Anchors for the Storm - Faith Alone (2nd Edition)

Preached on Sunday, September 14, 2014

Scripture readings: Genesis 15:1-6; Philippians 3:1-11; John 6:25-51

A faithful home above Vantage, WA:
September, 2014

I have a confession to make. Sometimes I drive too fast (actually more than sometimes). I never drive faster than it is safe to drive (well, almost never).

But I am a lawbreaker. I make excuses about it. Some people think it’s funny, and they tease me about it. But it’s true. And it is perhaps much truer than I realize that I shouldn’t even be talking about it from the pulpit without true repentance and the desire to change. I am sharing this because it is the very least of so many ways I am a puzzle to myself.

In this little puzzle to my life, what if I were to claim that my speeding wasn’t so bad because I make up for it by the fact that, when I am stopped by an officer of the law, I always know that I am guilty, and that it is my fault, and that I deserve a ticket.

I never pretend otherwise. I avoid making excuses. I never get mad at the officer. I do get mad, but my anger is aimed at my self.

My other claim to virtue is that I never plead for mercy on the basis that I am a minister. I never tell the officer that I am a minister. For one thing, I don’t believe that this would work, and I don’t believe it ought to work. So I don’t. And yet I really am a puzzle to my self.

This puzzle brings me to a Christian word. It’s a Bible word. That word is righteousness.

Righteous is a funny word, in the sense that we don’t use it much outside of church: except as slang. Isn’t it still used to say something like, “That car is righteous,” or “That dude is a righteous dude”?

I believe that this righteous slang word gets it right. This is what righteousness is all about. A righteous car is a car that does everything that a great well-maintained car ought to do.

I’m not going to comment on the word “dude”. But a righteous dude should be what a great human ought to be. In the world as it is, the slang righteousness is the only thing that saves righteousness from sounding like self-righteousness.

Righteousness is not weirdness, or what we call being “goody-goody”. It’s about being solid and real in the best way. You could expect fairness, and integrity, and truth, and compassion. You could expect the ability to look, and listen, and think things through, and to see them through, and not to quit. You could expect some degree of fearlessness. That would make a righteous dude or a righteous dudette.

The funny thing about being truly righteous is: who can measure up to it? I mean, we want to think of ourselves this way. Some people totally pull the wool over their own eyes about this, and those are the ones who aren’t fooling anyone but themselves: not for long.

We try to make excuses, to find reasons (and there are some). We try to justify ourselves.  We have our good qualities. But we are not righteous; not really.

The world is the same way. There are fear-mongers and hate-mongers and anger-mongers out there. And there are real things to fear, and to hate, and to be angry about. There are horrible things in this world: terrible things.

But there is also beauty, and love, and tenderness, and innocence, and faithfulness as well. There are people who love truth, and justice, and goodness; and these people stand up for the righteous things and fight for them.

The world is beautiful, and wonderful, and righteous. The world is horrible, and deadly. It is all of that; and so are we.

The Bible tells us that this world was made to reflect the glory of God, and so were human beings. The whole human order of things in this world, with marriage and family, and with friendship and community, was created to reflect the glory and beauty of God: to be righteous.

But it is also a fallen world. We all belong to that fallen world. We are made for the glory of God and we all fall short of it.

Some people will say that the world and its human inhabitants are a mixture of light and darkness, and they will advise us to try to live within the light. But there is nothing very grand, or bold, or victorious about this.

But we believe a grand, and bold, and victorious thing. We believe that there is a righteousness from God; a righteousness that has come into the world from the outside.

It has come into a fallen world in order to make a new world possible; to make new lives possible. This righteousness has come into the lives of some of the people in this world, and it can come into us. It is “the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.” (Philippians 3:9)

The righteousness that comes from God and is by faith (this righteousness that God wants to give to the whole creation) is something God started in a single family; the family of a desert nomad named Abram (or Abraham). Earlier in Abram’s story, the Lord spoke to him and said: I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great and you will be a blessing…and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 12:2-3)

The challenge and the difficulty of this promise was that Abram and his wife Sarah were old and childless. Yet the promise was based on a child that they were supposed to create between them.

They were in their seventies when God first made his promise to them. The years passed. The promise was renewed over and over again, and nothing, nothing, nothing at all happened.

Every time the promise was repeated they thought about that promise and they wished that it would come true. Every time the promise was repeated, guess what they must have done in the privacy of their tent. Guess what they must (at least) have tried to do. And nothing, nothing at all happened: nothing.

Then, in the verses we read from Genesis, God does it again. After years of making this promise, God repeats the promise again, and (even at this point) there are still years to go when nothing, nothing at all, will happen.

But one very strange thing does happen. This time we are told that Abram believed God. This was a very strange thing. It was a miracle. Here is how the Bible puts it: “Abram believed the Lord, and the Lord credited it to him as righteousness.” (Genesis 15:6) The Lord made faith to count as if it were righteous.

If being righteous required you to do what it took to be all that God intended you to be, then Abram and Sarah had a requirement that they had to live by. There was a law from God that ruled them. It gave them something they had to do together over, and over, and over again to make it happen, and it didn’t work. No matter how they tried, they could not be what God’s promise had promised them they would be.

They obeyed that law over and over, in the privacy of their tent; but something much more radical was essential.

The surprising and radical thing that God wanted was faith. Faith was essential before they could become what God wanted them to be. Faith was like the hinge on a door that enables that door to swing open. (John Calvin “Institutes of the Christian Religion”, 3.11.1)

Some people, even some Christians, seem to think that faith is something you do as part of a bargain to get God to do something for you, or that faith is something you give to God so that God can give you something in return: like the thing we call salvation, or like the things we call the answers to our prayers, or like the things we want that have to do with success, and peace, and plenty, and happiness.

Faith has very little to do with anything we want. It has everything to do with what God wants. Real faith only wants what God wants. That’s why God will give anything to those who only want what God wants.

But even saying that does not go far enough. Faith has everything to do with who God is and who God promises to be for us. When you are in the middle of a storm in life; when you are struggling under the weight of worry, or fear, or anger, or failure, or pain, or loss, and your stomach hurts, and your heart palpitates, and you can’t sleep at night because of the anguish you feel, faith has everything to do with who God is, and who God promises that he will be for you, in the time to come.

