I deal with interruptions and pop-up requests at work much more gracefully than I do at home. I haven’t yet internalized and automatized “doing everything without grumbling or arguing” (Philippians 2:14). This despite the facilitation that my realizing that the Prime Desire is always fulfillable should bring. I must be missing a piece at home, something I have at work but don’t have at home. What is it?
At work, I’m glad when work piles up. At home, that stresses me out. At work, when someone approaches me about something they want done, I smile and sometimes even thank them for the cool thing to work on. (Naturally, this is not true when the thing they’re approaching me about is something I built that has broken.) But when someone approaches me about something they want done at home, I grumble and resent.
What are the contextual differences that might account for the differences in my response?
“Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18). There’s a synergy between these three commands. It’s easier to rejoice when you’re praying continually and giving thanks in everything; it’s easier to pray continually when you’re rejoicing always and giving thanks in everything (after all, to whom are we to give thanks for things like existence?); it’s easier to give thanks in everything when you’re rejoicing always and praying continually.
But all these require that you be here now and do what you’re doing, thinking not of other things.
Just listened to: Yesterday’s Wine (1971) by Willie Nelson. More Christian moral instruction in a single, ten-line song than in whole catalogs of Christian devotional music. What a dirty, liberal, redneck hippie. And what an understated, if occasionally soporific, country mini-masterpiece the whole album.
The Bible says nothing about the importance of setting or achieving goals per se. If you set no goals, yet you love—that is, if you act as though God and those around you are important and their good matters to you—you’re doing alright. If you achieve no goals, yet you love, you’re doing alright.
That’s it! I think that for me, although I know in my head that this is what I should want, I actually really want other things. If I truly only wanted to love Him and others, to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly, to rejoice, pray, give thanks and make peace, then I would have opportunity to do what I want, every moment of every day. But I find in myself anger at setbacks, annoyance at disruptions, fear of failure to accomplish something, longing to be understood and liked, and desire to “feel good” through a panoply of means which I have discovered over years of living. So my prayer lately has been: “God, I am powerless even to want what I know I should want!”
me:
I hear you! “I am powerless even to want what I know I should want.” True.
Some disjointed follow-up thoughts:
For my part, l am so motivated by a desire to steer clear of feeling bad (angry, disgruntled, disappointed, frustrated, resentful, petulant, argumentative) that I’m thrilled to have found a Desire that is always fulfillable.
That this Desire is so prosocial and thus means that I can apply my dopaminergic drive toward the production of the more durably happyifying serotonin is a major bonus.
I think ridding ourselves of our secondary desires is neither advisable nor possible. John doesn’t write that we should shed the yearnings of the flesh and the yearnings of the eyes and the pride of our estate—he writes that we shouldn’t love those yearnings and pride. The trick is to subject those desires for other things—even if those things are plainly altruistic—to the absolute lordship of Jesus the Messiah and His Father, who usually do not require specific action but rather only the fulfillment of The Royal Law.
friend:
Hence discerning the “will of God” is kind of a fool’s errand since we know His will and we have secondary desires. Where I used to work, we used to say “love God and do what you want.” I always hated this because the some people took that as, “Sweet! I love God—and I’m going surfing. Screw those hard missions.” Yet I think your point remains.
In any event, we could also say “If you acquire and achieve all the most kingdom-focused secondary desires you could think of, but you don’t love, you lost the plot!”
me:
I think there are two kinds of people in the world: those who need to ask “What do I want?” and those who need to ask “What’s the right thing to do?”
As for “love God and go surfing,” I talked with another friend about that this morning. We agreed that there there’s nothing wrong with going surfing, and that if you surf in joyful thanksgiving to the Lord, it is worship. However, we also agreed that if all you do is eat, drink, and surf, showing no concern for the things that concern God, it can hardly be said that you love God. That’s the corrective.
“Critics of penal substitutionary atonement, and I find this a bit of a head-scratcher, routinely fail to appreciate how mercy, grace, pardon, and forgiveness are integral to the gospel” (Richard Beck). Amen to that!—and remember that I happen to think penal substitutionary atonement is bunkus.
