The Creator of the Universe Can't Be Tied Up in a Box

I once saw John Denver, hair wet and with a clothes bag tossed over his shoulder, heading through a hotel lobby toward the desk. Two weeks or so later, he crashed his plane and died.

Christian author Max Lucado is still very much alive and writing fine books. In his book Fearless he tells about introducing himself to a lady standing in a hotel check-in line with one of his books under her arm. He was hoping that her doctor hadn’t prescribed it as a cure for insomnia.

Well, wide awake she was, but she absolutely refused to believe that the guy talking to her, claiming to be Max Lucado, really was. She didn’t think he looked a thing like the thirty-year-old Max whose picture was on the back cover of her book.

Max finally gave up. The dear lady steadfastly preferred her “Max-in-a-box,” “freeze-framed in a two-by-three image” to the real thing. She missed a nice meeting with the author she admired, but she did provide him with a great illustration for a later book.

Lucado makes the point better than I could, but it really is sad when we make the mistake of preferring “God in a box” to the living Author of life and joy.

In a thousand ways, we try to tie God up in the boxes we prefer. Instead of allowing God to shape us into his image, we want him to look just like us. We much prefer him to be a member in good standing of our particular group and no one else’s. We want him to share all our pet peeves and prejudices, bless our particular persnicketiness and pious piffle. Frightened of a meeting with the Lion of the tribe of Judah, we like a safe Lord all tied up and constrained, muted and tamed, Christ the King of the universe nicely contained in a cardboard box.

The heart of the problem? Fear.

I wonder if there aren’t a good many folks who know enough about God to worry about the fire of his holiness but not enough about him to feel the warmth and joy of his inexhaustible mercy and love, not enough to let God’s perfect love cast out their fear so that they can respond to his warm embrace? They look at church folks, too often busy tying up God in their own boxes, and naturally wonder about anyone who would try to hold a nuclear reaction in a cardboard box.

And church folks? We’ve long displayed a morbid fascination with walls, be they cardboard or stone. Deep and soul-shrinking fear causes us to trust the walls that constrain and blind us more than we trust the Savior whose pardon and power free us and who will never be content to stay behind the walls we build.

Were it not for soul-throttling fear, we might all step out of our boxes more often, meet more of the family, actually learn something from each other, and together glorify the Lord we can never “manage, control, and predict.”

Two things, at least, are sure. We’ll never get God tame enough to stay in any of our boxes. But that completely untamed Lion loves us all with a joy-filled fierce and beautiful love.



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.

"Act Like What You Already Are: God's Kids!"

“All through the New Testament,” William Barclay writes, “there rings a plea for Christian unity.” Yes! Jesus himself asked, in his John 17 prayer to the Father, “May they [his disciples] be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me . . .” Evidently Jesus believes that one of the strongest proofs to an unbelieving world that he is indeed God’s Son incarnate is that love for him unites folks who would not normally be united.

Notice that the plea is not for us to somehow create unity between the followers of Jesus Christ; the plea is for us to recognize the unity that already exists through his Spirit.

No one knows what was causing friction between two ladies in Philippi named Euodia and Syntyche, but the Apostle Paul entreats them, “Make up your differences as Christians should.”

Probably both gals were fine Christian women, but their sad claim to fame is that they fussed loudly and longly enough that their quarrel threatened the health of the church they both professed to love. Why did they fuss? What was the issue? Nobody knows. Nobody cares. Which is probably the largest lesson of the tale.

But fuss they did. Over the color of the carpet? Over Sunday School material? (I’m kidding, but I’ll betcha the fuss was in that class of mountainous molehills. By the way, don’t we realize that it’s not good for followers of a crucified Lord to always get our own way?)

Did their quarrel erase the fact that they were both sisters in the Lord? No! The apostle doesn’t write, “Become sisters in Christ!” They already were—even when the fur was flying! What he’s saying is: “Grow up! Act like what you already are—sisters in the Lord.”

I would be a fool if I thought I needed to create brotherhood between my younger brother and myself. He is my brother. Most of the time, I’m even proud to claim him. (Then there was the time he blew the top off the neighbor’s new fencepost . . .) But whether I claim him or not makes absolutely no difference as far as our physical brotherhood goes. We are brothers because we have the same parents. We cannot create brotherhood. But we can recognize and cherish it, and that’s scads more important than one of us “winning” in some fuss.