Faith is like a fire within that does not light itself. Faith is the gift of fire that comes from seeing the love of God and the new life that is promised by God’s love. Faith is God’s gift of fire to a life without a spark. It is not your gift to God. It is God’s gift to you.

Paul says it in Ephesians 2:8. “For it is by grace that you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast.”

The fire of faith gives you light to see what you cannot see without it. It gives you warmth to thaw you out; so that the mind of faith can think, so that the heart of faith can love, so that the feet of faith may take you where God wants you to go, so that the hands of faith enable you to do whatever the work is that God wants you to do. Faith makes you alive so God can give life to others through you.

You can guard that fire of faith and feed it; but not light it. As long as it burns it will never cease to do the work that a living faith does. It will make you grow in its warmth. It will help others grow. It will give to others in their great need. It will do what is good, and helpful, and useful. It will be a force for good in the world around you.

Faith is always based not on who you are or on what you can do; but based on who God is, and what God does. And we meet God in Christ. We see who God is and what God does in Jesus.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus doesn’t call this gift “fire” but he calls it food. What God does through Christ is the food that the Father and the Son give to all who come to him, and we come to him by believing. We come to him by faith.

This is why he says. “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.” And Jesus says, “Don’t work for the food that spoils, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the son of Man (he means himself) will give you.” (John 6:27-29) And he says, “I am the bread of life.” (6:35)

Working for the food that spoils means doing what you think will make you all that you can be. But believing that Jesus is the bread of life is completely different.

Believing means having faith. It means trusting in God as he is (as we meet him in Jesus). It means trusting the cross and trusting the resurrection.

This is the work that is not work. This is the work that abandons itself and trusts in God’s work. Faith is not your gift to God but your journey out of yourself and into the gift of what God is, and into the life that God can give you.

Faith is based on God, knowing God as he is. What we know about God is what we see in Christ, in his life, his death, and his resurrection. We know God by seeing his sacrifice for our sins on the cross. We know God by seeing his power to defeat sin, and death, and hell.

Paul speaks of this in Philippians. He says, “I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ – the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.” (Philippians 3:8-11)

The Jews worked to prove their status as God’s people by keeping the Old Testament law (the Torah). This was the work they thought would prepare them for the Kingdom of God and to make that kingdom come. But that preparation accomplished nothing but hardness of heart, and pride, and the inability to be the blessing to every nation that God had called Abraham to be.

Faith was the heart of the promise; and God had come, in Christ, to give the power of his righteousness to those who saw what God had done; to those who made the daring surrender of faith.

Those who trust in Christ have new forces at work within them. They have the cross of Jesus working in them. They have the resurrection working in them. They have the Holy Spirit.

We can never bargain for this. There is no gift we can give for this. We can only believe what God has done. Then it goes to work in us.

Paul wrote, “Whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ.” (3:7-8)

Faith means going outside ourselves, in Christ: letting go of ourselves, and so there are things that are worth losing for his sake. There is the obvious rubbish of our selfishness and our lovelessness; the obvious rubbish of our sins.

Then there is the rubbish (the garbage) of good things. I am a hereditary saver and hoarder of good things. I have thousands of books, and trinkets, and artifacts, and memorabilia. Some day my treasures will be someone else’s garbage. There may be habits and marks of my character that are not bad in themselves, but they are clutter: sheer clutter. They stand in the way of my love for God and for others.

All Christians are called to be disciples. All disciples are sent out into the world as witnesses of Jesus in their words and actions and lives. We are all missionaries; whether we are officially ministers, or elders, or so called ordinary church members.

We are not called to be church members. The church matters, but church can turn into a club where we preach, and pray, and sing hymns, and take offerings. We are called to be members of Jesus: his arms, hands, feet, voice, and living presence. The organization and the responsibilities we assign each other can become clutter and an escape from being Jesus in this world. They become a substitute (or a crutch) for living as a disciple of Jesus by faith.

There are things we think of as our treasures, our strengths or our rights or our dignity. These get in our way of loving God with all we’ve got, and loving others as ourselves. These are not the great good things we think, no matter how tight we hold onto them.

We think of them as our strengths, when they may be nothing but strong crutches, and we don’t have enough faith to part with them. We don’t want to replace them with the strength of God that comes from faith.

There are people who say that faith is a crutch, but faith actually requires us to throw away our crutches. Faith gives us freedom from all our bad limitations and from all our good clutter. Faith makes us free indeed.

The author George MacDonald imagined God saying this: “My child, you must be strong in my strength. I have no other strength to give you.” This is “the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.”

There is no other way for it to come. It is by faith alone.

Anchors for the Storm - Grace Alone (2nd Edition)

Preached on Sunday, September 7, 2014

Scripture Readings: Psalm 51:1-19; Ephesians 2:4-10; John 1:1-5, 9-18

A family was talking to their pastor after worship and their little girl piped up and asked, “Pastor, just who is this amazing Grace that we sang about today?”

A gracious home above Vantage, WA
September, 2014

We can’t really understand what grace is, at all, unless we match it with the word amazing. There is no such thing as “mere grace”. Grace is, or should be, always amazing.

And the whole concept that grace should always, and only, be amazing should tell us something about ourselves that we don’t like to admit. The awful truth is that we don’t understand grace, and it is very hard for us to believe in it, or to accept it.

For instance, in English, and in a lot of other languages, we use the concept of grace for the purpose of thanks; and this is a good thing. Grace is a word we use to designate a prayer of thanks. We say grace at a meal (if we remember to, or have someone to remind us) because God has done something for us by providing for us, and so it is only right to give him thanks. God deserves it.

We thank people for what they have done. We thank people because they deserve thanks.

In an odd turn-around of this, if we have been taught to be really “nice” people, we have also been taught to not accept thanks graciously, even though we have been carefully taught to say “you’re welcome”. When someone thanks us, or even praises us, our mind races around to find some way to make an excuse for what we are being thanked for. We try to explain it away, or justify exactly why we don’t deserve to be thanked or praised.

