Loving Can Be Costly, But It's Worth the Price

Loving can be hard. Just look in John 11. We’re told, “Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus.” (11:5). A lot of loving is going on in this chapter! Love is a wonderful thing, but if we think loving is easy, well, that’s rarely true, and it’s certainly not the case here.

If Mary and Martha hadn’t loved their brother Lazarus, his sickness and death wouldn’t have cost them the price of a telegram (or smoke signals or a runner or . . .) to get the news to Jesus. Nor would it have cost them something far more pricey, buckets of bitter tears.

 

If Jesus hadn’t loved Lazarus and his sisters, the news of his sickness and, later, the knowledge of his death, wouldn’t have cost the Lord a trip back to dangerous territory, the misunderstanding of His disciples and Mary and Martha, precious tears shed with those sisters, and the unleashing of enough power to literally raise the dead.

If Jesus hadn’t loved Lazarus, He wouldn’t have raised him from the dead, and this miracle would not have been the final straw that caused the chief priests and Pharisees to call a meeting to make plans to kill Him (11:53), plans so serious that Jesus had to withdraw near the desert lest His death occur on His enemies’ time-table instead of on His own.

If the disciples hadn’t loved the Lord, Jesus’ decision to go back to the region where the authorities had recently sought to stone Him would have presented no problem at all: they’d have simply stayed on the safe side of the Jordan. It was because they loved Him that Thomas finally said, basically, “I’m pretty sure going back means that the Lord will be killed by His enemies, and I’m just as sure that if we go, we’ll die, too, but let’s saddle up, “that we may die with Him” (11:16).

Loving can be hard, and a very good case can be made that it’s loving that causes a lot of the difficulty for the folks in John 11 and, come to think of it, for folks like you and me. Maybe, then, we should un-complicate our lives by simply refusing to love. Maybe we should just become cold and unfeeling and cast off love so that our lives will be easier and we can avoid the pain caused by loving.

You know I’m not serious about that. Yes, loving can be hard, but the only thing worse than the pain of loving would be the pain of refusing to love.

Jesus raised Lazarus from the tomb and those sisters from their grief because He so loved them. He raises all of His children, His friends, from the tombs of our sin and guilt for one reason: His love. “For God so loved the world” that He sent His Son, and the Son so loved that He was willing to die to purchase pardon for you, for me.

Loving is hard. No one knows that better than our Lord who, knowing the cost, loves us completely, and pays the price.

Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

Our Deepest Longing May Be the Desire To Be Home

We are all on a journey. What is particularly ironic about the journey is that we spend most of our lives trying to get back where we started. We spend most of our lives trying to fulfill our deepest longing, the desire to be home, truly home.

If you think about the journey as beginning with an earthy mother and father, you’re right, of course. But I’d suggest you start farther back. God assures us that he knew us even before we were formed in our mothers’ wombs and that the gift of life comes directly from his hand.

When we are physically born, we are born for sure with the sinful nature that will one day cause us to go our own way and sin against our Father, but we nonetheless arrive in the most sinless, innocent, pure, and trusting condition we humans will ever know here.

No wonder Jesus tells us that unless we become as trusting, loving, and pure as little children, we can’t enter the kingdom of heaven. We grow up and spend most of our lives trying to regain that purity and innocence and loving trust in our Father. We spend our lives trying to regain the capacity for joy and delight and spontaneity that little children are filled with. Maybe we adults feel that loss more than we realize. Maybe that’s one reason we have such a deep longing to be children again in our true home.

Where is our real home? Home is where the Father is. Our longing for home is all wrapped up in our longing to be with the Father. When we see in our human fathers what is best, we’re led to long even more to be with the best Father of all. When we see in our human fathers deep weakness, we’re led to long even more to be wrapped up in the arms of the best Father. We might not put it that way, but the longing is there. We want to find our way home, home to the Father.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ disciples are distressed as he has been talking about leaving them. In the fourteenth chapter, he assures them, “In my Father’s house are many rooms, and I’m going to prepare a place for you so that one day I’ll come and take you to be with me where I am” (Shelburne translation).

