Christianity

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Be Still, My Soul


Such rich theology, comfort and knowledge can be found in old hymns. I had a sweet time of fellowship around a piano last night with two dear friends. They were preparing for an upcoming retreat where they are leading the worship, and they allowed me to sit in on their planning and rehearsing.

While they were going through songs, we had a great conversation about old hymns and new songs, but the thought occurred to me that, while newer songs tend to bring much comfort and encouragement and are upbeat and about the love of our Savior, there is much comfort and strength in the face of suffering that can be found in the old hymns.

I wonder if it is not because much inspiration can come from much suffering. This is one of my favorite “soul comforting” hymns. A friend shared the lyrics on her blog a week or so ago, but I wanted to share them as well.

If you are in a tough time, if you are desperately seeking Truth and seeking after the face and comfort of the Lord, spend some time meditating on the words of this song.

Be Still, My Soul
By: Katharina A. von Schlegel

1. Be still, my soul:
the Lord is on thy side.
Bear patiently
the cross of grief or pain.
Leave to thy God
to order and provide;
In every change,
He faithful will remain.
Be still, my soul:
thy best, thy heavenly Friend
Through thorny ways
leads to a joyful end.

2. Be still, my soul:
thy God doth undertake
To guide the future,
as He has the past.
Thy hope, thy confidence
let nothing shake;
All now mysterious
shall be bright at last.
Be still, my soul:
the waves and winds
still know His voice
Who ruled them
while He dwelt below.

3. Be still, my soul:
when dearest friends depart,
And all is darkened
in the vale of tears,
Then shalt thou better know
His love, His heart,
Who comes to soothe
thy sorrow and thy fears.
Be still, my soul:
thy Jesus can repay
From His own fullness
all He takes away.

4. Be still, my soul:
the hour is hastening on
When we shall be
forever with the Lord.
When disappointment,
grief, and fear are gone,
Sorrow forgot,
love’s purest joys restored.
Be still, my soul:
when change and tears are past,
All safe and blessed
we shall meet at last.

5. Be still, my soul:
begin the song of praise
On earth, believing,
to thy Lord on high;
Acknowledge Him
in all thy works and ways,
So shall He view
thee with a well-pleased eye.
Be still, my soul:
the Sun of life divine
Through passing clouds
shall but more brightly shine.

What encouragement do I find in these five verses?

1. Things in this world will cause my heart to stir, be grieve, to break. Pain and suffering are a part of life in this fallen world.

2. God knows this better than I do, and He is ready and prepared to comfort in those times.

3. People fail one another. But God is all knowing and is faithful to replace that which leaves with a blessing beyond imagination. There is no true loss with the Father; only great gain of something better.

4. One day, there will be no more pain, suffering, betrayal, struggle. Jesus has promised he is going to prepare a place for us and we will join him there.

5. We cannot wait until that time to begin living in that reality. We need to still our souls in the here and now, preparing ourselves for that time.

How do you still your soul in times of trouble?

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Do You Bully Jesus?


Yesterday’s post was admittedly inflammatory. Yet I firmly believe that the Holy Spirit working through Paul intended that passage to be so. God is serious about sin, and He desires us to be as well. Our Savior is only as big as we recognize our need to be saved. Small sin, small savior. Usually one made in our image that we pull out in times of trouble, like he’s a good luck charm. That’s not a Savior; that’s an idol. A lucky rabbit’s foot, maybe.

Paul’s illustration of forcing Jesus to participate in sexual sin is shocking. It jars us to the core. It scars for life, as one friend told me this week when I shared the illustration with her. But how does that same principle play out in the sins that we as people find not quite so heinous? Humans are notorious for ranking sin, and usually the sins of others rank far worse than our own pet sin. But to God, they are all equally heinous. There are not big sins and smalls sins because they are all infinitely offensive to an infinitely holy God. It’s not that there are no big sins; it’s that there are no small ones.

“I don’t participate in any sort of active sexual sin,” you may say. Don’t think yourself in the clear. This principle of forcing Jesus into sin applies to ALL sin, not just sexual sin.

In addition to my counseling ministry, I teach at a local high school. And if you work with teens, you daily deal with the one recurring and constant torture: bullying. Whether it’s physical, verbal, psychological or technological, bullying and peer pressure are a daily part of the teen age experience. But it’s not just for teens. Once I had a student ask me in tears how old you had to be when girls would stop being so mean and just be nice to one another. I told her that I wasn’t sure, but when I reached the age that it happened, I would let her know. I’m 31 and I’m still waiting.

Bullies are generally defined as those who pick on or mess with other students. Those who force others to do things their way, who run the show, command attention, fear, and control. Nobody likes a bully, usually even the bully.

