faith for faith

I wish that there were some righteous reason as to why I have not posted on Faith for Faith since January 15, but I am afraid there is not. I wish that I could say that I was so engaged with activities of greater significance that I had not found the time to write, but that is simply not true. The reality is that my spiritual life has become so smothered by the minutiae of day-to-day living that I have lost sight of the greater Picture of Christ and his Kingdom. I feel that I have been slowly groping my way through a dense fog of busyness and labor and have slowly realized, like a man in a drunken stupor, that somewhere along the way I dropped my faith and have had difficulty tracing back my steps to where I lost it. I have fallen, much as Christian did in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, into the Slough of Despond, and in it I have become thoroughly reacquainted with the man who I am capable of being apart from Christ.

And it is not as though in this time I have become slothful and have ceased to work, but quite the contrary, I have been working as hard as I ever have. And that, it seems, has been my problem. I began our present journey with a righteous course–to free ourselves of debt for sake of the Kingdom–and yet have, through my labor, lost the chief goal of righteousness. I have forgotten in practice, “Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and these things will be added to you,” and have adopted a “work now, ask questions later” attitude with regard to achieving that which I believe God has laid on our hearts to accomplish instead of waiting on him to provide as only he can provide. Therefore, since September of last year, I have been practically working seven days a week to fill the gaps in our needs, rather than seeking provision from God so that he, not I, would receive the glory.

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I love the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. He had a rare gift, and his poetry was solely a song from him to his Creator. His works were not published till well after his death, and that not by his design. It is a grace of God that his works were discovered and published:

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

For Christ did not please himself, but as it is written, “The reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me” (Rm. 15:3).

When it comes to those to whom Christians are to look for guidance and inspiration to live their lives, their focus should be Singular. For there is only one Man who lived perfectly for the sake of God and his glory, and that man is Jesus Christ. And though there are others to whom we can look to as a godly examples, their example is only good insofar as it accords with the example of Jesus Christ. For while there have always been, by God’s grace, godly men on this earth, those men, at the end of day, were still men and being such were still sinners till the day they died.

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We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up (Rm. 15:1,2).

As God has ordained it, his church is comprised of many people of many varying strengths and degrees of faith (cf. Rm. 12:3). And in spite of these variances, God has ordained that his church be one Body, united for the sake of his glory. And as such, the attainment of unity in the church for the sake of God’s glory must come through love and longsuffering, for the church at present remains in a fallen world and will, because of the variance within it, contain those who fail.

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Oftentimes when we think of serving the Lord in ministry and with our lives, we divide our lives into two categories–into those things which concern the Lord and those things which do not concern the Lord. In this, we effectively set ourselves as judges over our lives, and we divide our lives into that which we believe is sacred and that which we believe is not. This division of our lives into the sacred and the unsacred stems from a view of God that esteems him as lofty and transcendent and who only concerns himself with the “big” matters of our lives. For this reason, we prepare ourselves spiritually when we do such things as go to church services, aide the needy, and share the Gospel, but we often neglect our spirituality when we cut the grass, watch television, and eat food. For we believe and think that we know the God we serve, and we believe that he is too busy running the Universe and saving souls to be concerned about the manner in which we cut our grass.

This estimation of God that produces such a division in our lives, rather than being a lofty estimation, is in fact low estimation. For we view God as one who is constantly running about, tirelessly fighting the Adversary and strenuously beckoning men to himself, rather than he who is seated on high and who controls the world by the Word of his mouth. And as such, our God is not merely the God of Good and of Salvation, but he is the God of the birds and the hairs upon our head, and neither the bird nor the hairs upon our head live or grow or die or fall apart from his Word (cf. Mt. 10:29, 30). And our God does not merely ordain the beginnings and ends of all things, but he holds all things together so that nothing can claim a moment of existence apart from him (cf. Col. 1:17).

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The one who observes the day, observes it in honor of the Lord. The one who eats, eats in honor of the Lord, since he gives thanks to God, while the one who abstains, abstains in honor of the Lord and gives thanks to God. For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s (Rm. 14:6-8).

In Christian practice there exists two categories–that which is doctrine and that which is opinion. And though these two categories exist and have existed since the creation and more so since Christ fulfilled the ceremonial and civil requirements of the Law, their ends have ever been the same, namely to glorify God. Therefore whether one submits to doctrine or whether one submits to a certain opinion, it is to be done for the sake of the glory of God alone lest that which is not sin become sin.

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There is little that can be said about how far we fall short as made clear by these videos:

After much going back and forth with our potential lender–submitting documents and submitting more documents–it finally seems as though everything is going to go through on the land loan. And I thank you all for your thoughts and prayers.

We have signed pre-disclosure statements with the lender on the loan, and we are simply waiting for an appraisal to be done on the property and for a title search to be done by the attorney. If all that goes well, we are well on schedule to close on the land before month’s end.

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Many times (if not most times) when I speak to someone who is shopping around for a church, when I ask him his opinion of a particular church, his first impressions revolve around the type of music of the church. Seldom do I hear about the Christ-centeredness of the service or the disposition of the members or their desire to reach their community and the Nations with the Gospel. And if that person shows any inclination to visiting a church a second time, it is oftentimes contingent on whether or not he was entertained by that church the first time around.

While it is of little surprise that American Christians are more concerned about worshipping themselves than God by the churches they attend, it is saddening nonetheless. For it is clear that we have been deceived into thinking that true joy rests in self-satisfaction, and we rob ourselves of our Joy by seeking it in entertainment rather than in Christ and him glorified.

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I had not planned on adding another entry into the journal until something a bit more significant had happened, but not to include the struggles that we have had thus far would not be a truthful representation of our so-called journey to unindebtedness.

Because of our past decisions–most of them foolish, some of them not as much–we have incurred a great amount of debt when compared to our present income. Because of this, we have been denied a loan twice with just mine and my wife’s name on the loan, and to get approved for the loan we are going to have to add a more financially stable co-signer to the loan, namely my father-in-law.

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