Then Jesus says, “And you know the way to the place where I am going.” That’s when Thomas, whose love for the Lord was second to none and who was unwilling to endure the perplexity any longer, absolutely boils over: “Lord, what are you talking about? We don’t know where you’re going, so how in the whole wide world can you expect us to know the way?!”

Jesus’ answer?

“Oh, Thomas, you do know the way, because you know me, and I am the way.”

How do we get home, home to the Father? We follow the One who is the Way to the Father, and, walking with us all along the journey, he leads us home.

 Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

Only God Makes Genuine Joy, and He's Good At It!

It’s snowing outside. That suits me fine. I love snow. (It’s also blowing a gale, and that’s not so lovely, but . . .)

I might be tempted to claim that I brought the snow home with me from an “instead of Christmas gifts” ski trip our family took to the mountains last weekend, but I doubt anyone would believe me. Besides that, the folks up there are stingy with their snow, and a good bit of what my family and I were skiing on is snow the folks up on the mountain made themselves.

It’s amazing how much impressive equipment it takes to blow enough water (and lots of it) through cold air to make tons of the white stuff. Not that long ago, only the Lord could make snow. We shouldn’t get too uppity about it. He’s still the only One who can make the right ingredients and most important conditions even for the stuff we make.

Still, snow-making has come a long way, and those big snow guns are impressive. They look like big cement mixing buckets on wheels. Shoot mega-gallons of water into a bunch of highly-compressed fast-moving air, and do it in the right proportions at around 27 degrees or below, and you’ve got snow, and lots of it.

I want one of those things for the house. Of course, I don’t need one that big, but I’ve seen some smaller homemade ones on the Internet that look intriguing. (My wife gets an “Oh, no, what next?” sort of look on her face when she sees me looking at such videos.) We don’t get nearly as much genuine God-given snow as I’d like, and I think it would be really cool (in every sense) to call up the grandkids and say, “Come on over! I’ve got a couple of inches of PawPaw-produced snow already made for you, and I’m making more!”

We had a wonderful time in the mountains, and though God makes beauty in a jillion forms, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything more beautiful than sights you see when skiing down a snow-covered mountain. I know I’ve never done anything that was much more fun. Best of all is sharing it with the people you love and enjoy the most. Beauty is even better when shared. Skiing together. Riding up the lift together. Talking together and seeing deer foraging under the trees. Waking up each morning with granddaughters hollering out the cabin window, “Hi, duckies!” and watching the ducks on the cold pond respond by paddling over as they know those little girls and an old guy will soon be tossing bread to them. Well, what is better than that?

I can’t bring the mountains or the pond or the ducks home, but I wonder if I could figure out how to make a little snow . . .

You can’t make joy. Lots of people try, with pathetic results. When genuine joy “catches” us, it’s always by surprise, which is one of its best features. God made it that way, and He is so very, very good at it.






Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

The Order of the Cars on This Train Matters

Samuel Taylor Coleridge uttered profound truth when he warned, “He who begins by loving Christianity more than Truth, will proceed by loving his sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.”

It’s a matter of priority. It’s like the toy train you might set up around your Christmas tree. The engine goes first, then the coal car, then the other cars, and finally the caboose. This train analogy, though, breaks down because your train will likely run even with the cars out of their proper order. If we get the items in Coleridge’s statement out of order, the whole thing runs off the track in a crash that produces serious injury.

I hear Coleridge saying that our Creator is the Source of all genuine Truth, real and absolute. If we love the Truth most of all, we will be led to the One who is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” Followers of Christ are led to worship Him, not only within Christianity but also bowing within a particular Christian group (church), and should find themselves and their own desires blessedly submitted, bowed in proper position, humbly bringing up the rear as “caboose.”

I think he’s right, not least because I see the obvious wreckage that ensues when we get the things out of order.

