Well, just the one. You’re welcome.
I Have Jokes
Author: Ragamuffingospelfan
My Favorite Bookstore
I confess that I currently listen to more books than I read. Since I spend a lot of time in my car, it makes sense to listen to books through Audible. That said, I still love an honest to goodness bookstore that only sells books.
I do love me some Barnes & Noble, but I also admit they’re like the big bad bookstore in You’ve Got Mail. They not only sell books but movies, music, and lots of other stuff. They have a very retail chain feel to them.
My favorite bookstore right now is probably Landmark Booksellers. It’s close enough so I can go there regularly. They have a unique indie vibe that I really like. They also sell new and used books, which is definitely right up my alley.
On a bit of a tangent, there’s something about holding and reading a physical book, especially if it’s older. Those old books have an aroma and a texture that makes you want to soak in every word.
Parnassus is also a legit bookstore, but it’s a bit out of my way to go there, plus the parking in Green Hills is practically nonexistent. But that’s a good one for those who live more in the Nashville area.
I hope there will always be books and people who read books and places that sell books. I can’t imagine a world with only audio books and Kindles. That would be super sad.
Today, I picked up an old used C. S. Lewis book at Landmark. It wasn’t a planned purchase, but I saw this old book with the dust jacket still intact, and it called my name. What else could I have done?
A God We Can’t Exaggerate
“Many Spirit-filled authors have exhausted the thesaurus in order to describe God with the glory He deserves. His perfect holiness, by definition, assures us that our words can’t contain Him. Isn’t it a comfort to worship a God we cannot exaggerate?” (Francis Chan)
There’s a beautiful old book by J. B. Phillips called Your God Is Too Small. I think that’s the case for anyone who has ever lived who tried to conceive the idea of God. We always fall short. We always make God way too small.
The problem with a lot of deconstruction is that we make ourselves the standard by which God and truth are measured. We are definitely too finite and small to be any kind of measuring stick to which God must conform (thanks to Frances Chan for that one as well). It’s putting ourselves above God, essentially saying that God would never [fill in the blank] because I would never [fill in the blank].
God not only above us, He is so far beyond us that our minds could never have fathomed God at all apart from God revealing Himself to us. That blows my mind. It also humbles me whenever I get to the place where I think I have God figured out.
We can’t possibly exaggerate God. How cool is that? The biggest, grandest, wildest picture we can dream up or draw or sing about or write about falls short of who God is by far. All we can do is sit at the brink and adore the depth, to borrow from Matthew Henry.
God is never too small. Only our conception of Him is. But God made Himself incarnate and came near and became a tiny infant. That’s my favorite part.
Fall Nostalgia
I think one of the main reasons I love fall so much is that so many of my favorite memories are tied to Autumn. I can get a whiff of an Autumnal scent in the air, and suddenly I’m 10 years old again.
This kind of weather makes me wish I could still go over to my grandmother’s house for dinner. I can smell those freshly baked rolls even now. Sometimes, I’d give just about anything to be a fly on the wall in 1982 to see my grandparents and my uncles and my cousin again.
I also have flashbacks to me wearing those plastic Halloween masks walking up and down Fox Meadows Road trick or treating for candy and the inevitable toothbrush from the one neighbor who was a dentist. Also, there was the time our next-door neighbor took us to a kind of Halloween Haunted House event at a church (the details are a bit fuzzy 40 years later).
I can also picture going to Gatlinburg back in the day before it became so touristy and commercialized. Riding in those station wagons, I probably asked “Are we there yet?” 3,998 times in the time it took to drive from Memphis to East Tennessee.
I figure Fall is a kind of slowing down of nature before the Sabbath of winter and the renewal of Spring. I could live in a world where we went perpetually from September to December back to September. I think October may be my favorite color.
Even though I can’t really go back, Fall reminds me that I’m blessed to have memories to cherish and people to miss. I had a great childhood and was loved a lot by a lot of people. My faith is a testimony to many generations of family members who prayed for me and showed me what loving Jesus looks like.
I also think Fall may be my very favorite scent.
