Home > Work > A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society
121 " We fill our minds with the stories of God’s acts. Joy has a history. Joy is the verified, repeated experience of those involved in what God is doing. It is as real as a date in history, as solid as a stratum of rock in Palestine. Joy is nurtured by living in such a history, building on such a foundation. "
― Eugene H. Peterson , A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society
122 " The Negeb, the south of Israel, is a vast desert. The watercourses of the Negeb are a network of ditches cut into the soil by wind and rain erosion. For most of the year they are baked dry under the sun, but a sudden rain makes the desert ablaze with blossoms. Our lives are like that—drought-stricken—and then, suddenly, the long years of barren waiting are interrupted by God’s invasion of grace. "
123 " Every community of Christians is imperiled when either of these routes are pursued: the route of defining others as problems to be solved, the way one might repair an automobile; the route of lumping persons together in terms of economic ability or institutional effectiveness, the way one might run a bank. Somewhere between there is community—a place where each person is taken seriously, learns to trust others, depend on others, be compassionate with others, rejoice with others. “How wonderful, how beautiful, when brothers and sisters get along! "
124 " One of the most interesting and remarkable things Christians learn is that laughter does not exclude weeping. Christian joy is not an escape from sorrow. Pain and hardship still come, but they are unable to drive out the happiness of the redeemed. "
125 " For those who choose to live no longer as tourists but as pilgrims, the Songs of Ascents combine all the cheerfulness of a travel song with the practicality of a guidebook and map. Their unpretentious brevity is excellently described by William Faulkner. “They are not monuments, but footprints. A monument only says, ‘At least I got this far,’ while a footprint says, ‘This is where I was when I moved again.’”9 "
126 " A common but futile strategy for achieving joy is trying to eliminate things that hurt: get rid of pain by numbing the nerve ends, get rid of insecurity by eliminating risks, get rid of disappointment by depersonalizing your relationships. And then try to lighten the boredom of such a life by buying joy in the form of vacations and entertainment. There isn’t a hint of that in Psalm 126. "
127 " Joy is what God gives, not what we work up. Laughter is the delight that things are working together for good to those who love God, not the giggles that betray the nervousness of a precarious defense system. "
128 " The first great fact which emerges from our civilization is that today everything has become “means.” There is no longer an “end”; we do not know whither we are going. We have forgotten our collective ends, and we possess great means: we set huge machines in motion in order to arrive nowhere. JACQUE SELLUL "
129 " Psalm 127 shows a way to work that is neither sheer activity nor pure passivity. It doesn’t glorify work as such, and it doesn’t condemn work as such. It doesn’t say, “God has a great work for you to do; go and do it.” Nor does it say, “God has done everything; go fishing.” If we want simple solutions in regard to work, we can become workaholics or dropouts. If we want to experience the fullness of work, we will do better to study Psalm 127. "
130 " Rescue me from the person who tells me of life and omits Christ, who is wise in the ways of the world and ignores the movement of the Spirit. The lies are impeccably factual. They contain no errors. There are no distortions or falsified data. But they are lies all the same, because they claim to tell us who we are and omit everything about our origin in God and our destiny in God. They talk about the world without telling us that God made it. They tell us about our bodies without telling us that they are temples of the Holy Spirit. They instruct us in love without telling us about the God who loves us and gave himself for us. "
131 " Our work goes wrong when we lose touch with the God who works “his salvation in the midst of the earth.” It goes wrong both when we work anxiously and when we don’t work at all, when we become frantic and compulsive in our work (Babel) and when we become indolent and lethargic in our work (Thessalonica). "
132 " P. T. Forsyth wrote: The depth is simply the height inverted, as sin is the index of moral grandeur. The cry is not only truly human, but divine as well. God is deeper than the deepest depth in man. He is holier than our deepest sin is deep. There is no depth so deep to us as when God reveals his holiness in dealing with our sin . . . . [And so] think more of the depth of God than the depth of your cry. The worst thing that can happen to a man is to have no God to cry to out of the depth. "
133 " By joining Jesus and the psalm we learn a way of work that does not acquire things or amass possessions but responds to God and develops relationships. People are at the center of Christian work. In the way of pilgrimage we do not drive cumbersome Conestoga wagons loaded down with baggage over endless prairies. We travel light. The character of our work is shaped not by accomplishments or possessions but in the birth of relationships: “Children are GOD’s best gift.” We invest our energy in people. Among those around us we develop sons and daughters, sisters and brothers even as our Lord did with us: “Oh, how blessed are you parents with your quivers full of children! "
134 " A person has to be thoroughly disgusted with the way things are to find the motivation to set out on the Christian way. As long as we think the next election might eliminate crime and establish justice or another scientific breakthrough might save the environment or another pay raise might push us over the edge of anxiety into a life of tranquillity, we are not likely to risk the arduous uncertainties of the life of faith. A person has to get fed up with the ways of the world before he, before she, acquires an appetite for the world of grace. "
135 " God loves you. He’s on your side. He’s coming after you. He’s relentless. "
136 " Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. G. K. CHESTERTON "
137 " The blessings that are promised to, pronounced upon and experienced by Christians do not of course exclude difficulties. The Bible never indicates that. But the difficulties are not inherent in the faith: they come from the outside in the form of temptations, seductions, pressures. Not a day goes by but what we have to deal with that ancient triple threat that Christians in the Middle Ages summarized under the headings of the world, the flesh and the devil: the world—the society of proud and arrogant humankind that defies and tries to eliminate God’s rule and presence in history; the flesh—the corruption that sin has introduced into our very appetites and instincts; and the devil—the malignant will that tempts and seduces us away from the will of God. We have to contend with all of that. We are in a battle. There is a fight of faith to be waged. But the way of faith itself is in tune with what God has done and is doing. The road we travel is the well-traveled road of discipleship. It is not a way of boredom or despair or confusion. It is not a miserable groping but a way of blessing. "
138 " The Bible isn’t interested in whether we believe in God or not. It assumes that everyone more or less does. What it is interested in is the response we have to him: Will we let God be as he is, majestic and holy, vast and wondrous, or will we always be trying to whittle him down to the size of our small minds, insist on confining him within the boundaries we are comfortable with, refuse to think of him other than in images that are convenient to our lifestyle? But then we are not dealing with the God of creation and the Christ of the cross, but with a dime-store reproduction of something made in our image, usually for commercial reasons. "
139 " We are invited to bless the Lord; we are commanded to bless the Lord. And then someone says, “But I don’t feel like it. And I won’t be a hypocrite. I can’t bless God if I don’t feel like blessing God. It wouldn’t be honest.” The biblical response to that is “Lift up your praising hands to the Holy Place, and bless GOD!” You can lift up your hands regardless of how you feel; it is a simple motor movement. You may not be able to command your heart, but you can command your arms. Lift your arms in blessing; just maybe your heart will get the message and be lifted up also in praise. We are psychosomatic beings; body and spirit are intricately interrelated. Go through the motions of blessing God and your spirit will pick up the cue and follow along. “For why do men lift their hands when they pray? Is it not that their hearts may be raised at the same time to God? "
140 " One day they were making “bricks without straw” and the next they were running up the far slopes of the Red Sea, shouting the great song “I’m singing my heart out to GOD—what a victory! He pitched horse and rider into the sea! GOD is my strength. "