If we don’t believe in absolute Truth, then we can believe in anything at all or nothing at all. (Not really. Everybody worships something, even if just themselves.) In that kind of world, “two plus two equals five” is as valuable a belief as “two plus two equals four.” That’s nonsense, of course, but we’re far too “tolerant” and nice to call it nonsense. So the train crashes.

If we don’t believe in genuine Truth, then we can easily relegate Jesus of Nazareth to “great human teacher” status and put him on the shelf with Mohammed and Confucius and others, forgetting that truly “great human teachers” are neither insane enough nor devilish enough to claim to be God, as Jesus did (backing up the claim with a resurrection). The train crashes.

Or, if choosing to follow Christ and worship him, we put our own church tradition above all others and even above Christ and His Church which encompasses all of his people, the train crashes, and we easily come to love ourselves, our group, and our own religious opinions better than Christ or truth and end up very religious and very far from God. (It’s the old mistake of Pharisees from all ages.)

Or, loving ourselves most, we may take another road. We may just play at consumer religion, attend for the show when it’s easy and costs nothing, and worship only ourselves, our tastes, our convenience. More train wrecks.

But get the cars in order, and we’ll find that each of them is beautiful and valuable and that God works and is honored through them all.







Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

"Sit Back, Relax,and Enjoy This Documentary"

The last thing I wanted to do on a recent trip to San Antonio was to have to think much. Thinking is work and I do it poorly. I just wanted to relax. But my wife and I took a tour to a couple of the vintage San Antonio missions, and—here’s the mistake—watched a documentary video, and . . .

The nice volunteer lady at the first mission did a pretty good job (in a bit of a ditzy sort of way) filling us in on some of the history of the place. Established in 1731, it really has some history.

We hurried through the tour so we could get back to the Visitor Center for the last movie about the missions of San Antonio. A good bit of it was quite well done, but I admit that I found myself increasingly bugged by the unacknowledged but very apparent philosophy behind the documentary.

What would you call it? Political correctness? Air-headed (and very intolerant) liberalism? Secular humanism? All of the above?

I wanted to ask our guide (who loved the video) some questions, but I thought better of it:

Are you sure that the Indians—I mean, native Americans—were always unfailingly in the right? I don’t doubt the Christian missionaries at times made serious mistakes and worse, but do you really believe the native peoples never did? I don’t doubt that every culture has much to learn from other cultures, but aren’t some beliefs and practices actually better than others? I don’t doubt that missionaries should respect and learn from the many customs of indigenous folks that are worthy of respect, but if they find folks drinking warm blood out of their uncle’s skull, is it really a bad idea to encourage some better customs? (Forgive me. I used the word “better,” implying that there might actually be some objective standard of right and wrong and that some things, beliefs, and practices might truly be better than others.)

I don’t doubt that in cultures other than our own folks have seen some genuine truth and that some real diamonds may glimmer even within some largely pagan religions. I don’t doubt that people have at times truly worshiped the Creator even though they might not have known His real name, and that we can learn some things from them.

But—work with me here—IF it is possible to actually truly know God’s name, and IF He really has actually in written revelation told us about the name and work of a genuine Savior, aren’t indigenous peoples better off knowing His name and being taught about that Savior?

Such questions are, I know, hopelessly out of fashion. As G. K. Chesterton once wrote, “We are on the road to producing a race of man too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.” It seems so harsh to believe in objective standards. It seems so intolerant to believe that two times two always equals four.

But it is still true. If a thing is actually true, we should not be embarrassed about believing it and encouraging others to.




Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

What an Old Wedding Says About Our Living Lord

The setting Jesus chose for his first miracle is almost as amazing as the miracle itself. He changed water to wine at a wedding feast (John 2).

I’m told that when my maternal grandparents decided to get hitched, they first hitched a horse to a buckboard and bounced and rattled down the dusty dirt roads one evening to the preacher’s house. He came out with his Bible, stood beside the wagon, said a few traditional words, and asked the pertinent questions. Each one said, “I do,” and . . . they were. Married, that is. That’s pretty much all there was to it. That wedding kicked off a marriage that lasted over six decades.

