Lift Up Thine Eyes

Take a good look at the picture below.

Don’t just scan – really look. Notice.



That’s “Lift Up Thine Eyes” by Norman Rockwell, published in 1969. The title is an adapted quote from Psalm 121:1-2 – “I will lift up mine eyes to the hills; from whence shall come my help? My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth.”

The title also appears on the little church sign at the front of the cathedral. This picture is a great example of the ironic spirit of a lot of Rockwell’s work, but this one is more serious than whimsical, or at least it seems so to me.

What did you notice about the picture? Which way were your eyes drawn? My guess is you first saw that horizontal line of people, then were drawn up into the opening of that great gothic arch, and finally followed that line of birds all the way up to the right corner of the painting. That my friends, is composition at work!

Did you notice the hunched and harried look of the passers-by? The spectacular tail-fin on that car? The apostles gathered in the alcoves?

My favorite thing about this picture is something that I DIDN’T notice till the third or fourth time I looked at it. The passers-by of course are not noticing the beauty around them, but they also are not noticing EACH OTHER. Most of them are looking at the next step they are about to take. The only people in the picture who are looking at each other are the minister and the man on the ladder, and the lady on her way down the steps, who at least has the potential to see the other people around her. We’ll come back to that.

This picture also reminds me of this song.

This was, according to the composer, Walt Disney’s favorite song. And it isn’t about birds. The line right before this song starts is “Some people can’t see past the end of their nose.” And again, not only is there a message about not noticing the beautiful cathedral, but about not noticing the people outside the cathedral, either. And how a very little bit can make a big difference to someone.

Now, a thought exercise. If you were to update Rockwell’s picture to the modern day, what would change? That great tailfin would be gone. The people’s clothes would different – all those great hats would disappear. And, as one of my youth astutely pointed out, there would be cell phones in all their hands and bluetooths in their ears. But would their posture be changed? Have all the technology and doo-dads that fill our lives really helped us notice one another, or are they just more sophisticated ways of NOT noticing what is actually around us?
And what would be unchanged, 40 years later? The face of the cathedral. Built to last, and with an enduring purpose – to remind people to lift up their eyes. Not just to scan, but to SEE, to NOTICE.

Richard Foster, in his classic “Celebration of Discipline,” lists “Study” as a discipline of the Christian life, and defines it like this: “Study is a specific kind of experience in which through careful attention to reality the mind is enabled to move in a certain direction.” He adds, “Remember, the mind will always take on an order conforming to the order upon which it concentrates.”

And this brings us back to the people in the picture, those who are not noticing each other and those who are. If we lift up our eyes and see, look at, and notice the things that endure, that inspire, that remind us of Another, we will then be in a better place to see, notice, and CARE about ONE ANOTHER – the people we don’t see when we are just looking at the next step in front of us.

There’s one more thing I love about this picture. The mighty counter-cultural weapon of the minister and his assistant is a black sign with those little white stick-on letters. In the shadow of a great gothic arch and surrounded by a great crowd of witnesses, they do the best they can with what they’ve got. And that’s ministry.

Pursuing God...by Kayak

It can be difficult to express spiritual realities in images. I can only imagine how difficult it must be to be the cover designer at a Christian publishing house. “Ah, here’s another book about the Holy Spirit – shall I use the same clip art dove I used last time, or try a ‘tongue of fire,’ whatever that is?” But I just finished a book whose cover takes the cake.

It’s “The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine” by A.W. Tozer. My dad let me borrow it – thanks, Dad. Published in 1948, it is one of those books whose clear, evocative language on a deep subject give it a timeless quality, and it is full of great insight on what it means to seek God.

So how do you express that in a cover image? The publishers of this edition couldn’t decide, so went with two different representations.



At the bottom, a classic – the winding road. We’re on safe ground here. Jesus used this one.

At the top – a man in a kayak paddling into the sun.

Wait, what?

Every time I picked up this book I saw that kayak and just had to shake my head a little. A friend that I shared my disbelief with pointed out that the man in the kayak is soaking wet, though he seems to paddling across crystal clear water. Photoshop? Or poor kayaking skills? I have seen soaking wet people in a clear stretch of water before.

But, if we let our imagination loose for moment, I can make sense of these two images in a way that I sure the publishers did not intend.

There are two ways to pursue God. 1) You can thrash about, furiously paddling, exerting all your energy to achieve an impossible goal, like a man trying to kayak as quickly as possible into the sun.

2) You can walk down the road. To make sure you are on the right road, follow someone who has gone there before. I recommend Jesus. In this way you exercise trust, and aren’t depending solely on your own effort, like a mad kayaker. You may not always be able to see the destination clearly, and there will be rough patches and sunny spots. Also, you have the benefit of knowing Someone put that road there, so clearly Someone wants to be found.

There, enough of that. Now, some gems from Tozer:

“We have laid the altar and divided the sacrifice into parts, but now seem satisfied to count the stones and rearrange the pieces with never a care that there is not one sign of fire upon lofty Carmel.”

“Religion, so far as it is genuine, is in essence the response of created personalities to the creating personality, God.”

“To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love – justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart.”

