As Bob Dylan once sang...

Bob Dylan once sang, "you're gonna have to serve somebody."  It doesn't matter who you are or what you do.  Everyone is faced with the fact that they must serve someone.  As Dylan puts it, "well it may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but your gonna have to serve somebody."  

As Jesus puts it, "No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.  You cannot serve God and money" (Matt. 6:24).  Here, the contrast is God or Mammon, but the principle stands for any other thing else as well.  Either we will serve God or we will serve something else.  People cannot serve God and something else simultaneously, nor can people choose to serve nothing at all.  The one who tries this finds that, at very least, he is serving himself and has put himself in the place of God.

The Bible calls anything that people serve, but which is not the one true God, an idol.  Anything that becomes a person's central or controlling focus, the thing which a person devotes their time and energies to above all other things, that thing becomes their god.  If that controlling focus and chief devotion is not God, that doesn't mean the person is irreligious.  Rather it means their religion (formal or otherwise) is idolatry.  Everyone worships something.  Everyone serves something.  Either it will be the true God or it will be a false "god".  People are by nature worshipers.  It is in our makeup.  We were made to worship the one true Creator-God.  Many do not worship Him, but that doesn't mean that they are not worshipers.  Whether it is the false god of a formal religion or a thing or principle that we've elevated to the place that only God ought to fill in our lives, everyone is a worshiper and everyone is religious.  

In his excellent and immensely insightful book, Idols for Destruction:  The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture, Herbert Schlossberg says this:  "...it might be said that a religion should have God as its end.  But anyone with a hierarchy of values has placed something at its apex, and whatever that is is the god he serves" (p. 5).

Like Dylan said, you gotta serve somebody. 

Trinity as Roadtrip

"'For through him [Jesus] we both have access in one Spirit to the Father' (Eph. 2:18).  Think of it this way.  The Son is the road.  The Father is the city we are driving to, and the Spirit is the car.  We are going to the Father, the Son is the way we are to go, and the Spirit enables us to go.  Who needs a road that goes nowhere?  Who needs a city that no one can get to?  Who needs a car when there is no road, and no destination at the end of it?  When we are being biblical, we never exclude any member of the Godhead from our thoughts."

                        - Douglas Wilson, Father Hunger:  Why God Calls Men to Love and Lead Their Families, p. 191.

On serving two masters...

"God and Mammon are two totally different taskmasters, and one can no more serve both than follow a road that forks.  Jesus insists that loyalty to God must be undivided."

                                       - David E. Garland, Reading Matthew: A Literary and Theological Commentary, p. 82

Something I Read...

"Jesus is attacking the true enemy of Israel instead of the enemy that many of the Jews recognize.  Many of the Jews think that the greatest problem for Israel is the Roman occupation.  If they can get rid of the Romans, everything will go well.  Jesus knows that the Romans are not the real problem.  In the wilderness, He confronts the real threat to Israel, the devil.  Throughout His ministry, Jesus is at war with the devil and the demons who serve him.  Casting out demons is one of Jesus' most common miracles.  He comes to deliver Israel, but to deliver Israel from the real oppressor.  He comes to free Israel from the slavery that started in the garden of Eden, not primarily the one that started with Pompey."

                                                                          - Peter J. Leithart, The Four:  A Survey of the Gospels, p. 65

Reading before your time...

 
A while back, I linked to a great post by Kevin DeYoung on the need for pastors to read over their heads.  In a more recent post, he has given some of his suggestions for where pastors can start to read over their heads.  I have read only a few of the suggestions he lists and those have been well worth the effort.  Actually, they haven't been difficult reads, just weighty ones.  In other words, while scholarly (based on excellent scholarship), they haven't been intended only for scholars.