I have many such desires. This world is overstuffed with opportunities to do and enjoy good. But it doesn’t often matter which I choose to fulfill, or even that I fulfill any of them at all. What’s important is that I fulfill the Prime Desire to do the will of God—even, I should emphasize, when that Desire runs counter to my secondary desires.
This frees me to accept interference, interruptions, and redirects (most of which come in the form of other people’s secondary desires), or to at least field them gracefully, without grumbling or arguing.
Over the summer, my primary prayer for myself was that everything I do, say, and think be done, said, and thought in total love for You and love for those around me like they’re myself. A week or two ago, that prayer became more specific: that all my talking be full of grace (gift), as though seasoned with salt. And today, You’ve narrowed the focus even more: Let me do everything without grumbling or arguing. In the thick of this stressful period of home improvement that has often heavily dampened my mood and occasionally strained my relationship with Carla by its insistence that I keep working and my frequent ignoring of that insistence because of my antipathy for this kind of work—I couldn’t think of a more perfect directive. Thanks.
Just re-watched: The Truman Show (1998) written by Andrew Niccol and directed by Peter Weir. Film studies classes and media studies classes could (and hopefully do) have field days with this movie that would benefit humanity. I, for lack of time to sit, think, and write well along those lines, will offer this single intertextual connection along a more theological-anthropological line: “…so that through death He might destroy the one who has the power of death…and free those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives“ (Hebrews 2:14-15).
I’ll throw in a sociological intertext, too: “Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must…” (Elrond in The Fellowship of the Ring).
Bonus: I knew Philip Glass scored some of the movie. But I hadn’t noticed until this viewing is the first time I noticed he’s in it!
I am deeply, intrinsically inclined to be subject to nothing and to no one. I wish to be in my own driver’s seat as much as possible. Yet, as Burkemann writes, there is a direct relationship between individual sovereignty and loneliness. I do not wish to be subject to loneliness. Moreover, I am, by dint of my creaturehood, unavoidably subject to the Lord of all. That’s true whether I’m acting so or not. Hence, trying to live my life by exercising unalloyed individual sovereignty is both maladaptive and false. What’s more, the Lord of all actually explicitly commands me to subject myself to others and even says that unless I die, I will be alone.
Yet a clear pattern has emerged in my own life: I do not initiate much social activity and decline much of it that is offered to me. I do this largely because I have used my considerable, insistent autonomy as a waymaker for productivity, energy preservation, and, to some degree, spatial and other kinds of order in our household. As a result and as predicted by Burkemann and Jesus alike, I feel more and more alone.
So what’s the trick? Bend my powerful autonomy to intentionally subject myself to others. Here I don’t mean volunteer to serve people, like when they’re moving or something. I have no problem doing that. I mean three things that I’m not already doing consistently:
When someone proposes a social activity, join in!
Initiate my own social activity, too!
And when I’m among others, be intentional. Engage. Be fully there. Bring my whole, powerful self—my “loving others really well,” my “tremendous interpersonal skills” and potential for being “one of the best communicators out there”—to the table.
My independence and power themselves are assets to others—but only if I exercise them for the sake of and in subjection to others.
In any given day, myriad people and circumstances will be both out of my control and impinging on my own autonomy. What will I choose?
A biblical understanding of the work of the Cross of Christ starts with this: Jesus willingly went to His death to fulfill the Law and the Prophets. Everything good the Crucifixion accomplishes by itself—and there’s a lot—flows from that fact. However, if the Law and the Prophets make no sense to you, that’s OK (and join a big club): Taking a page from Acts, I’ll tell you that Jesus wasn’t just crucified—He was also resurrected, validating Him as “both lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36) and thereby warranting your followership even if the import of what came two or three days prior escapes you.
“All things are permitted for me, but not all things are of benefit. All things are permitted for me, but I will not be mastered by anything” (1 Corinthians 6:12). And again: “All things are permitted, but not all things are of benefit. All things are permitted, but not all things build people up” (1 Corinthians 10:23).
After another morning waking up in the 4 o’clock hour and failing to fall back to sleep, I find myself freer than usual of my scruples. And I mean that as a good thing. Lord, let me not be mastered by anything except pure love for You and those around me. Not mastered by my own schedule, not mastered by my own scruples, not mastered by my own habits, not mastered by my own compulsions, not mastered by my own prior intentions, not mastered by my premade plans, not mastered by fear of embarrassment, not mastered by fear of overextension, not mastered by greed—none of these things, except insofar as they are coterminous with pure love for You and for those around me.