Weeping Prayers
This is not me currently, but I know a few people who are navigating the process of grieving a loved one. It’s never an easy process and even though I’ve been around a while, I still can’t say that grief is a natural process because death really isn’t natural. It’s a product of the fall brought about by sin and not in God’s original design.
I do believe that God hears weeping as a prayer as much as He will hear your words and desires of your heart. The Bible says that God collects our tears in a bottle. I know that someone in deep grief may not have anything more than tears to offer to God, and that is enough.
As a reminder, there is no time limit on grief, because grief is the price of love this side of heaven. It will never be right that the person isn’t here. It will never be right that you will never hear that familiar voice or see that face again until heaven.
I love the fact that Jesus, knowing He was about to call His friend Lazarus out of the grave, still wept over his death. He wept over the grief of his friends who had no inkling of the coming miracle. He wept to show that we can believe in heaven and the resurrection and still be sad at the same time.
So I’m saying that there’s no shame in grief. Sometimes tears can be the only prayers we have.
Growing Old
Growing old is not the most fun. Most people would rather stay young for as long as possible (and I confess that I am one of them). But bear in mind that growing old is a privilege and not an automatic right. It’s also a gift that is not given to everyone. You and I can both list relatives and friends who left this world way too soon.
Here is a prayer from an anonymous abbess about both the joys and travails of growing old. It’s full of wisdom and honesty. May it become our prayer if God wills that we should grow old.
“Lord, thou knowest better than myself that I am growing older and will soon be old. Keep me from becoming too talkative, and especially from the unfortunate habit of thinking that I must say something on every subject and at every opportunity.
Release me from the idea that I must straighten out other peoples’ affairs. With my immense treasure of experience and wisdom, it seems a pity not to let everybody partake of it. But thou knowest, Lord, that in the end I will need a few friends.
Keep me from the recital of endless details; give me wings to get to the point.
Grant me the patience to listen to the complaints of others; help me to endure them with charity. But seal my lips on my own aches and pains — they increase with the increasing years and my inclination to recount them is also increasing.
I will not ask thee for improved memory, only for a little more humility and less self-assurance when my own memory doesn’t agree with that of others. Teach me the glorious lesson that occasionally I may be wrong.
Keep me reasonably gentle. I do not have the ambition to become a saint — it is so hard to live with some of them — but a harsh old person is one of the devil’s masterpieces.
Make me sympathetic without being sentimental, helpful but not bossy. Let me discover merits where I had not expected them, and talents in people whom I had not thought to possess any. And, Lord, give me the grace to tell them so.”
Why Go to Church?
I stole this from a Facebook post. It’s not a perfect answer, but I think it does make a point:
A Church goer wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper and complained that it made no sense to go to church every Sunday.
He wrote: ‘I’ve gone for 30 years now, and in that time I have heard something like 3,000 sermons, but for the life of me, I can’t remember a single one of them. So, I think I’m wasting my time, the preachers and priests are wasting theirs by giving sermons at all.’
This started a real controversy in the ‘Letters to the Editor’ column.
Much to the delight of the editor, it went on for weeks until someone wrote this clincher:
‘I’ve been married for 30 years now. In that time my wife has cooked some 32,000 meals. But, for the life of me, I cannot recall the entire menu for a single one of those meals.
But I do know this: They all nourished me and gave me the strength I needed to do my work. If my wife had not given me these meals, I would be physically dead today.
Likewise, if I had not gone to church for nourishment, I would be spiritually dead today!'”
I get the point of what the author is trying to say, but if hearing sermons at church is the equivalent of eating, then that means those who get all their spiritual knowledge on Sunday are only eating once a week. That’s not enough.
If you don’t have a consistent time of Bible reading and devotion every day, you’re just as spiritually malnourished as you would be physically if you ate one meal at the beginning of the week and didn’t eat again until the next week.
Church is for gathering together to encourage each other. The sermon is part of that. So is the worship. But that can’t be all the spiritual nourishment you get to last you for 7 days.
On the contrary, if you neglect that gathering together on Sunday, you miss out on the benefit of being around God’s people. Also, you’re disobedient to God’s command for believers to gather together. You don’t get that edification and encouragement and (sometimes) gentle reproof.