“To most people God is an inference, not a reality. He is a deduction from evidence which they consider adequate, but He remains personally unknown to the individual. Others do not even go so far as this; they know of Him only by hearsay. To many others God is an ideal, another name for goodness or beauty or truth; or He is law or life or the creative impulse back of the phenomena of existence. Christians, to be sure, go further than this, at least in theory. But for millions of Christians, nevertheless, God is no more real than He is to the non-Christian. They go through life trying to love an ideal and be loyal to a mere principle.”

“Faith is the gaze of the soul upon a saving God. Faith is not a once-done act, but a continuous gaze of the heart at the Triune God.”

“The man who has struggled to purify himself and has had nothing but repeated failures will experience real relief when he stops tinkering with his soul and looks away to the perfect One. While he looks at Christ, the very thing he has been trying to do will be getting done within him.”

“If faith is the gaze of the heart at God, and if this gaze is but the raising of the inward eyes to meet the all-seeing eyes of God, then it follows that it is one of the easiest possible things to do. It would be like God to make the most vital thing easy and place it within the range of possibility for the weakest and poorest of us.”

Sermon: The Work of the Holy Spirit (aka The One Where I Made the Congregation Talk Like Arnold Schwarzenegger)

Know what this Sunday is? That's right - Pentecost Sunday!

This is a sermon from a few years back on the red-headed step-child of the Trinity (at least for Baptists), the Holy Spirit! So, it's going to be a little long - but it has pictures!
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This morning we are going to talk about the Holy Spirit. It would be an interesting exercise to go around the room and take a survey of your initial reactions to that topic. What emotion or thought first passed through your head at the mention of the Spirit? Was it excitement? Nervousness? A sense of mystery? Concern? Talking about the Holy Spirit tends to be a divisive topic, a topic that polarizes people. The Bible tells us that the Holy Spirit is the reason for the unity that we have, or should have with other believers, and so it is deeply ironic and terribly tragic that beliefs about the Holy Spirit should divide us.

I think there are three major reasons that some of us get nervous at the idea of talking about the Holy Spirit. One reason is that as citizens of the United States we live in a society and within a worldview that has very little place for the concept of "supernatural" events intruding on our daily lives. In some areas of the world, and in the biblical world, this is not the case, but in the U.S. we like things we can accurately label, measure, and quantify. We like things that are tangible, controllable, and predictable, and the Holy Spirit is none of those things. Even for those of us who believe very strongly in God, and in our personal relationship with Jesus Christ, the idea that there are unseen, spiritual forces at work in our lives and the world around us feels foreign at best, and culturally backwards at worst. Nobody in our culture wants to be seen as naïve or superstitious, so the Holy Spirit tends to make people nervous.

Another reason for nervousness about the Holy Spirit is that, by nature, the Spirit is difficult to picture. Jesus, we feel like we have a handle on. However inaccurate, most of still see the gray-haired, bearded figure from Michelangelo’s Sistine chapel as our stand-in for God,

but the Holy Spirit? The closest we can get is a dove, or a tongue of fire, whatever that looks like. There are dozens of famous artistic depictions of God, thousands of Christ, and the Holy Spirit has…a clip art dove?

I think it is very difficult for us to feel like we know a person that we cannot see in our minds’ eye in some way.

A third reason that the Holy Spirit makes us nervous is that those of our Christian brothers and sisters who tend to speak most passionately about the Holy Spirit usually worship in a way that makes us nervous. I am speaking about our Pentecostal brothers and sisters. Most of us in this room today likely do not come form a Pentecostal background, or have had limited experience with such, and so tend to see Pentecostal worship as …rowdy, unusual, uncomfortable? Our Pentecostal brothers and sisters associate the Holy Spirit with practices in worship that are foreign to many of us, and I am thinking primarily of speaking in tongues.

Did you feel that? Did you feel the collective temperature of the room rise just a little bit there? Amazing isn’t it? We are going to chase a small rabbit here for a minute. I want to read two verses to you that might blow your mind a little bit, if you haven’t read them in a while, and then move on. You don’t have to turn there, the verses are 1 Corinthians 14:18-19. Paul is writing to the church at Corinth and says: “I thank God I speak in tongues more than you all; however, in the church I desire to speak five words with my mind so that I may instruct others also, rather than ten thousands words in a tongue.” We are not going to go into detail about speaking in tongues today – we are going to talk about the Holy Spirit - if you want to talk to me about tongues later, fine or just read 1 Corinthians – Paul really spells it out pretty clearly there, I just wanted to say that when you talk about people who speak in tongues, remember you are talking about the apostle Paul.

That rabbit has been chased, and we are now back on track. There are many reasons why talking about the Holy Spirit might make us nervous, but there is something that we cannot escape, and that is, according to the Bible, the Holy Spirit is absolutely indispensable to anyone who calls themselves a Christian. It is therefore indispensable for us as Christians to do our best to understand the Holy Spirit in spite of our limitations of imagination, and to understand what the Spirit does in our lives. If we cannot fully picture the Holy Spirit, that’s okay. Do you really want a God that fits completely in your frame of reference? But we must understand what the Holy Spirit is doing in our Christian lives. There are so many things we could talk about, but I want to focus on three things.