Kevin mentions at the beginning of the second post that his beginner list is basically all contemporary stuff, and that's fine.  We ought to read good contemporary stuff.  But that is definitely not all we ought to be reading (and I know Kevin would agree).  I want to advocate that, as important as it is for pastors to read good stuff that is over their heads, it is just as important, or perhaps even more important, to read before their time.  In his preface to St. Athanasius's On the Incarnation, C.S. Lewis famously advocates the reading of old books.  Among the chief merits of reading works from the past is that it helps us to see the follies and errors in our contemporary time and culture and reveals the faulty assumptions we make in our present day thinking in areas and in ways that reading even the best and most faithful of contemporary works never can.  Here's an extended quote from Lewis's introductory essay:

     "Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?"—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them."

The entire essay is well worth reading as is the book it introduces.  If you can't find a version of On the Incarnation with Lewis's intro, you can read it here.

Bored by eternity?

Russell Moore writes an interesting post on why the afterlife boars us.  He fleshes this out further in an article in Christianity Today from a year ago.

Speaking for myself, I can certainly identify with what Moore says about being bored at the idea of eternity in heaven.  I used to really struggle with the impression of heaven, of the afterlife, that I had growing up in the church.  As an inquisitive child, asking all kinds of questions about what heaven would be like, I remember receiving answers like "everything you need for your happiness will be there," or "we will just praise God for all eternity."  I would alternate between visions of a celestial and perpetual summer vacation in an infinitely well stocked toy room and an unending church worship service.  As a kid who didn't really like school, I thought the perpetual vacation sounded pretty good, but not the eternal worship service.  Now that I am older, I don't think either one sounds all that exciting.  I'm not trying to sound irreverent so please don't take me wrong, I love Lord's Day worship with God's people.  But deep down, I struggled with the idea of an afterlife with a great deal less variety and activity than this present, earthly life.  It just wasn't a vision that really fired my mind and heart.  Quadrillions of years looking back on this life and enjoying the reward of heaven seems out of proportion with the fleeting moment of our existence here and now.  Eternal rest after 70 or 80 years of labour...  However, my thinking has changed regarding the nature of eternal life in God's presence and it changed from reading Scripture (which I think is a good thing).  I'd like to think out loud about it in further posts on this subject. 

Have you Heard?

 

Anyone who knows me very well knows I am a huge Mark Heard fan.  I consider him to not only be the finest modern day Christian poet to ever write lyrics and put them to music, but I consider him to be a finer poet than any modern day lyricist, including the all the so-called greats.  Without a doubt, his richest works were his last three albums, Dry Bones Dance, Second Hand and Satellite Sky, but much of his earlier work was very rich as well, if not quite so achingly prophetic.  Heard crafted his songs out of the deeply held conviction that, while many musicians and artists can tell the truth through their art, only Christians can tell the whole "true truth".  And unlike much (or most) of the mainstream Christian music industry, which seems parrot the music scene of the surrounding culture and thereby make itself merely a sub-culture of that scene, Mark Heard believed Christians ought to be making the truest, most honest, most original, most beautiful and best music of all.  This he learned from Francis Schaeffer at L'Abri. where he was discipled in his understanding of art and the Christian worldview and message.  Heard refused to change his songs when studio heads told him they wouldn't sell very well.  They were right, Heard's music was never that popular.  But he was righter than them.  He started his own label, Fingerprint Records, and he stayed true to his calling as a prophetic voice speaking into both the lost culture and confused church of his day.  His music will last because it is truly great art and its message is more relevant than ever because our culture is still lost and the church is still confused.

At the suggestion of my wife, I pulled my blog title from a Mark Heard song.  It goes like this:

                   Well-worn Pages

Sitting with a Bible in his hand
He thumbs the well -worn pages like before
The evening young and he an aged man
He seeks to understand his Maker more

Sitting in the dark in frayed attire
He feels the chill of winter coming in
He throws another log into the fire
And looks into his Bible once again

He learned to love the pages as a boy
And sought to keep his faith alive and strong
And in the face of threats to rob his joy
The years had somehow left him with a song

A rough and shaky finger scans the lines
And well he knows the old familiar words
He thinks of all the times they've met his eyes
It's still the goodest news he's ever heard

Written by Mark Heard
© 1979 Autumn Balm Music BMI

This won't be the last you hear from me on Mark Heard's music.