The Reason for Relationships

This is the devotional from Paul Tripp and Tim Lane based on Psalm 146:

Why doesn't God just make your relationships better overnight? We often think that if God really cared for us, he would make our relationships easier. In reality, a difficult relationship is a mark of his love and care. We would prefer that God would just change the relationship, but he won't be content until the relationship changes us too. This is how God created relationships to function.

What happens in the messiness of relationships is that our hearts are revealed, our weaknesses are exposed, and we start coming to the end of ourselves. Only when this happens do we reach out for the help God alone can provide. Weak and needy people finding their hope in Christ's grace are what mark a mature relationship. The most dangerous aspect of your relationships is not your weakness, but your delusions of strength. Self-reliance is almost always a component of a bad relationship. While we would like to avoid the mess and enjoy deep and intimate community, God says that it is in the very process of working through the mess that intimacy is found.

There is a lot of wisdom in these words. The processes of life are often the things that mature us and bring us closer to God and one another.

The Reason for Relationships

I want to share a devotional from Timothy Lane and Paul David Tripp originally published in Heart of the Matter. It's based on Psalm 146. I'll quote Psalm 146 today and share the devotional tomorrow:

Praise the Lord!
Praise the Lord, O my soul!
I will praise the Lord as long as I live;
I will sing praises to my God while I have my being.

Put not your trust in princes,
in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation.
When his breath departs, he returns to the earth;
on that very day his plans perish.

Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob,
whose hope is in the Lord his God,
who made heaven and earth,
the sea, and all that is in them,
who keeps faith forever;
who executes justice for the oppressed,
who gives food to the hungry.

The Lord sets the prisoners free;
the Lord opens the eyes of the blind.
The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down;
the Lord loves the righteous.
The Lord watches over the sojourners;
he upholds the widow and the fatherless,
but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.

The Lord will reign forever,
your God, O Zion, to all generations.
Praise the Lord!

Lamentations 3:19-33

And yet...and yet...even the weight of sin cannot keep the Lord's people from him. God reaches down to his people. He does not abandon them. His grace is overflowing. Take comfort in his promises:

I remember my affliction and my wandering,
the bitterness and the gall.
I well remember them,
and my soul is downcast within me.
Yet this I call to mind
and therefore I have hope:

Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion;
therefore I will wait for him.”

The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him,
to the one who seeks him;
it is good to wait quietly
for the salvation of the Lord.
It is good for a man to bear the yoke
while he is young.

Let him sit alone in silence,
for the Lord has laid it on him.
Let him bury his face in the dust—
there may yet be hope.
Let him offer his cheek to one who would strike him,
and let him be filled with disgrace.

For no one is cast off
by the Lord forever.
Though he brings grief, he will show compassion,
so great is his unfailing love.
For he does not willingly bring affliction
or grief to anyone.

Lamentations 1:1-4

Compare the beauty and majesty of the kingdom we read about yesterday, with the portrayal below. It shows in stark terms the devastation that sin can bring to people. In contrast, the two descriptions bring tears to my eyes. This is why God warns us so much about sin.

How deserted lies the city,
once so full of people!
How like a widow is she,
who once was great among the nations!
She who was queen among the provinces
has now become a slave.

Bitterly she weeps at night,
tears are on her cheeks.
Among all her lovers
there is no one to comfort her.
All her friends have betrayed her;
they have become her enemies.

After affliction and harsh labor,
Judah has gone into exile.
She dwells among the nations;
she finds no resting place.
All who pursue her have overtaken her
in the midst of her distress.

The roads to Zion mourn,
for no one comes to her appointed festivals.
All her gateways are desolate,
her priests groan,
her young women grieve,
and she is in bitter anguish.