In Spanish, when you do something for someone, they say “thank you”. They say “gracias” or “grace”. Then the polite thing for you to say is “de nada” which means “it is nothing”; as if you haven’t done anything worth mentioning. This shows the gallantry and generosity of the Spanish culture. It also shows the confusion that human nature feels about real grace.

Even though grace is amazing, it can be embarrassing. But you might not think that.

We talk so much about grace, as Christians, and we say how wonderful it is to receive the grace of God. I’m not sure we really believe this. How can we say that we love grace when God gives it to us on a divine scale, and yet we get embarrassed by it on a human scale, when one of our fellow human beings offers to help us? Because, helping someone, expecting nothing in return, is exactly the same thing as giving them grace. Why is it embarrassing when people help us, but not when God helps us?

When I was twelve, we moved to a new house; and the yard was all dirt and star thistles and it was my job to hoe up all those thistles. Here I was slaving away and not very happy about it, when this gnarled up, stooped over, little old man, with arthritic hands, named Jose came over from next door. Jose saw me out there hoeing all by myself and he came over to help.

I still remember his hands. I saw them as he started to hoe beside me. I had never seen such twisted hands.

All I could do was say to him, “No sir, no sir; I can do it. Thank you. Thank you, sir. I can do it.” And, finally, he let me do it myself, and he went back home. I was confused about grace.

We are confused about grace. It’s no wonder that, when we finally do understand it, we find it to be amazing; not just in our talk or our singing, but in fact.

Grace is amazing because it is beautiful. The original New Testament word for grace is the Greek word “charis” and the basic root meaning of charis is beauty, or loveliness. The original Old Testament words for grace are “chen” and “chesed”, and the basic root meaning of both these words is the concept of beauty and loveliness; although “chen” has come to mean favor, and “chesed” has come to be interpreted as loving kindness, or steadfast love, or unfailing love.

“Chesed” is the grace word used in the psalm: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love.” The origin of these words for unfailing love was beauty.

Even our English word “grace”, itself, has that same root meaning. When we say that a woman moves with grace we mean that she moves with great beauty and loveliness.

It is only by understanding the grace of God, in terms of an amazing beauty and loveliness, that we are able to understand the meaning of grace at all. Grace is a gift because it is an action (which God takes on our behalf) that reveals his infinite beauty and loveliness to a degree that completely amazes us.

When we experience grace, it has nothing to do with us. It has everything to do with the beauty and loveliness of God. It has nothing to do with our worthiness, and everything to do with the worthiness of God. When we experience the worthiness of God, our own worthiness is swallowed up by his, and it disappears in his. And our being swallowed up and disappearing into the worthiness of God is no injustice to us. We lose nothing by it. We are only enriched by it. This is grace. It’s beautiful.

Surely even an achievement is a kind of gift. If you write a good poem, your pleasure is not in your achievement but in the vision at the center of your poem. If you have the skill in mechanics to build an engine, surely your pleasure in your skill is swallowed up when you put that engine in a boat, or a car, or a truck, or a plane, and you drive it, or you fly it, and you feel the power and the smoothness of that engine at work.

Your skill is swallowed up in the pleasure of the gift. The better the gift, the more thankful you feel. The best gifts direct you beyond yourself, no matter how much your participation has been a part of it. You want to enjoy the gift far more than you want to claim credit for it.

There is a way of living and understanding the meaning of our life that is called “grace alone”. It is a way of living your life, and understanding your life, from the point of view of everything being a gift; seeing the goodness of all the gifts, and being able to be properly amazed by the greatest gifts.

It is all about beautiful gifts. The meaning of our life, our relationships with others and the commitments we share, our relationship with God and the promises that bind us to him, are all about grace, and grace alone. This means that the most important thing about our life is not our skill, not our achievement, not our maturity, not our ability, not our self worth, not our savvy or wisdom but the grace of God. It is about our experience of all these things as gifts from God.

This is not to say that skill, achievement, maturity, ability, savvy or wisdom, or even our own worth are not important. They are important.

We, ourselves are of infinite worth to God. We are worth a cross to God. But what we have, (and what we are) are not the way we come to God, except through thanks. They are not the way we come to others. They are not even the way we come to ourselves, except through thanks.

We come to God. We come to others. We even come to our selves, through the experience of life as a gift that is full of the gifts of God.

What people are able to do with their hands, and their minds, and with their backs and shoulders and legs are amazing. I try to never underestimate what anybody accomplishes.

I served a church in southern Idaho where the land was homesteaded about 1910. One of my members told me the story of how his grandparents homesteaded about one day’s mule team trip from the Snake River. They had no water on their place for the home, the farm, and the livestock. The grandfather had to take a wagon load of empty water barrels by mule team, a day’s journey to the river. It took them another day to get back, and this gave them water for one day. Then the process had to be repeated.

A minister visited a farm, and it was a beautiful farm: the fields, the home, the machinery, everything. The minister said, “What a beautiful farm God has given you.” The farmer replied, “You should have seen it when God had it to himself.”

There is great beauty in achievement and worth, but there is an even greater beauty in the gifts that we haven’t earned and cannot earn. The truth is you can only work with what God has given you, because you have not brought yourself into this world. You have not given birth to yourself.

Life in the kingdom of God is not about earning, but about gifts. Life is about grace alone.

The Bible is full of pictures of grace.

We have read Psalm fifty-one. The great Old Testament King David wrote this psalm. David was God’s key person in his time and place. David is so keyed to God’s plan that God was born, in Jesus, as the Son of David. David was the eighth son in a huge family, and he was fated to be that family’s spare boy. He was fated to stay with the sheep all his life.

In the human way of things, David was not needed. But the Lord did a divine thing. The Lord worked by grace. The Lord called him from the flocks to be the future king; the replacement for a king who had failed.

David did not really want to be king, and he never tried to be king, but the Lord, through many hardships, brought him into the kingship. God called David a man after his own heart (1 Samuel 13:14), and all of this seems like the highest level of success.