Sometimes God’s children disagree. Big surprise? Sometimes they quarrel tooth and nail and engage in power plays. Occasionally, they even fuss over something important. Just like, well, just like children.

We Christians should be more interested in lifting Christ up and less interested in winning “holy” wars. Our divisions, whether in the larger Body or within local churches, are a slap in the Father’s face.

But even when we seem the most divided, our job is not to create unity but to recognize the unity that is already there binding believers together simply because we are children of the same Father, bought by the blood of the same Son, and given life by the same Spirit.





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.

A Tale May Be Told By the Length of Chromosome Tails

Have you heard about telomeres?

A telomere is “a region of repetitive DNA sequences at the end of a chromosome, which protects the end of the chromosome from deterioration or from fusion with neighboring chromosomes” (Wikipedia). Hmm.

Telomeres, it seems, are sort of like tails on the ends of our chromosomes. Like the plastic tips at the ends of shoelaces, they keep our chromosomes from “fraying” and may have a lot to do with how we age. Young people have the longest telomeres. Their bodies are better able to fight off the effects of aging, such as weakening immune systems, etc. And so, may your chromosomes prosper and their telomeres be long!

A recent morning show segment on telomeres was interesting (and kind of funny). The doctor/reporter gal had made arrangements to have her telomeres tested. (Yes, you can, too, for $249.) They were revealing the results (eight percent margin of error) live on national TV.

Her physical age was on a chart. We waited for her “telomere age” to be banged up there on the same chart. (Yes, how heart-warming to a 54-year-old like me if his telomeres turned out to be what you’d expect in a 45-year-old!)

The doc was 59 (if she was honest), and we watched as her “telomere age” was revealed. Good news! It was a round number. Bad news! It was 70!

She took it pretty womanfully, I guess. She managed to get the words out, “Well, I’m not all that surprised.” Oh, but she looked surprised. She looked like she was trying her best to breathe even though she’d just inhaled a golf ball!

Having recovered somewhat for the camera, she then betrayed, I think, both the arrogance common age-long to the human race, and the particularly striking arrogance of our time. She said, “Well, I’m not too surprised. I grew up in a home with second-hand smoke, and I partied too much sometimes in college.” But since then, she allowed as how she’d lived “a good life.” She didn’t mean morally. She just meant she’d been very serious about stuff like never drinking milk a cow would actually claim, etc.

Well, living smarter will probably help you live longer (and the good doc vowed to be even more serious about it and come back in five years with longer telomeres). But I’ve got news for you: you won’t do everything right. You can’t. And even if you do a bunch right, life has a way of dealing with such arrogance. (The Greeks called it “hubris.” World-class pride.) You’ll slip in the shower and break your neck, or you’ll be such a pain in the neck that somebody will run over you on purpose and put you out of our misery!

The Apostle Paul is surely right: bodily exercise is “of some value.” But let’s be careful not to put all our eggs in this earthly basket. Besides, who in their right mind wants to live to be 120?

If we have no hope beyond this present life, then we’d better fixate on our fraying telomeres. But those who trust in God can live life with hope and joy, knowing that our life both here and hereafter is in good hands.






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.

Thank God for All the Ways the Father Shows Us the Son

Oh, my aching back! I knew it would hurt today. I spent too much time yesterday on a bar stool.

Oh, you thought . . . No, I was sitting on a stool at the “bar” in our kitchen. I like to work there, but my back doesn’t like it when I do.

It was a Monday. I like Mondays. I love what happens on Sundays, but I’m okay with the fact that Mondays are as far as you can get from Sundays. I learned ages ago that anything “extra” I want to get accomplished during a given week can best be done early in the week.

So on the Monday in question I spent some time working on a kind of grandfatherly gift for my kids and grandkids.

When our four sons were just little guys (they didn’t stay little in any sense for long), more often than not, I’d put them to sleep by reading to them. My wife and I read them a bunch of the children’s books, Bible story books, etc., you’d expect. (And, yes, some fairy tales. No child should be deprived of the real-life truths found in fairy tales.)

As they got older (but way earlier than was reasonable) I read to them my favorite books, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. During Christmas, we’d read Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

But we spent most of our time reading C. S. Lewis’ series of seven children’s books, The Chronicles of Narnia.