This should make room for more spontaneity, as it already has today. What’s more, I’ve freely moved at whatever pace I’ve wanted to. My natural pace is happily fast. I’ll just sometimes need to somewhat modulate my pace and intensity for the sake of others.
The Cross tells us we are definitely guilty. It also tells us that if we repent, we are definitely forgiven. To take one and not the another, setting aside that the latter is a non sequitur without the former, is to cause ourselves to suffer from incurable shame (if we take only the former) or to cause others to suffer from our seared consciences (if we take only the latter).
The above is true, by the way, whether we accept the logic of vicarious sacrifice, as ancient Israelites did and as most present-day Christians do, or reject it, as Girardians do.
Just listened to: All The Difference (2024) by Skye Peterson, aka Phoebe Bridgers’ pseudonymous bid get on lists like this one and gain airplay on K-LOVE. 😉
In all seriousness, this is thoughtful, doubt-speckled, faithful journalmusic crafted by the Christian twentysomething daughter of Andrew and produced with tastefully anodyne charm by her brother, making for an incipient CCM dynasty I feel excited about. I even dared recommend it to my daughter.
Just finished watching “What’s in your bucket?,” a sermon given by Greg Davidson Laszakovits this past Sunday at University Baptist & Brethren Church, because I was out of town but want to drink from the same wells as fellow UBBCers when I’m away. Its point is simple: In light of James 2:14-20, your bucket list ought to contain goals of service.
I write about it neither because it was an amazing piece of oratory, although it was perfectly fine, nor because it changed my life. I’m not even necessarily recommending anybody else watch it, although it is only fifteen minutes long. Instead, I write about it because:
of how well it jibes with a drumbeat I’ve been trying to sound since my period of religious doubt in 2015–2016 and how happy it makes me to hear this sort of thing from a pulpit: What God really wants from us is good fruits and the good works that lead to them. Moral performance, or at least earnest moral effort. Following Jesus is first a moral demand, not an affective one. Affect can help. A lot. But affect can also disguise corruption and complacency; and also because
it’s an example of a holy expansionism on the part of God’s kingdom that makes me smile. Culture has a newly popular aspirational concept like a “bucket list”? Great! “You may keep it,” says the Lord. “But it’s Mine.”
Saw this. Did you find that Luke’s approach was different from other gospel writers?
self:
Yes, although this video makes a soteriological mountain out of a textual molehill. In Luke, the temple curtain is torn literally the verse immediately before Jesus is reported to breathe his last. Besides, elsewhere in Mark, repentance is quite explicitly tied to forgiveness in Mark: That’s how Mark starts.
Sacrifice properly rendered is repentance tokenized, that is, it is a form of symbolic amends offered as a pledge of repentance not yet actualized—because actual repentance cannot be proven except with the passage of time. Apologies and gifts are other forms of such symbolic amends. Since it’s impossible to prove repentance immediately, the impulse to make sacrifices to God as a way of recognizing our errors, acknowledging God’s importance to us, and pledging our allegiance to Him is a good one. It’s just one that, as the Hosea quotation (and big tranches of the Bible, really) suggests, runs the risk of becoming emptily ritualized and thus of masking the absence of true repentance, which is what really matters in the end. (If you think about it, the same is true of apologies and compensatory gifts.) That risk is so high that God knew He’d sooner or later officially declare it extraneous. That’s precisely what He did in the Messiah’s crucifixion (and the subsequent destruction of the Temple).
As I recall, on the basis of a misinterpretation of Romans 4:17b (“calleth those things which be not as though they were”), Charismatics have been trumpeting fake news as a disciplined, God-mandated spiritual practice for decades. This makes them unusually comfortable with and skilled at newspeak and doublethink—about current events and moral performance both—as well as prone to interpreting everything they claim and hear as being of heavenly import.
This helps me understand part of our current national political scene.
A way to actionably summarize part of my June 1 post: If it’s not for the sake of someone else, then do it in thanksgiving. If I stick that two-part rule for behavior, I’ll be doing everything in love.