But then David lusted after the wife of one of his most faithful officers. David committed adultery with this woman Bathsheba, and arranged the death of the faithful husband. David was accused and exposed openly. He broke down and saw himself as he was: a sinner in need of grace, a sinner unworthy of any grace at all. (1 Samuel 11-12)

But David prayed for grace. This psalm is his prayer. And his prayer was answered.

“Have mercy upon me, O God, according to your unfailing love.” (Psalm 51:1) The phrase “unfailing love” here translates one of those Hebrew words for grace, and for beauty, and loveliness. David asked for God to take action, on his behalf, in a way that he could never deserve, and never repay.

Justice is a beautiful thing, but justice would have killed David. So David asked for something more beautiful than justice. He asked for an amazing grace; a scandalous grace (it’s true) but an amazing grace. David admitted that he deserved nothing but the judgment and punishment of God: “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are proved right when you speak and justified when you judge.” (51:4)

David prayed “have mercy” when he had no mercy on the woman’s husband. David prayed “according to your unfailing love,” after he had turned his back on his duty of love and grace to others.

David prayed “according to your great compassion,” when he had had no compassion at all. He knew that he was asking for something that he did not deserve.

The story of David’s life (as we read it in Samuel) tells us that the Lord answered his prayer for grace by giving him grace.

The grace of God in David’s life gave David what he knew he needed above all else: “Create in me a pure heart O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” (51:10)

The grace of God would make David’s heart pure again so that he could do what he had failed to do. David would try to see his life as full of the gifts of God and live accordingly. He would try to treat others with reverence, with the reverence due to them as gifts of God in their own right.

The truth is that David would never succeed at this very well. Many times he would just be awful. But it was his aim to live by grace. It was his desire to live a life that was changed by grace whether he succeeded or not. David sometimes lived a life that showed a gracious heart. He lived in a way that drew the love and sacrifice of others because he, himself, often overwhelmed them with his own sacrifice.

After his failure, David knew he did not deserve any real peace of mind ever again, but he prayed for it anyway: “Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me.” (51:12)

This is the beauty and loveliness of God that Paul writes about when he says: “God who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions – it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus.” (Ephesians 2:5-6) The beauty of this action by God, on our behalf, is grace.

Only grace would allow David to live fully as a servant and a child of God. Paul teaches us that it is the grace of God that lifts us up “into the heavenly realms” which means the capacity to live life in the freedom of the power and the presence of God, through Christ. The grace of God gives us the drive and the freedom to become gracious.

John tells us that the coming of God in the flesh, in Jesus Christ, was full of grace and truth. (John 1:14) This grace gave us the power to see God, and to be reborn and recreated as brand new children of God, who are born by the will of God. (John 1:12-13, 18) And God’s will for us is grace, and his grace gives us wills like his own.

There is a time when everything in our life is grace; even though we have earned nothing. When we are babies and little children we can’t do anything for anyone except to need grace; to need love, and nurture, and endless (tireless and exhausting) care, and direction. When little children experience neglect instead of care, there is a neediness within them which often follows them all their lives.

Sometimes neighbors, and relatives, and other concerned people can step in and give them a new start and a new life. This is grace.

One way or other we can generally only give what we have been given. We give what we have received. We can only give grace when we have received grace.

No matter how independent we think we are, or ought to be, we can only build a good life on the foundation of having learned, at one time in our life (at least), that everything is a gift; everything is grace and grace alone. There is never a stage in life where you can become an abundant giver (a passionate, uncalculating giver) without continuing in a life full of grace, in which it seems that you live by grace alone. Sooner or later we will find ourselves in a place where we can do nothing but receive grace.

Even in the Bible, the word grace is a strange and confusing word. When we study the Bible it is easier to find grace in the New Testament than in the Old Testament.

There is plenty of grace in the Old Testament, though. Otherwise the people of Israel would never have survived.

But the simple, clear word for “grace” is very rare in the Old Testament. The Bible itself tells us to expect this.

John, the writer of the gospel, tells us that the clearest thing to find in the Old Testament was the law. The clearest thing was the challenge to try living by the law and by earning your own way.

John tells us that Jesus helps us to see more of God than the law alone. Jesus helps us to see everything that God would give us through grace, beyond the law. John says, “For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but God, the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.”

John tells us that God, the Word, became flesh. He uses the word flesh, instead of the word for human or man, because the flesh is the weak, central core of human nature.

The flesh is the part of human life that wears out the soonest. The flesh represents us as frail people, as rebels hiding in the in dark. The flesh represents us as people who cannot understand what it means to receive and welcome Jesus; as people who will not come and live in the light of God, who gives us life.

Jesus became flesh. He identified himself with all of human life (the best and the worst). But he went beyond that. Jesus was aware of our need, and so he identified himself, most of all, with the undeserving heart of human nature; the failing, sinful heart of human nature.

Jesus not only identified himself with humans at their best, but at their worst. This is important.

This is why the cross is beautiful and lovely in all its awful horror. God, in his grace, goes the distance with us. God goes with us infinitely beyond any notion of worthiness or deserving.

God deals with the darkness in us until that time when we are truly free, until that time when he will put all the darkness away in a new heaven and a new earth.

Grace alone means that there is no other story. God is never done with us, or with grace. The story of grace is the only story; and it never ends. After all, isn’t the good news of the gospel beautiful because it is the heart of a never-ending story?

It is a story where there is joy because everything is a gift, and the story only leads to the discovery of gift beyond gift, beyond gift, beyond gift: “one blessing after another.” The Bible calls it “grace upon grace”.

Everything will be grace and grace alone. This is the good news of the gospel.

Anchors for the Storm - Christ Alone (2nd Edition)

Preached on Sunday, August 31, 2014

Scripture Readings:  Isaiah 59:1-21; Colossians 1:15-23; John 14:1-14

I am old enough to remember a time long ago when, if you asked a person whether they were a Christian, some people would actually say, “Of course I am. I’m an American.” This sounds odd nowadays; and it was never true; but it was a surprisingly common answer, once upon a time.

Summer of 2014: Looking Toward Sentinel Gap
            North of Desert Aire-Mattawa, WA
          

It also used to be possible to ask someone if they were a Christian, and they might say, “Of course I’m a Christian. I go to church.” But there is the old preacher’s joke that says being in church doesn’t make you into a Christian any more than being in a garage makes you into a car. The joke tells the truth.

