all wrapped up in love – that God loved us first. Because of that love, we respond in love.

Bridges doesn’t mention it, but reading this chapter kept reminding of Paul’s explanation of love in 1 Corinthians 13, what he called “the most excellent way.” The words are as familiar as the response of Jesus to the question of the greatest commandment.

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”

That is indeed a most excellent way – the way to the obedience – the way to love God with all of our hearts and with all of our souls and with all of our minds.

Over at Reforming the Informing, Tim Challies is leading the discussion of The Discipline of God. Today’s focus is Chapter Seven, “Obeying the Great Commandment.” To see what the discussion’s about, please visit Tim’s site.

Word Candy Wednesday

Confessing the Sin of Envy

I have to confess the sin of envy.

Every day I read a statements by writers who confidently say they have been called by God to write.

I envy their call. And I envy their confidence.

I don’t feel called by God to write.

Writing is something I do, something I have always done. I’ve made a living by words, and in many ways I’ve built a life from words.

I’ve been a reporter, copy editor, newsletter writer, news release writer, speechwriter, report writer, ghostwriter, article writer, speaker, reader, teacher, presenter, blogger, corporate blogger, poet, contributing editor, novelist, Twitter editor (tweeter?) and Facebook page manager. I’m sure I’ve left some things out.

My life has been filled with words, by words, for words. Words shaped by experience, understanding and imagination.

But I have never felt the confidence to say that God called me to write. It’s a skill or gift or ability He gave me, but I can’t say it was a calling in the way we Christians mean “calling.”

What I believe He did call me to was faith – is faith.

A.W. Tozer in The Pursuit of God says something about this.

“Imagination is not faith,” he writes. “The two are not only different from, but stand in sharp opposition to, each other. Imagination projects unreal images out of the mind and seeks to attach reality to them. Faith creates nothing; it simply reckons upon that which is already there…The Object of the Christian’s faith is unseen reality.”

Tozer says it better than I think I could have. My imagination – as wild and exciting and weird and strange as it might be (I write poetry, after all, and there are few things stranger than that) – is not my faith. Imagination creates something out of the mind; faith apprehends a reality that is already there.

But I do wish I could feel some of that confidence, at least sometimes.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading and discussing Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. To see more posts on this chapter, “Apprehending God,” please visit Jason’s site, Connecting to Impact. Next week we will begin a discussion of chapter 5.

Ursula Le Guin’s “Finding My Elegy”

Ursula Le Guin is something of a writing institution. It might be more correct to call her a writing monument – 23 novels, 11 books of poetry, two poetry translations (in two different languages), a National Book Award, five Hugo and five Nebula awards, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Now 82, Le Guin has produced a twelfth volume of poetry, Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems, gathering works from previous collections and adding a significant number of new poems. In fact, the volume is sufficient for two works of poetry, and one suspects that Le Guin has pulled together some of her favorite poems and included new ones as a kind of possible life or work summary.

To read the rest of the article, please see my post today at TweetspeakPoetry.

A Painting Tells a Story, But Which One?

In 1864, the French painter Edouard Manet finished “The Dead Christ with Angels,” which he then sent to that year’s Salon for exhibition. It is a picture of the dead Christ with two angels in the tomb, based (rather loosely) on Mary Magdalene’s sighting of the angels after Jesus’ death. (The painting currently is in the hands in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.)

After it was on its way, the painter realized he had made an error – he painted Christ’s wound from the soldier’s spear on the side of the body, instead of the right. Manet wrote to his friend, the writer Charles Baudelaire, seeking advice on what to do. Baudelaire advised him to fix it before the Salon opened, or face ridicule. Manet did not repaint the wound, and he was indeed ridiculed.

It is a moving painting, and oddly more modern-looking than 1864 might suggest. It is one of several religious-themed works that Manet did about that time, and at first glance it seems quite orthodox, aside from the placement of the wound.

But look more closely, and something else becomes apparent. The story of the exchange with Baudelaire notwithstanding, something else is going on this painting, and it suggests a kind of caution for Christians about both “serious” and popular culture.

Look in painting’s the lower right-hand corner, and you will see a snake slithering through rocks. What’s brought to mind is Genesis 3:15, where God tells Adam and Eve about the one to come, who will be bruised on his heel but will bruise the serpent on its head – the passage that is considered the first reference to the promise of the messiah. The snake in Manet’s painting is anything but dead or injured, while Christ is clearly dead (although you can see the halo above his head).

Step back and look at the painting as a whole, and you see one angel attending to the body of the dead Christ, another looking away, and the healthy snake slithering away. The angel on the left does appear sad; the angel attending directly to the dead Christ looks – what? Impassive? They don’t seem ready to announce that He is risen as much as that He’s dead, and they’re there to take him to heaven.

The story can go in one of two directions. Either it is right before Christ is resurrected and the angels’ announcement of that, or it is a new narrative, in which Christ is just another saint, and His soul is being escorted to heaven. The snake’s situation is equally ambiguous – it’s either right before the bruising of its head or there will be no bruising at all, and the serpent is perhaps just a serpent after all.

Manet himself inscribed the painting with the Bible verse reference – John 20:12: Mary is standing outside the tomb and bends over to look inside “and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.” The two angels in the painting are in shades of brown, not white; they are not at the head and the foot but on either side. Whatever one wants to say about the painting, it is not a literal rendering of the verse Manet based it on.

The painting, and the stories it may be telling, serve as a reminder for us about culture. It’s not that we should always, always be literal in how we participate in culture. It is more that we be careful, and not leave what we’re doing so open to two very different (and opposite) interpretations. Manet painted either a religious subject (very) loosely based on scripture, or he painted what looks like an anti-Christian one.

This article was originally published by The Christian Manifesto, but the site was redesigned and the archive (with all of my posts) disappeared. So I’m occasionally reposting some of the articles I wrote for the publication.

To number my days

So teach us to number our days

     That we may get a heart of wisdom

             Psalm 90:12

To number my days

is to accept both

beginning and end

to know I am but

a single moment

a whispered vapor

in time, a single

breath created

for this moment

this time to do

what must be done.

Photograph by Sabine Sauermaul via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Saturday Good Reads

Last week, in a break from the usual list of Saturday Good Reads, I noted some of the regular bloggers featured here. Today, here are some of the ones I’ve recently come across whose work I really enjoy.

Amanda Hill blogs at Hill + Pen. She was born and raised in the Texas Hill Country, and she’s an attorney (for which I can forgive her) and a mother. She’s married to an attorney (two attorneys in one family – imagine!). She writes about family, people, the Hill Country and other topics, and is always, always interesting.

Seth Haines is an attorney (yes, another one) in Arkansas, the father of four boys and the husband of Amber, as in Amber The Run Amuck. Seth writes essays, short stories, poems, and they’re all good. He blogs at Seth Haines.

Anita Mathias lives in Oxford (U.K.) and blogs at Dreaming Beneath the Spires. She writes on faith, theology, philosophy and half a dozen other subjects.

Jim Schmotzer blogs at The Faithful Skeptic, posts mostly poetry, and needs to post a lot more often than he does.

Chris Yokel is a songwriter and poet. I found him first through his poetry, and then ordered one of his CDs, “The Rain That Falls.” I really like his music. He blogs under his own name and also has a YouTube channel.

Shawn Smucker is the author of several books, recently took his family on a four-month tour of the United States, and has recently been in Sri Lanka at a World Vision blogger. He writes at Shawn Smucker.

Next week, I hope to feature three groups of writers I work with online.

Photograph: Houses of Parliament at Night by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.