I’m glad that The Lord of the Rings and several of the Narnia books are now movies. I was afraid Hollywood would butcher these books that I love, but those films are amazingly well done. Still, I’m glad that in my head, and those of my sons, our own images of hobbits and centaurs and epic voyages and wonderful Narnian and Middle Earth adventures came before Hollywood’s.

My sons loved the night-time readings, but they wanted more and longer readings than I could provide. (Since they went to sleep every night to the sound of my voice, they tell me that I have no one but myself to blame if they sleep through my sermons.)

But sometime in the midst of our reading years ago, I decided to crank up the tape recorder each evening, which means that I could later play them the tape when I got tired. I ended up with recordings of five of those Narnia books actually being read to my sons.

Now the grandkids are showing up, and Monday I spent some time “digitizing” those old tape recordings and putting them on CD so I can keep on reading to my favorite little people (if they’re interested) even when I’m not around. (I mean geographically “not around,” not dead, though I guess . . .)

Reading’s good. We all ought to do a lot more of it. Reading to kids is especially good. By all means, a good Bible story book, filled with the best stories of all, can wonderfully implant in little children’s minds pictures of Jesus and his love. But why stop there? If you’ve spent any time in Narnia, you know that it would be very hard to find a better picture of who Christ really is than that of a great Lion, awesome and joy-filled but completely untamed, named Aslan.

Thank God for all the ways the Father shows us the Son.



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.

"Wow! That Person Really Knows the Bible!"

“Wow! That person really knows the Bible!” I hear that comment made fairly often, and I always wonder what the speaker means.

Usually they mean that someone is quite familiar with the words of the Bible, its many facts and wonderful stories, etc. On one level, that’s great, since most studies these days show that the general level of factual Bible knowledge among even Christians is appalling.

But then I wonder, how much does that person whose Bible knowledge is being touted really understand about God’s written revelation? For example, how much does he understand about the various types of literature that are contained in the Scriptures? Does she realize that being serious about learning what a particular book of the Bible has to teach means being serious enough to learn something about its context and setting? And on we could go.

I don’t doubt for a moment that one doesn’t have to have credentials as a Bible scholar to derive great blessing from simply reading the Bible and learning about the amazingly Good News of God’s love.

But neither do I doubt that those who have worked hardest to truly know the most about the facts, the message, and the meaning of the Bible are the very last to ever claim to know much about it at all. You might as well claim to truly know the Milky Way, and only the most foolish and blind astronomer would ever make that claim.

I’ve been enjoying Dr. Eugene Peterson’s memoir The Pastor. One of Peterson’s most truly wise and learned teachers at the Johns Hopkins University was Professor William Albright, then perhaps the world’s leading scholar in biblical archaeology and Semitic studies.

Peterson says that one day Dr. Albright walked into the classroom greatly excited. For years scholars had been debating the exact location (and meaning) of Mount Moriah, where Abraham had “bound Isaac for sacrifice.” Dr. Albright had awakened that morning to suddenly realize that he had discovered some very important answers. He stood before his doctoral students and laid it all out, filling the chalkboard with Ugaritic, Arabic, Assyrian, Aramaic, and Hebrew words pertinent to the issue. He’d gone on for twenty minutes when one of his best students raised his hand and asked, “But Dr. Albright, what about . . .”

Peterson says that the Professor stopped, considered for twenty seconds, and said, “Mr. Williams is right—forget everything I have said.” Amazing humility! And true humility is always impressive.

Most folks don’t even begin to realize how much we are blessed by those like the good Professor and so many others who have devoted their lives to helping us better understand God’s written word.

May we never forget that the real purpose of God’s written revelation—every page—is to help us know and become like the Lord behind it. Knowing its facts but not its Author would be sad indeed. The more we truly know of Him the more truly humble we will become.





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.

"When Jesus Saw What Was Happening, He Was Angry"

If I were to ask you to name some occasions in Scripture when Jesus was angry, where would you start?

Probably the incident that would come to mind first for most of us is Christ overturning the tables of the greedy money-changers in the temple. If he wasn’t awfully angry on that occasion, he certainly did a fine imitation of an angry Lord!

And when Jesus stared holes through the hypocritical religious leaders of his day and called them “a brood of vipers,” I doubt the Pharisees missed the fire in his eyes. It was fierce love of God’s people that sparked solar flares in those usually oh so gentle eyes.