There is a well known Democratic politician who was raised a Methodist, and who is reported to have said, long ago, that she didn’t know how anybody could be a Republican and still be a Christian. (I won’t tell you who that was, from the pulpit.)

This helps us get at the phrase, “Christ alone”.  Can there be anything, besides Christ, that makes us Christian: where we were born, where we spend our Sunday mornings, or the particular church we belong to, or something we have done?

“Christ alone” is the answer to a question, but what is the question? There may be a lot of ways of putting the question. How can I be saved? How can I be born again? How can I be born from above? How can I have a relationship with God? How can I be a new person? How can I change? How can I stop being part of the problem and start being part of the solution? How can I find fulfillment and meaning? How can I find forgiveness?  How can I come home?

The answer is “Christ alone”. Or Jesus put it like this, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.” (John 14:6)

“Christ alone” is a phrase that comes down to us from hundreds of years ago, during the period of history they call “The Reformation”. There are five phrases that have come down to us from that time which all contain the word “alone”. They are scripture alone, Christ alone, grace alone, faith alone, and the glory of God alone.

These phrases came into use as a way of correcting certain abuses and mistakes and wrong directions that had been taken by the church during the chaos of “The Middle Ages”. Really those times were not as bad as we think, and we still experience enough chaos as God’s people, in this world, to need these phrases. We are thinking about them as a kind of system of anchors put out in different directions around a ship in a storm, to hold it safe.

We can see how these anchors work together as a team to keep us centered in our life as Christians, to keep us from distorting the priorities of the Christian life. Faith alone reminds us of the importance of living with our deepest trust in God alone and not in our own strength, or goodness, or habits, or in anything we can do.  But sometimes we can distort the role that faith plays in our living and praying. We make faith into something that we do.

The principles of “Scripture alone” and “Christ alone” help us understand the nature of faith. For instance, in the scriptures, Jesus does not say, “Your faith in me is the way, and the truth, and the life.” Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”

Our faith is almost an extension of ourselves. It is a part of what we think and do. But “the way, the truth, and the life” have nothing to do with us, except in being an invitation, and as a gift that we receive through Christ. Christ is greater than our faith because he is greater than our hearts (1 John 3:20). Christ is “the author and perfecter of our faith” (Hebrews 12:12).

Faith alone is a gift from beyond our selves. Faith comes from grace. It is a gift from God (not self-generated, not something we work out). (Ephesians 2:8-9) I think we need to want to have faith, but faith is a gift.

Our knowledge and our understanding of Christ is not “the way, the truth and the life” (though this plays a part of our love). We want to know and understand. But Christ alone means that what we need is in Christ and not in us.

When Jesus says, “No one comes to the Father but by me,” he is not warning us about the quality, or the direction, or even the content of our faith, or our understanding. He means that he is assuming responsibility over us. It is the same thing that he meant when he said, “You did not choose me, but I chose you…” (John 15:16)

All of this comes from the context of Jesus saying, “Let not your hearts be troubled.” (John 14:1) Why is he telling us not to be troubled or afraid? It is because he is giving us a promise. Saying that our life with God is by “Christ alone” is not a threat to scare others, but a promise in the form of an invitation. It is the promise of Jesus that our life with God is in good hands, in the very best hands, in hands that have been pierced with nails for us.

Isn’t it funny how we make these words to mean exactly the opposite? We make them into a solemn warning; as if we really wanted to be scared, or for others to be scared; as if we wanted a religion of worry and fear instead of a religion of freedom and love. Saying “Christ alone” is meant to be the anchor for this.

In my summer between third and fourth grade I went to a Y.M.C.A. camp for a week. At one point during the week they cleaned out the swimming pool and they started to refill it. The water came into the pool from openings in the sides of the pool that made huge jets of water. It was really powerful, impressive, and exciting.

I know this because I was in the pool at the time. The camp opened the pool for all the campers while they were filling it. It seemed huge. It was probably an Olympic sized pool; and here it was, full of kids playing in the giant jets of water.

The only problem with this was that, as the water jetted into the pool, the level of the water got deeper without everyone noticing this. I didn’t notice, and (suddenly) I got in over my head. An older kid who obviously had lifeguard training saw that I was in trouble. He grabbed me and started pulling on me in order to save me.

And what did I do? I fought him with all my might. Who did he think he was, thinking that I was in trouble (although I was)? I was so mad, and I was a real brat to him.

That’s how this world is; the world we are part of. And we really are part and parcel of it.

 A pedestrian got hit by a car and was lying in the street. A passerby ran up to the man and put his coat under his head (maybe he shouldn’t have done this, but this is an old joke), and he asked the man, “Are you comfortable sir?” and the man lying on the street said, “I make a decent living, thank you.”

Everybody is doing just fine, thank you, and has no need of what we offer. People will tell us that there is no need for any special way, or special truth, or special life. And Christians, by and large, are just the same; we certainly don’t need any special help, thank you.

I can say that I’m not perfect (which surprises no one). And when I say it I am thinking what how wonderful it is that I am so self-aware, so honest, so humble. But just try to tell me one way that I am not perfect, and advise me on a plan of action for just how to make the necessary changes, and then see how I react.

And, by the way, do you want to know what is really wrong with you?

It is because our hearts are shaped this way that our only true hope is Christ alone.

Isaiah gives us an example in his book: “For your hands are stained with blood, your fingers with guilt. Your lips have spoken lies, and your tongue mutters wicked things. No one calls for justice; no one pleads his case with integrity. They rely on empty arguments and speak lies; they conceive trouble and give birth to evil. They hatch the eggs of snakes and spin a spider’s web. Whoever eats their eggs will die, and when one is broken, a snake is hatched.” (Isaiah 59:4-5)

Does it sounds extreme; that ancient world? It’s the same world we see in the news every day. But the most surprising thing about Isaiah’s message is that he is not speaking to the so-called heathens. Isaiah is speaking to God’s people. It’s the church of his day, full of people who don’t know their own heart. If we want to find ourselves in the Bible, we must see that this is where we are. This is us.