If we apply the principle found in 1 Corinthians 6, that because we are one with Christ in the Spirit, sin in the life of a believer forces Jesus to participate in acts against his will, then we can only conclude that every time we as believers sin, we bully Jesus. Think back to the day of His crucifixion. He knows bullying intimately. He was beaten, scorned, mocked. I can imagine that growing up wasn’t a piece of cake for him either. He never took part in bullying other students and was probably mocked as well. We know his brothers picked on him and claimed He was crazy right up to the moment He appeared to them after the resurrection. Jesus knew the pain and rejection of being bullied on this earth.

Jesus knows it today. He desires to be with us and we psychologically bully him by isolating and ignoring His call to our hearts for worship and fellowship. He wants no corrupt communication to proceed from our lips, but only words that will build up fellow believers, yet we force him to participate in venomous backbiting and gossip. Jesus desires to be healthy physically so He is able to do the will of the Father to best of His ability, yet we entrap him in physical cages of gluttony like a 6th grader stuck in a locker.

Understanding the heart of Christ helps us understand the brokenness He experiences over our sin. At the end of Luke 19 we see both his broken heart and his righteous anger over the hard heartedness of His people and the blatant sin that it caused. While looking over the city, He weeps for their short sightedness and coming destruction because of their refusal to repent and believe. Once He gets to the city, He righteously cleans out His Father’s house of prayer. Jesus loves his people fiercely; but He hates their sin severely.

So what do we take from this short series on the impact of sin?

1. God’s Word is for our good, the best and ideal from the only One who loves any of us perfectly, as we desire to be loved.

2. Refusing to trust Him and His love leads us to false loves and choices that cause us, at best to settle for less than what He has for us and, at worst, brings us horribly painful consequences.

3. Our sin breaks the heart of God. All sins. Every last one. His heart breaks because of His great love for us and his great hate for the sin that damages our lives and separates us from Him.

4. To solve this seemingly hopeless situation, He showed His great love for us in that, “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

The one who was bullied took the punishment for the bullies so that He might have relationship with them. Oh, what a Savior!

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No Love Without Obedience


In my many conversations and lectures concerning relationships and sexuality, those who oppose my stance on these issues repeatedly bring up passages in which Jesus stresses love. God loves us the way we are, they say. We should be able to express our love for one another any way we please. God loves me even if I am involved in supposed “sin”.

Love one another. Love. Love. Love.

Problem here is that these people are speaking of Disney, fairy tale, happily ever after love. News flash: Love does not equal happiness. While Jesus did say the world would know we are his disciples by our love for one another (John 13:35), he also very specifically said that if we loved him, we would keep his commandments (John 14:15). So love isn’t a feeling. It’s an action. A cognitive decision to behave according to a certain standard in the best interest of another. Hmmm…

This post from Dan Phillips today on Pyromaniacs.com addresses this issue with a thorough and biblical treatment of love and obedience. It’s a lengthy argument, but well worth the time to chew through if you are one that really struggles with the concept of God “limiting” how humanity chooses to express love to one another to Him.

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The Thin Line


It’s an age old problem. Those we love the most, have known the longest, trusted with the most of ourselves, are the ones that have the potential to hurt us the most. This is exactly why so many people walk around with a wall around their hearts, keeping people at arm’s length to prevent potential heart break. The benefits of love are simply not worth the risk of hurt and rejection.

Prevention of pain explains a lot in ministry and life in general. Ministry leaders don’t stay places long because it hurts less when those you serve reject you or betray you if you haven’t known them long and you don’t have much invested in them. Marriages are short term agreements instead of lifetime covenants because it’s easier to find someone else than to work through the hurt caused by someone who knows you deeply. We are connected in more social networking ways than ever before in the history of humanity, but we “connect” through the barrier of technology. There is a very thin line between love and hate because great hate is usually only generated by a betrayal of great love. Some people learn this and decide it’s not worth the risk.

I was reminded of this today when my feelings were bruised in a ministry situation by someone I have known for a long time. My first thought was, “That wouldn’t have bothered me so bad if I weren’t at my home church and it hadn’t been someone who knows me.” Knowing and being known opens us up to hurt. And no one wants to be hurt. As humans, our favorite idol is our own pleasure and happiness, and we will often decrease our own happiness to decrease our risk for pain.

But then I thought about Jesus, the One who Scripture claims knows all of our pain and temptation yet never sinned. I thought about how painful it must have been for Him to be betrayed by Judas, one of his disciples, someone He had poured Himself into for three years. Three years is a long term relationship in our time, and they had been together almost constantly in those three years. They shared life together. They knew one another and were known by one another. Three years worth of betrayal were felt in that kiss in the garden.