Whenever today I hear a couple say, “We just want a simple wedding,” my first thought is, “Oh, dear people, you don’t know what simple is. That beautiful beast is extinct, and I’ll guarantee you, unless you’re married almost immediately, the whole thing will grow, and grow, and grow. Simple is a worthy goal, but we’re more likely to end up with a simple tax code.”

Simple is the last thing a wedding I read about a few years ago was intended to be. From the very first, the bride’s family pulled out all the stops. Picture this in your mind (and then double the glitz): lavish pre-wedding parties, the biggest and most ornate church in a big city, a wedding dress that cost more than the annual budgets of most small countries, a full orchestra, and every wedding “trimming” known to womankind. It was a bona fide occasion of state of which most royal families would be envious.

Perhaps that’s why the bride was even more nervous than most brides. Nervous, she nibbled—a lot—during the hours before the ceremony. As she walked down the long aisle in her lavish dress, the gown was white, but the guests noticed that the bride herself was distinctly green. Just before she reached the altar, she stopped, emerald green by now, bent over, and . . . tossed her cookies, chiseling in stone the one memory every guest would carry with them forever from that royal occasion. Had Elvis himself later shown up to sing, the bride’s retching would be what everyone remembered.

When an engaged couple sits in my office, I always try to remind them that a big wedding and a big marriage have nothing at all to do with each other, and that most of their effort should be spent on preparing for the marriage!

I’m not sure what sort of miracle Jesus might have worked to save the day at the wedding I just told you about, but the fact that Christ cared so much about a humble couple and their special time so long ago at Cana says a lot about the scope and the depth of his love. As he enters not just our feasts but every aspect of our lives, he loves and delights in us, and his mercy and grace are always with us.

May we never forget to invite this most loving Guest to be marvelously present in each moment of our lives.



Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

January Is a Good Time for Looking Both Directions

Well, here we find ourselves again in January, and maybe some reflection is in order.

On the one hand, author Thomas Mann is right: “Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.” So a new year? January? Big deal.

On the other hand, I’m always a little surprised when 12:01 a.m. of the new year rolls around and there’s not even any perceptible “bump” indicating that our wheels have run over a chronological curb. Even so, the seasons of the year each do have a discernible character, and I like that.

I like seasons, and I like living in a place where weather-wise, they are pretty obvious. It’s strange. I don’t tend to like change, but I like the changing seasons. I particularly like the fact that there is so very little change each year in the way that they invariably change. I like the particular character with which the Creator has endowed each season, and winter just might be my favorite.

I know nothing about Edith Sitwell, but I think she captures for me winter’s winsomeness: “Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.”

There it is: “the time for home.” I like that.

One of my sons recently reflected on the time our family had together at Christmas, and what he said delighted me and may well have been the best Christmas gift I received. He said, “You know, it was really nice to be home. You and Mom have made it a really enjoyable place to be, and that’s true for all of us, from the little ones to all the rest.” I love that, and am immensely thankful for it!

Home matters to me, and there is no place I’d rather be. Maybe that’s why I can think of nothing better (as long as the cupboard is full and there are some good books, old movies, and firewood available), than being snowed in for a few wonderful days. The only way, it seems to me, that we ever have anything much worthwhile to offer to the loud and bustling world outside is when we spend enough quiet and rich time inside, being gently reminded of who we are and Whose we are. That’s true of our homes, I think, and I believe it’s also true of our minds and our spirits.

January gets its name from the Roman god Janus who was depicted on Roman coins as two-headed, looking both ways, backward and forward. He was the keeper of gates and doors.

Wisdom lies in spending the right amount of time looking in both directions. God is still the Lord of both our “coming in” and our “going out.” He is the God of all times, all seasons, both “now and for evermore” (Psalm 121:8).





Copyright 2009 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.