Ah, but I’m thinking of another occasion now. I like what the first two say about our Lord, but I like even more what this next one says.

It’s found in Mark 10. The people have been bringing their children to Jesus to have him touch them, bless them, and the disciples, uptight about crowd control, have begun shooing them away. Surely the Lord is far too busy, far too important, to be bothered by a bunch of snotty-nosed kids. (Mind you, the Greek text says nothing about snot. Come to think of it, in two years of biblical Greek, I don’t remember learning the Greek term for mucous, but kids are kids.)

The Bible says Jesus gets “irate.” “Indignant.” “Much displeased.” And one version just says, “angry.”

Not at the kids or the parents. At the disciples.

“Don’t push these children away,” he admonishes his disciples. “Don’t ever get between them and me. These children are at the very center of life in the kingdom.”

And he goes on: “Mark this: Unless you accept God’s kingdom in the simplicity of a child, you’ll never get in” (The Message). Then he gathers the little ones into his arms and blesses them.

I love this picture of our Lord! And I love what it says not only about the Son but also about the Father and His estimation of who is really greatest in the Kingdom.

Probably I should admit that these words are not being written by a presently emotionally stable individual. Stable people don’t get misty-eyed when they see chalk drawings on their sidewalk, and bubble “guns” sitting still and bubble-less, and tree swings becalmed (and nothing is sadder than a grandpa sitting in a tree swing alone). It’s far too quiet around here. No little fingers are tugging at me to come see a really pretty purple flower. Yes, our granddaughters just spent a few days with us in Muleshoe (they prefer Muleshoe hands down to Malibu), and I’m experiencing PawPaw withdrawal.

“That’s my PawPaw!” I’ve heard both girls “explain.” Loudly. I’d rather be their PawPaw than any country’s king.

And wonder of wonders, the King of the universe feels that way about all His little ones. And you. And me.










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.

God Insists That His Children Learn To Be Thankful

My parents believed in giving thanks. Yes, they believed in giving thanks primarily to God for the blessings he showers upon us. But Mom & Dad also believed in giving thanks to the people around us.

My mother, normally a most loving woman, was an absolute tyrant regarding “thank you” notes. From the moment we were old enough to scratch out a note, if we received any kind of gift from friends or family, she’d glue a writing instrument to our hands, staple our posteriors into a chair, and crack the whip as we wrote the required heartfelt note of thanks.

And Dad? Well, what started me thinking about all this was an essay one of my brothers recently wrote, remarking on the incredible amount of correspondence that my dad sent out each week. As the founder of a Bible school for preachers and church leaders, Dad depended upon contributors to keep the school funded, and, added to the mound of pastoral letters he sent out to minister to friends and extended flock far and wide, were stacks of those “thank you’s” for support. I wonder how many Underwood typewriters Dad rode right into the ground!

My mother and father taught me that there is a time for gratitude. That time is all the time. And they taught me the biblical truth that a grateful heart is the antidote for all manner of diseases of the soul.

I admit that I’ve not always followed their lead. Far too often, I’ve allowed “grinchy-ness” to crowd out gratitude, but Mom & Dad made sure that when I fall to that temptation I’m rarely able to feel good about it for very long.

Funny. Even before I read my brother’s essay, I’d already been thinking specifically about how gratitude seems to be the key to living the life God wants for us. In my own private devotions . . .

Stop! Don’t get the idea that I’ve got anything at all to be proud of regarding such devotions. I do them sporadically at best and usually poorly, I’m sure. So that’s my confession.

Okay. In my own private devotions, I often use the now-centuries-old (first published in 1549) and, to me, richly beautiful, Book of Common Prayer and its “order” for daily devotions and systematic readings and prayers from Scripture. On one recent morning, a morning which followed an evening in which I was grinchier than usual, I noticed how many of the words and Scriptures in the “morning rite” point to gratitude.

“O give thanks to Lord!” worshipers are urged in a variety of words in almost every paragraph and with multiple psalms and other Scriptures.

My circumstances, feelings, mood, and digestion may change often. But it’s good to be reminded each new day that God does not change—nor does my deep need to give thanks to him.

It seems that I’ve got another Father who is also serious about me learning to be a genuinely thankful person—whether I like it or not.







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.