There is a Disney cartoon program called “Phineas and Ferb” in which there is an evil scientist named Dr. Doofenschmirtz, who is always plotting to take over the world (or part of it) and spread his evil plans. But he fails every time. In one episode his evil mentor encourages him by saying, “Heinz, you don’t have to conquer the world in order to spread evil. You can do it through all the little things you say and do every day.” And that is what we do.

If we kept an exact record of every thought and feeling that passed through our minds, every second of the day, we would be ashamed to read it. If we thought that other people could see our thoughts and feelings at every passing second, just by looking at us. We would all hide.

A five year old knows lots about injustice and evil from both sides; and we become experts as we grow up. We receive more wounds and we become more insensitive as we grow up. Only we would do almost anything to avoid having anyone see through us.

The world we live in has not been working very well for a long, long time. The world we find so disturbing is the way it is because it is full of human beings just like us. Welcome to the human race!

And yet, the world as it is doesn’t want a way, or a truth, or a life that it can’t devise for itself. The original humans, in the form of Adam and Eve, wanted to be self-governing. They wanted a life that they could devise for themselves. What we have is the result. The world as it is doesn’t want to admit it needs such a way, a truth, or a life from beyond itself.

Today’s world says that our growing scientific knowledge means that we don’t have to look for answers from beyond this world any longer. Great knowledge has given us more cures for disease, more food for more people, a higher standard of living and comfort, and more dangers, violence, and deception than ever.

In the face of this, do you know that Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life?  G. K. Chesterton wrote that it is not true that the Christian way has been tried and found wanting, but that it has been found difficult and left untried.

Isaiah says, “So justice is driven back, and righteousness stands at a distance; truth has stumbled in the streets, honesty cannot enter. Truth is nowhere to be found, and whoever shuns evil becomes a prey. The Lord looked and was displeased that there was no justice. He saw that there was no one, he was appalled that there was no one to intervene; so his own arm worked salvation for him and his own righteousness sustained him.” (Isaiah 59:14-16)

God himself took up the cause. God did for this world what it could not do for itself. God did for us what we could not do for ourselves.

God’s arm reached down into our world to do the work of salvation. Now God doesn’t have an arm like ours, with bones, and muscles, and sinews; but God has strength within himself. God has the ability to use his strength to do his work. This arm, this strength, is Jesus. Jesus is God in the flesh, God as a living human being, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.

Jesus is what Isaiah meant when he said, “his own arm worked salvation for him.” “Christ alone” is the equivalent of saying “God alone”.  Paul describes: “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” (Colossians 1:19-20)

Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.” This makes the world mad. It even makes some people who profess to be Christians mad. It seems arrogant and exclusive.

Christians have acted arrogantly. We have acted in ways to exclude others as if we were better than them. The cure is to look at what Jesus is saying and where he is saying it.

Philip said to Jesus, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.” Jesus answered, “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:8-9) One of the things that Jesus is telling us, and the whole world, is that God is not exclusive. God wants to be known, and loved. God wants to be present.

There is a house for God and us together. It is the Father’s house. We are made to be together. Paul said, God wants “to reconcile all things to himself, whether things on earth or things in heaven.” (Colossians 1:20)

The world says it wants to see all religions as equal. The problem with this is that they are so different in the essence of what they teach about the nature of the world, and of God, and of how we find our purpose. They are so different from each other that if they are all equal then they must all be equally far away from the way, the truth, and the life.

If no one in the world is close and everyone is far, then it seems that the reality of the universe must be that God, if there is a God, must be very far away. God must be very difficult to know, and God must be very uninterested in reaching out to us, or else he is unable to reach out to us. And we are on our own.

Jesus tells us that “the way, the truth, and the life” of God is not distant. It is close. It is as close as a single face that cannot be mistaken for another. It is as close as a voice distinct from all other voices. It is as close as hands and fingerprints that are absolutely unique. “The way, the truth, and the life” is approachable and knowable. It is found in Jesus: in Christ alone.

Is this arrogant? It could be. But where has the way, the truth, and the life been? Where is it going?

The way, the truth, and the life has taken off its clothes, and wrapped itself in a towel, and become a foot washer. Jesus and his disciples, just before he said, “don’t be troubled,” had finished the Passover meal, and Jesus had washed the disciples’ feet, every one of them; even the feet of Judas Iscariot, the betrayer.

This is not an arrogant truth: not for Jesus, and not for us. And Jesus has told us to do likewise. Jesus has told us that the world will know that we are his disciples if we are foot-washers, and if we are a servant people who know how to love others. (John 13:1-17)

Where is Jesus going? Jesus is on his way to the cross with a vengeance, in order to destroy his enemies.  But the enemies of Jesus are not people. They are the sources of evil in this world: injustice, unrighteousness, lies, hypocrisy, violence, abuse, willful blindness, heartlessness: in other words, sin.

Jesus fights these enemies on the cross. He conquers them within us when he claims us there on that cross. This is “the way, the truth, and the life” he has been talking about.  This is how the Lord’s “own arm worked salvation for him.” This is how, “He put on righteousness as his breastplate, and the helmet of salvation on his head; he put on the garments of vengeance and wrapped himself in zeal as in a cloak.” (Isaiah 59:17)

The cross is God’s vengeance on sin. The cross is the picture of zeal in the extreme. Who else would go so far as the Lord has gone, in patience, and humility, and blood, and pain?

This is servanthood; sacrificial, redemptive love. It is no sin to say that this is the only genuine and hopeful way. It is not arrogant to claim some special status for love, even though love will never stay on its pedestal.

Jesus washed our feet to make us his servants. This is what we call anyone to be, if we want to help them know the way, the truth, and the life. We call them to be servants like us: like Jesus. You can’t be arrogant and do this.

When the God’s people (the church) live like this, no one will call us arrogant any more. Or, if they do, no one else will believe them.

God himself is not proud. In the modern world, where the Christian faith is more and more out of favor, we may find a new blessing in losing our pride.  We will not be the top. We will not be the leaders. We will be the bottom. We will be foot washers: people of the cross.

When such a time finally comes, it may seem to us that all we have left is Christ; and Christ alone. This is what all other faithful disciples have found; those who have gone before us. This is the common state of God’s people in the world: having Christ alone.

