What is ‘righteousness’? It’s when God saw what you did and says, “My Son would do that,” Of course, that’s impossible—so God works to make us like His Son, and along the way He even treats us like Him. Quite overwhelming…
Blessings.
—j
Tag: Jesus
Whose Body?
(A bit of wisdom from my dear friend Ken Needham)
“While the surgeons and most of the nursing staff were excellent, there were a couple of exceptions—people who had some knowledge and experience who “knew what was best for me” but were not listening to me. It is MY body. I have inhabited it all my life and I know it well. Their intentions were no doubt good but listening to them worsened rather than improved the situation. This started me thinking about the Body of Christ, the church. There are those who “know what to do”. They are trained, they have experience—but they are not listening to Him, and we are His body. Are you listening to Jesus? Do you know His will? Are you going to be part of what He is doing as we enter each new day, or are you coasting along thinking that you are in charge and know what to do?” —Ken Needham
The Unforgettable Fires
“All the Dachaus must remain standing—the Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes—all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge—but worst of all their conscience. And the moment we forget this—the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance—then we become the gravediggers.” — Rod Serling, “Deaths-Head Revisited,” The Twilight Zone
While some try to erase selected atrocities from the history of hell, humanity is nonetheless charged to either remember or repeat the abominations for which he has proven himself so capable—and in this instance to remember millions slaughtered without reason. The Jews belong to God—He said so in His Book and nothing has changed. The devil is never proven more alive and active than in his relentless malice toward the Jews—and God was never proved more powerful and deliberate than when He regathered His people to their own land after nineteen-hundred years of persecution and near annihilation.
“I will bring you back to the land of Israel. Then you, my people, will know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the Lord have spoken, and I have done it, declares the LORD.’ ” Ezek. 37:12-14
The verse is inscribed over the exit-arch of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial. Yes, they know it, too.
Don’t forget.
—j
2021 Will Be…
“Whatever may happen, however seemingly inimical to it may be the world’s going and those who preside over the world’s affairs, the truth of the Incarnation remains intact and inviolate. Christendom, like other civilizations before it, is subject to decay and must sometime decompose and disappear. The world’s way of responding to intimations of decay is to engage equally in idiot hopes and idiot despair. On the one hand some new policy or discovery is confidently expected to put everything to rights: a new fuel, a new drug, détente, global government. On the other, some disaster is as confidently expected to prove our undoing: Capitalism will break down. Fuel will run out. Pandemics will lay us low. Climate change waste will kill us off. Overpopulation will suffocate us, or alternatively, a declining birth rate will put us more surely at the mercy of our enemies.
“In Christian terms, such hopes and fears are equally beside the point. As Christians we know that here we have no continuing city—that crowns roll in the dust and every earthly kingdom must sometime flounder, whereas we acknowledge a King that men did not crown and cannot dethrone, as we are citizens of a city of God they did not build and cannot destroy. Thus, the apostle Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome, living in a society as depraved and dissolute as ours. Their games, like our television, specialized in spectacles of violence and eroticism. Paul exhorted them to be “steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in God’s work,” to concern themselves with the things that are unseen. “For the things which are seen are temporal but the things which are not seen are eternal.” It was in the breakdown of Rome that Christendom was born. Now in the breakdown of Christendom there are the same requirements and the same possibilities to eschew the fantasy of a disintegrating world and seek the reality of what is not seen and eternal—the reality of Christ.” —Malcolm Muggeridge (with a few minor updates)
2021 will be glorious.
—j
In Excelsis Deo
Imagine eternity.
Imagine infinity—imagine absolute life and infinite power, with no beginning and no end. Imagine infinite size and mind, boundless knowledge, unapproachable holiness in both being and motive—perfection beyond anything anyone ever dreamt—ultimate power to create and destroy with utter absence of malice entwined with supreme, omniscient Justice. Such power—such absolute personhood—holy and just, vast and unstoppable—light so brilliant and holiness so blinding that only the holy can enter. Yet He is compassionate, tirelessly loving, overflowing with grace and mercy—all superlative qualities lavished on sullied beings—on the rebellious, rejecting, wicked little creatures that He, in the beginning, created to be the recipients of His giving nature—of all His love and grace. Suddenly the simple, often clichéd words Jesus told a desperate Pharisee take on new force, new weight, fresh worship:
“For God so loved—He gave…”
And, as if that were not enough, He told us to approach this infinite, eternal, all-powerful, all knowing, all holy, all righteous, all discerning, supremely just, immeasurably vast God as “Our Father…”
That is miraculous. That is Christmas.
O come let us adore Him.
—j
Toast for Thanksgiving
I confess have a favorite movie—Babette’s Feast*. Babette, a spectacular chef who fled the French Revolution, made a feast for a village of Christian people who hated each other. The table was set with more than food—it was rich with joy, mercy and reconciliation. Just like Jesus when He ate with sinners. I hope you’ll watch it someday.
Near the end a surprising character, Old Lorens, offers a wonderful toast…
“Mercy and truth have met together. Righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another. Man, in his weakness and shortsightedness believes he must make choices in this life. He trembles at the risks he takes. We do know fear. But no. Our choice is of no importance. There comes a time when our eyes are opened and we come to realize that mercy is infinite. We need only await it with confidence and receive it with gratitude. Mercy imposes no conditions. And lo! Everything we have chosen has been granted to us. And everything we rejected has also been granted. Yes, we even get back what we rejected. For mercy and truth have met together, and righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another.” —Old Lorens Lowenhielm, Babette’s Feast
Hallelujah.
—j
*Rated ‘G’, French-Danish, with subtitles
A Light in Mordor
“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tower high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
It’s like a chapter from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings—hope dims in the creeping clouds of Mordor while armies driven by fear and rage cower in the eaves of the deepening shadows. But it was just today’s Facebook and news reads. Angry? Depressed? Fearful? Hopeless? It’s easy to slide into the reeking pits of the Land of Shadows.
Who do we believe? What is truth? We won’t find it in Mordor. The shadows “are only a small and passing thing,”—hope, truth, light remain like the stars and aren’t going anywhere. Man has made his mess, God made the stars.
“Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God. They are brought to their knees and fall, but we rise up and stand firm.” —Psalm 20:7–8
Arise.
—j
Someone OFFENDED You?
“Followers of Jesus are not fearful people. Followers of Jesus are not angry people. Followers of Jesus are the least offendable people in the world because they are not of the world. When did so many followers of Jesus forget this, I wonder, and why?” —JRM
The Resurrection According to J.R.R. Tolkien
“The Birth of Christ is the Eucatastrophe* of man’s history. The Resurrection is the Eucatastrophe of the story of the incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.”
—J.R.R. Tolkien
The greatness of the Resurrection of Christ is beyond measure—it’s the superlative of all happy endings. Are you His? revel in it. Are you not? Plunge into Him. You will live forever, just like Him. Besides, He loves you—He still has the scars that prove it.
—j
*The ultimate happy ending
His Unquenchable Fire
I sometimes think about the cross
And shut my eyes and try to see
The cruel nails, the crown of thorns
And Jesus crucified for me;
But even could I see Him die,
I would but see a little part
Of that great love, which like a fire,
Was always burning in His heart.
—Bernard of Clairvaux
Well said, St. Bernard. Now it’s our turn to seek and see.
—j
Jay McCarl 