But even more than that, how much did it hurt for Him to have been rejected by His chosen people? Jesus had known and had been known by His people since the time of Abraham. For eternity, before the foundation of the world, Jesus knew His creation, He knit them together one at a time in their mother’s wombs. He revealed himself in creation; day after day for thousands of years, He put himself out there, opened himself up to the risk of rejection.

Then He came to earth and was rejected. Rejected by His chosen people. Rejected by the very creation into which He had poured His own Image. Rejected by His physical family, who declared Him to be crazy and warned towns to steer clear of Him. Rejected by His spiritual family in the Temple, by those who knew the most about Him but really didn’t know Him at all. He was literally rejected to death.

Jesus knew the thin line between love and hate, but He determined that his hate of sin and separation from His creation outweighed his love for himself and his own happiness. His love for His Bride and His Father outweighed His hate for His own pain and suffering.

So when we face the tough times in relationships, those times when we are hurt, rejected, betrayed, how do we handle it? Do we run away, protecting ourselves and our hearts, or do we remember that Jesus stuck with it for the long haul? When our hearts are breaking, do we remember that Jesus poured Himself into relationships for centuries and was rejected, yet still stuck with it?

When we have times that we feel like no one understands the pain we feel, remember that Jesus invested more time in relationships than any of us, ALL of time, and experienced an equal amount of heartbreak.

He knows what heartbreak feels like and He wants to heal yours.

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Meditation Good for the Brain… and Soul


I read an article on NYTimes.com this morning entitled “How Meditation May Change the Brain”. Recent research indicates that people who meditate on a regular basis increase gray matter in the area of the brain that supports memory and learning while also decreasing the gray matter in the area of the brain that registers anxiety and stress.

Sounds like meditation might just be the cure to a lot of problems in the stressed out, forgetful, anxious culture we have developed in America. Some of the most common complaints of people today include the symptoms we are told meditating will alleviate. The problem for Christians is that we have been trained to believe that meditation is related only to Eastern religions such as Buddhism. So, instead of taking time to meditate and relax, we medicate and continue our stressed out, overworked lives.

There has been much discussion lately concerning the use of Eastern religious practices by Christians. Yoga has been a hot topic debated back and forth. Should Christians participate in an activity that was designed as a form of worship for another religion? Can the benefits of an activity be “Christianized” so that believers can participate without being a stumbling block or inadvertently worshiping a false god?

One thing that needs to be considered in this question is that there are things the Bible itself tells us to do that have become related distinctly to Eastern religious practice because Christians have abandoned them. A great example of this is meditation. In our culture today, we relate meditation directly to Buddhism and we picture a person in a lotus position, emptying their mind and repeating the Ohm.

There is a distinct difference between the meditation found in Eastern religions and the meditation in which we are told to participate in Scripture. As an oversimplification, Eastern religions teach meditation is to empty your mind, to think on nothing, to focus on your inner self and become “one” with the spirit of the universe.

Scripture teaches us to separate ourselves from the stresses of the world. We are to clear our mind, but not to focus on nothing. We have something specific to meditate upon. We are to push out the stress and anxiety of the world and meditate on God, on His character, on His Word.

We are told in Genesis 24 that Isaac went out to a field at night to meditate.

Joshua 1:8 says: Do not let this Book of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful.

The longest chapter in all of the Bible is Psalm 119, a praise of the benefits of knowing and meditating upon the Word of God.

Psalm 46:10 says, Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.

So as far as I’m concerned, the research published in Psychiatry Today: Neuroimaging simply confirms what God has been trying for ages to get humanity to understand: doing what God tells us to do is for our own good (Deut. 10:13).

So is it wrong for Christians to meditate? NO! It’s actually a command from God. But the fundamental difference between Eastern meditation and Christian meditation is the focus of the meditation. Eastern meditation empties the mind and focuses inwardly on self. Christian meditation fills the mind with the Word and focuses outwardly on Christ.

I would encourage you to try the experiment the man in the article is attempting. Rise early. Spend one hour in still silence, thinking on the Word and person of Christ. Train your mind to focus on Him, not on the distractions of this world. In the words of the old hymn, “Turn your eyes up on Jesus, look full in his wonderful face. And the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of his glory and grace.”

Spend some time looking Jesus full in the face, and see if it doesn’t just change your outlook on your day. When we do the right things for the right reasons, the right results occur, and they bring glory to God. Meditation for the man in the article seems to make him a nicer husband, and that’s enough for his wife, but to meditate on and for Christ will change both heart and mind, and can change lives for eternity.