Each and every one of us will come to some time and place in which we will seem to have Christ alone. Our instinct will be to think that we are alone, when we have only Christ. But then we will find that this is not true. We will find that, when we have Christ alone, we have everything we truly need, because of him. 

Anchors for the Storm - Scripture Alone (2nd Edition)

Preached on Sunday, August 24, 2014

Scripture Readings: Psalm 19:1-14; 2 Timothy 3:10-17; John 5:24-47

A walk around Ginko Petrified Forest State Park
Near Vantage, WA, August 2014

Many years ago, the great author G.K. Chesterton and some other writers were brought together for an interview. Among many other questions, they were asked what book they would want to have with them if they were stranded on a deserted island. One said he would want “The Complete Works of Shakespeare”. Another said he would want the Bible. Chesterton spoke up and said, “I would choose “Thomas’s Guide to Practical Ship Building”.

Chesterton knew that his life on that deserted island would be driven by a single guiding purpose. If he had access to only one book on that island, he would want it to be a book that matched that driving purpose.

We have been designed and given life, in this world, by God, for a purpose, and God has designed and given life to a book, in this world, that matches our purpose. We call that book the Bible. We call it the Scriptures.

The name Bible means book. Scriptures means the things that have been scripted, written, and brought together for this purpose, in this book. (Actually the scriptures collect in one, single volume a whole library full of books.)

The message of the scriptures, the message of the story they contain, tells us that the God who made us (and who made all things) is a God who loves relationships. The Bible tells us that this God takes delight in the presence of love and faithfulness in these relationships.

Psalm nineteen tells us that God designed his creation to be able to speak to us about him and for him. He made it to bring joy to those who heard it speak, “In the heavens he has pitched a tent for the sun, which is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion, like a champion rejoicing to run his course.” (Psalm 19:4-5)

The same Psalm tells us that God has ways (God has patterns) and that God wants these ways to be our ways (our patterns) too. It tells us that when God’s ways are our ways it is life-giving to us. The Psalm says: “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul (reviving our deepest life).” (Psalm19:7)

The word law here is the Hebrew word “torah”. Torah often means the first five books of the Scriptures. Even though it is generally translated as “law”, Torah doesn’t mean law in the sense of rules and regulations. It means ways, and patterns, and God’s teachings about those things.

The Book of Genesis, with its account of creation, and with its account of the Lord calling people to be his beloved people, starting with old man Abraham and old lady Sarah, is a book that shows us the ways, and the patterns, and the teachings of God. This is part of the torah. This is part of God’s law.

The events described in the laws of Genesis are the ways of God. They are told to us in such a way as to give us a living experience of God that will revive our life, our soul. God’s ways of creation and calling people to faith are told to us in such a way that will amaze us, and make us wonder all the time. It is told in a way that will give us the light to see great things, and take us out of ourselves and into the light of God’s love.

Moses was the first of God’s people who were commanded to write things down. (Exodus 17:14) The five first and oldest books of the Bible can be called the books of Moses, because they have those things he wrote.

Moses was the one who started God’s writing business, so that God’s ways would be remembered; so that people in the future could meet God and hear God speak through what had been written. In reading what God had done, they could meet God himself, and hear his voice, and live.

Jesus told his hearers what the scriptures were for. He said: “You study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life….If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say?” (John 5:39-40, 46-47)

This Sunday, and in the weeks ahead, we are going to look at five guiding phrases from about five hundred years ago, from the time we call the Reformation. These old, old phrases don’t come down to us as a set. They weren’t dreamed up all at once. They weren’t all designed to meet one great issue. But they all serve a similar purpose. I imagine these guiding phrases to be like multiple anchors dropped from a boat in a raging storm.

The funny thing about each of these phrases is that each one uses the word “alone”: scripture alone, Christ alone, grace alone, faith alone, and the glory of God alone. They are five things that serve alone. How can all five things be alone? 

Ancient ships often carried several anchors as a protection during storms. When the storm winds were shifting and constantly changing direction, multiple anchors, set in multiple directions, would hold the ship steady as the wind changed. First it might be the anchor from the bow that held them steady. Then it was the anchor from the stern. As the wind shifted, each anchor would be the essential one.

Our own struggles and challenges can come from any direction. These anchors hold us and keep us from being driven by the storm. They hold us from different directions safely in the center of the purpose for which God has designed our lives. Each anchor holds us in our proper relationship with God in Christ.

We are creatures of God; children of God. But there is a drive within our nature to be rebels, to assert our independence from God.

There is a drive within our nature to achieve a kind of mastery, to make a false picture of ourselves, to make ourselves the one we really worship (as if life were all about us). This drive makes us seek to set ourselves up as a god for others (so that they will give in to what we want). As strange as it seems, even when we believe in God, we sometimes want to be in charge of God himself, because we find God’s independence so frustrating. We use prayer and the Bible as tools or machines to manage God.

Each of these anchors holds us safe in a relationship where God alone is God. Here we are always safe in our real identity as creatures and children. These anchors hold us steady in our real God-related lives.

The heart of the scriptures is a relationship with God in Christ. Paul says this to Timothy: “From infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” (2 Timothy 3:15) The whole Bible is about this.

The Scriptures are inspired for the purpose of shaping our lives for our relationship with Jesus, because we are all going to see Jesus.  Paul says this, as he writes, “In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom…” (2 Timothy 4:1)

One of the dangers is that we will be tempted to change the good news of the Gospel of Jesus into a set of facts or a field of knowledge instead of the voice of the living God. We are tempted to see the Bible as a textbook of information about the Lord. We are even tempted to see the Bible as a textbook about other subjects that are of interest to us. We stop meeting the personal Jesus in the scriptures and we compensate by absorbing facts and ideas.

Some people make it seem like a hard thing to master the facts of the Bible, and they may try to boss others around on the basis of their special knowledge, or they might try to pull others down who seem to know less of the facts and are less able to quote from book, and chapter, and verse.

Others are tempted to give up, because they know that they will never catch up. Those who give up will either follow those who have all the answers, or else they will go away.