It’s not an either/or but a both/and. You need Sundays and you need to feed on God’s word every day. We all do.
Getting Back to the Gospel
“Everything about which we are tempted to complain may be the very instrument whereby the Potter intends to shape His clay into the image of His Son–a headache, an insult, a long line at the check-out, someone’s rudeness or failure to say thank you, misunderstanding, disappointment, interruption. As Amy Carmichael said, ‘See in it a chance to die,’ meaning a chance to leave self behind…” (Elisabeth Elliot).
We’ve lost that aspect of faith. In our myopic, selfie-driven, self-focused faith, we miss the part where Jesus told us to take up our cross daily and follow. We’ve forgotten that He said that unless a single seed falls into the ground and dies, it can’t break open and blossom.
I’ve forgotten what it means to die to self daily. All these interruptions and inconveniences, even the hard stuff that shakes the very core of who we are, are merely chances to die and leave self behind. We have the opportunity to become more like Jesus the less we whine and the more we worship, the less we agonize and the more we adore.
So many of us follow after false teaching because we’re not grounded in the goodness of God. As one writer puts it, we lower our theology to match our pain because we’re not steeped in that goodness. The only way for our rough edges to be smoothed away and for the impurities in us to be burned away is to let the Master have His way in us and with us.
That means those thousand tiny deaths to self that happen every day in a thousand different ways. That means that all the negativity in your life, from flat tires to rude co-workers to tragedy in your family is God working in you to be more like Jesus. And God works even those things for good to those who love Him and are called according to His purposes.
This is me reminding me again that nothing is wasted in God’s economy. Everything serves a purpose — even pain — and every trial is a chance to die and be transformed into the image of God’s Son.
Homesick for God?
“How many people have you made homesick for God?” (Oswald Chambers, Disciples Indeed)
That’s the key to evangelism, I think. It’s not constantly reminding people how sinful they are or ridiculing their worldview. I think in that approach we forget that we too were once sinful and had wrong beliefs about the universe.
What was it that won you over? What was it that made you want to know and love God? Was it really someone telling you what an awful person you were? Was it someone constantly berating your beliefs?
I think the key is to make people long for God to the point where they’re homesick for God. I think people seeing you loving God and living out of the overflow of God’s love for you will want to know God. People who see you loving others well the way God loved you well will crave that kind of love, even if they don’t have a name for it.
The way the early Church drew people was in how those believers loved each other. They loved lost people as well, but mainly it was in their love for each other that made people want to hear their gospel message.
If all you have is a well-defined set of doctrines and beliefs, no one cares. If all you have is a passion for making people as moral as you are, then no one wants to hear about it. But when you live transformed and let the life of Christ in you permeate everything you do, then people can’t help but see and be drawn to what they don’t have.
The key is to make people homesick for a home they’ve never known but want to go to more than anything or anywhere else. Make them homesick for God.
Scriptural Hymnal
I went to a concert tonight at Christ Community Church that was a bit atypical. What made it unusual is that it was a Scriptural Hymnal Release Celebration — basically, the words of Scripture set to music.
I’m all for modern worship. I’m all for the classic hymns. But there’s something especially powerful about straight up singing the Word of God. Knowing that instead of singing words about God or words to God, you’re singing God’s words back to God is a mind-blowing concept.
I learned tonight that over the next year or so, there will be 100 songs released on 10 albums. How cool would it be if churches all across the country picked up on these hymns and incorporated them into their worship? I mean you can’t get better theology than that. You definitely can’t get more biblical than the Bible.
It reminded me more than a little of Handel’s Messiah, but with contemporary arrangements and using the NIV instead of the KJV. But I guess Messiah was contemporary for its time. It only seems antiquated because it’s around 400 years old. Not that I mind. I still love Handel’s Messiah and listen to it at least once every year.
But this was what I needed. What better way to get Scripture into your mind than having it become an ear worm through hearing the songs? What better way to pray and praise than singing God’s word back to God?
Much thanks to Randall Goodgame, A. S. Peterson, and the good folks at the Rabbit Room for this one. It was a truly spectacular night.
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