Archive for January, 2012

Humility, humus, earth, on the ground… To the serpent this was judgment, to the Son it was the Way. From the garden to the crucifixion, this was and is the first line of battle.

Remember that Jesus spent only a few hours raised up there, jammed into the gateway of eternity, where they bled, suffocated, and killed him; God murdered on a tree, nailed into place. It wasn’t suicide, wasn’t about an absentee Father, or cowardly disciples, or even demonically empowered bloodlust. In obedience, He willingly passed through them all in silence and weakness, actually doing something about everything, the Godhead on assignment! He had nothing more to say. What was done would prove, yet again, that which was from the beginning.

One of the pillars of the Protestant Reformation was the Latin phrase sola fide, faith alone. To confide, literally means to commingle faith with another, which leads to a posture and praxis of personal confidence, and together with others the keeping of such confidences leads to faithfulness.

How does one become confident? Where does faith even start? Many over-qualify “hearing” the ῥῆμα found in Romans 10:17, at the expense of all the other Old Testament references in the rest of the chapter. Faith gets leveraged all over the map, becomes secretive, code-based, exclusive, branded, and insider– which is the antithesis of a shining beacon of light on a hill. Who bottles and sells sunlight? You might tinker with a small solar grid, but won’t harness a cosmic storm.

When I first sit down by the fireplace, all the shopping carts of my mind crash about every which way. Eventually, one by one, they find their place, quiet down. As the busy stuff dissipates, the memories come. A lot of our family time is spent right here in this space, playing games, reading books, shooting nerf guns, lots of laughs, wrestling, tickling, occasional disputes, kids snacking after dinner, then snacking again before bed. Then one last chat on pillows, prayers from mom and dad, and the drifting away into dreams worth sharing over breakfast.