Jesus confronted those who denied him because they built up authority over others through their technical expertise in the information of the scriptures. They thought that this mastery would give them life, or make them larger than life. In reality the experts used their mastery of facts as an escape from being prepared and shaped for a life-giving relationship with the Father and the Son.

We have a God who loves relationships. We have a God who created us for these relationships. We have a God who (when we tried to set up life on our own authority, and ruined the world as a consequence)…we have a God who came down in Jesus to live and die for us. He overcame the power of death for us to unite us with himself in a way that depends on him from first to last. He didn’t come to give us words, but to give us himself, yet the words can speak with his living breath to carry him to us.

Since this God gave us the scriptures as the place where we can meet him and live, we want to be sure that we do truly meet him. We want to come to the scriptures so we can come face to face with him and really know him.

But we must get over loving merely what we know about Christ. We want to go beyond the things we know, so that we can love the Christ who knows us. There is just a difference.  Knowledge is great, but love will beat knowledge every time.

When I was a child, I wanted attention. But, more than that, I wanted to be attention-worthy. I wanted to earn attention.

I didn’t want to earn attention by getting in trouble because I wanted people to like me and get mad at me. I found that some of the other ways that kids attracted attention didn’t come easily for me. Athletic skill didn’t come easily, but skills in information and knowledge did.

And so I decided to become brilliant. This isn’t as bad as it sounds. Plenty of kids wanted to be great. They wanted to be athletes like Mickey Mantle or Johnny Unitas, and nobody thought the worse of them because of this.

So I wanted to be brilliant. I read, and I read, and I read. I browsed through dictionaries. I sifted through encyclopedias. When I was ten, I had loads of books on history, and archeology, and technology, and science. I had a telescope. I had a microscope. I loved this. It felt so good.

I neglected my school work because it got in the way of acquiring knowledge. I might only be getting a C in a class, but I could answer all the teacher’s questions. I achieved mastery.

But I can tell you that there was no real life in this. Knowledge is great, but love beats knowledge every time. The experts in the scriptures, who achieved mastery through their study and their knowledge, possessed the scriptures. They possessed them, but in the process, they lost the God of the scriptures. They lost Christ. Some of the most seemingly biblical Christians possess the scriptures, but they may have very little to show of Christ beyond their joy in having the facts. 

Where this happens, you can see that their spiritual life is about the techniques for doing things. Or you see the conditions they set for their acceptance of other Christians from other churches. The Jesus who lives in them does not welcome sinners, at least not if those sinners are Christians who interpret the Bible differently. They have romanced the Bible, and its authority, thinking that in doing so they have romanced the Jesus of the Bible. But they have made a mistake.

When we say that scripture alone is our anchor we mean the scriptures as Jesus saw them. The scriptures are the only true portrait of Jesus. The Old and New Testaments both exist for bringing us to him and understanding him.

When I go to an art museum I love to look at the portraits of people from long ago. In the best portraits the people in them look ready to laugh. Or they look ready to step out of the frame and talk to you, or else run their sword through you.

The Bible is the best portrait of all. By the power of the Holy Spirit Jesus does step out of the frame; and he speaks to you. That’s inspiration. He challenges you, and offers his salvation to you: his friendship and lordship.

We say that scripture alone is an anchor for any storm because it offers the whole Jesus. The scriptures don’t just give us the words of Jesus. They give us the work of Jesus. They give us the body and blood of Jesus.

Even the Old Testament, Jesus said, is a place where we can get the whole reality of him. In the Gospel of Luke, after the resurrection, Jesus met his disciples and we read this: ‘He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.’ (Luke 24:25-27)

We are tempted to love only a part of Jesus, and not the whole Jesus. There are parts of Jesus we don’t understand. There are parts we may not like. There are parts we are afraid of. There are mysteries about Jesus (about exactly who he really is) that confuse us. There is the talk about sin and forgiveness that we may resist. We are tempted to construct a Jesus after our own image, and in our own likeness; a Jesus built to our own specifications.

Scripture may be misinterpreted, and abused, and forced into the boxes of someone else’s making, or of our own imagination. Scripture alone saves us from the distortions, and the oversimplifications, and the additions, and the subtractions of those who claim to have authority when, all the while, they are only reaching for mastery. Scripture alone protects us from our own temptations to be the master, to be the one in control, and to create a truth of our own invention.

Just because scripture may be misused doesn’t make it imperfect, because many perfect things can be misused. Love itself can be misused. The innocence of another person can be misused.

Scripture, though, in all its strange, confusing perfection is simply there, like a person you may not want to look at too closely for fear that they might look right back at you. Scripture is like a person you have to struggle to listen to because they speak with the heavy accent of a country you don’t know. Scripture is like a brother or sister or an old friend who knows you too well to let you pretend to be something you aren’t, or let you retell an old story in your own favor.

Our relation with scripture alone is like the relationships within a marriage or a family where you never stop learning about another person. It is hard in the sense that you never fully get to the bottom of that other person. After a life spent together, that person will still amaze you and confound you. But this difficulty is not the hardship some try to make of it. It’s only a sign of the blessing of a living, growing relationship.  Our relationship with the Bible is like that.

If there was someone who was always trying to come between the two of you, in order to explain the real message of the one you loved; if there was someone who claimed some kind of authority to speak to you on their behalf; you would know that something was very wrong. Something was either fishy about them, or you were missing something pretty important. This is why we want a direct relationship with God through the Bible. We want a relationship with God where we can say, “Scripture alone.”

Scripture alone can be trusted to give you God in his fullness, just as he is. Scripture alone can be trusted to show you yourself, just as you are; and to show you your true self, as God wants you to be, and how he plans to get you there. Most of all it shows us how humble and patient we must learn to be with such a God.

We meet God in many places: nature, people, books, good sense, and experience, but the scriptures show us the living portrait of God in Christ. It shows us a portrait of God in the manger, in the carpenter shop, on the road, on the cross, and coming out of the empty tomb.

Scripture shows us a God who has come to give us a new life in a way that no landscape, and no sun or moon or stars, and no other human being can give you. Here, in the scriptures alone, God himself gives us something we need. He gives us himself.