1 Kings 8:1-11

I just started reading through Lamentations, a truly powerful and very sad story of the consequences of sin. But before reading Lamentations, let's look at 1 Kings 8 and the dedication of the temple. This description represents the pinnacle of ancient srael's favor with God:

Then King Solomon summoned into his presence at Jerusalem the elders of Israel, all the heads of the tribes and the chiefs of the Israelite families, to bring up the ark of the Lord’s covenant from Zion, the City of David. All the Israelites came together to King Solomon at the time of the festival in the month of Ethanim, the seventh month.

When all the elders of Israel had arrived, the priests took up the ark, and they brought up the ark of the Lord and the tent of meeting and all the sacred furnishings in it. The priests and Levites carried them up, and King Solomon and the entire assembly of Israel that had gathered about him were before the ark, sacrificing so many sheep and cattle that they could not be recorded or counted.

The priests then brought the ark of the Lord’s covenant to its place in the inner sanctuary of the temple, the Most Holy Place, and put it beneath the wings of the cherubim. The cherubim spread their wings over the place of the ark and overshadowed the ark and its carrying poles. These poles were so long that their ends could be seen from the Holy Place in front of the inner sanctuary, but not from outside the Holy Place; and they are still there today. There was nothing in the ark except the two stone tablets that Moses had placed in it at Horeb, where the Lord made a covenant with the Israelites after they came out of Egypt.

When the priests withdrew from the Holy Place, the cloud filled the temple of the Lord. And the priests could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled his temple.

From this picture of glory, we'll turn to Lamentations tomorrow.

A Matter of Faith

I was walking through our library at the university the other day and noticed that they were having a used book sale. Of course, I took a look. I found a couple that I liked and bought both for $3. One was a book published by Westminster Press in 1957: Toward a Christian Philosophy of Higher Education. This edited volume includes a chapter, "Faith and Reason," by J. Edward Dirks. It's an excellent piece. In one section, the author provides an insightful reflection on the nature of faith in human existence. I wanted to share it with you here:

Christian thinking proceeds from the fundamental principle that human living involves a commitment - one that is inescapably bent by a primary loyalty or allegiance in which all the constituent aspects of life find their focus. The question which the gospel asks in judgment is always the question of one's life perspective or world view; namely, is this view shaped by the glorification of the living God or by something else which is not worthy of ultimate trust but has perhaps been elevated to the supreme position of the divine? The Christian faith reveals that the conflict of life is between various religious perspectives, not between a religious and an irreligious one. It interprets the tension as between trust in the living God and trust in something else - a social program, human rationality, the order of nature, the authority of the Church - which may assume the center of ultimate loyalty and concern. The Bible constantly impresses upon us the struggle between the true God and the idols of man's own making, and the call of the Bible is always for a return to the true God and a leaving behind of idolatry. The tension is therefore one of opposing faiths, not one between faith and its alternatives.

The key here is that every person's understanding of his or her life and the world is ultimately based on a faith commitment. It rests on a belief: a belief in God or a belief in the supremacy of reason or nature or something else. Everyone has a starting point that cannot be proven...it must be believed. The question then becomes: Which starting point leads to conclusions that make the best sense of the world?

Remembering T.S. Eliot

"T.S. Eliot, who died today in 1965, was one of the greatest poets writing in English in the 20th century, if not the greatest. Born in America, he moved to Britain when he was 25 and became a British citizen a few years later. His work profoundly influenced the life and thought of his time and fed the spirits of countless readers....Eliot was also a committed Christian, becoming an Anglican in 1927. He said of himself that he had "a Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinist heritage, and a Puritanical temperament". Many of his poems and other writings explore themes of faith and belief" (from Christianity Today).

I don't know what made me think of him tonight, but T.S. Eliot popped into my head. I took an English course in modern literature during the summer after my sophomore year. It was hot that summer in Rochester, NY. The classroom air was always sticky, but Dr. Spenko had a way to make the time go by quickly. We read T.S. Eliot. I forgot most of what I learned, but I remember being moved by his work.

I found this quote from Choruses from the Rock:

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.