Look with me at Ephesians chapter 1. Paul here is writing to the church at Ephesus, and he opens with an extended blessing of God beginning in verse three. We are going to read 3-14 for the context, and Paul is going to drop a lot of theology on us, but I want you to focus on the role of the Spirit in verses 13-14.

3Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ,
4just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love
5He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will,
6 to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in (S)the Beloved.
7In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace
8which He lavished on us. In all wisdom and insight
9He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him
10 with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth. In Him
11also we (have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to His purpose who works all things after the counsel of His will,
12to the end that we who were the first to hope in Christ would be to the praise of His glory.
13In Him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation--having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise,
14who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, with a view to the redemption of God's own possession, to the praise of His glory.

The Holy Spirit is a pledge of inheritance, and as I told the children, a seal. Our experience with the Holy Spirit is God’s guarantee in the present day of His promises for the future, as well as His mark on our lives. The Holy Spirit is the power that enables us to sense the presence of God in whatever way that you sense it. The Holy Spirit is our promise that presence is for today and forever. Christ calls the Spirit the Comforter – and what could be more comforting than knowing that the promises of God are true?

The presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives also reminds us that God has already begun to fulfill his promises. The Old Testament prophets said that in the new age God would put his Spirit on everyone who believed. We are part of that! We are in the new age, the age of the kingdom! It is not yet completed, but it has begun! You are probably are not used to thinking of your life this way, so let me spell it out a bit more. The people of Jesus’ day believed that they were living in an age of evil, and that it was characterized by: death, war, sickness, demonic activity, and sin. They believed that when the Messiah came and started the new age, it would be marked by just the opposite; life, peace, health, the presence of God, and the will of God done on earth. Look at the life of Jesus and the activity of the early church in that light. Jesus raised the dead, and the church preached resurrection, Jesus said turn the other cheek, and the early church taught that we were to live in peace with all men. Jesus healed, the early church healed. Jesus cast out demons and said he would baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire, the early church believed that they were experiencing the presence of God in their lives in a way no one had before. Read the New Testament with that in mind, and you cannot help but notice that the Christians believed they were living something unprecedented, and that the Holy Spirit was responsible.

That is on the macro level, that is the big picture of what the Holy Spirit is doing – remaking the world into the world God wants. What does that mean for you personally. Turn over to Ephesians 3. Starting in verse 14, Paul prays for the Ephesians – pay particular attention to verse 16.

14For this reason I bow my knees before the Father,
15from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name,
16that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man...

The coming of the Holy Spirit is the sign that God has begun to fulfill his promise to remake the world in general, and the Holy Spirit is remaking you in particular. “Strengthened with power in the inner man so that Christ may dwell in your hearts” that’s Paul’s flowery way of saying the Holy Spirit is making your heart like the heart of Jesus, so that your life will be like Christ’s life. As Jesus was about life, peace, health, and doing the will of God, the Holy Spirit serves to make your life about those things

There’s a word that seems to always be close by in the New Testament when anyone is talking about the Holy Spirit, and Ephesians 3:16 is no exception. The word is “power.” At its most general, power is the ability to do something. In the case of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit provides us as Christians with the power to do the will of God. With apologies to Norman Vincent Peale, the power of positive thinking is nothing compared to the power of the Spirit of God. And that is the power which is at work in every believer. The Holy Spirit is God’s active agent in making the impossible possible. If God wants something done on earth, the Holy Spirit is all over it. And if God wants something done through you, the Holy Spirit is going to be all over you. That is especially true of seemingly impossible tasks. God is not bothered by those, by the way. Whatever has you stressed today, just know that God is not stressed about it. He is not in heaven biting his nails saying, “I have no idea how I’m going to handle that.” He has an idea! And he wants to use His Holy Spirit to help you handle it in the way that he wants. Has God called you to do something? You have no idea of the power you have available to you. God has given you already everything you need to make it through, and to overwhelmingly conquer in the person of His Spirit.

Of all the seemingly impossible things that the Holy Spirit was responsible for in the New Testament, the most amazing to me is the fact that anyone believed the gospel at all, especially outside of Israel. Imagine being a Jewish Christian, going to a Greek city to preach the gospel! Yet God, through His Holy Spirit, brought our ancestors in the faith to him. Nothing is impossible with him, and the same power at work then is at work in you. The Holy Spirit is God’s Spirit – it is a Spirit of power!! Look at 2 Timothy 1:7.

7For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and love and self-discipline.

A Spirit of power, love, and self-discipline! I had the privilege this summer of being the camp pastor at Mission Waco’s overnight camp for their kids in their summer program, and I taught them this verse. And I taught it to them in a way that helped them remember it to this day. I taught them to say this verse like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I think that is the only way you can really get the feeling Paul is going for here. You have to say it and think about it in the most unconquerable frame of mind you can get into. Now, I debated whether to teach it you this way. I wondered if it was appropriate for Sunday morning, but ultimately I decided that if I taught you how to say it correctly, you would probably never forget it, and that when you feel afraid you would remember this and trust that the Spirit of the Living God is at work in your life. So, release your inhibitions, and repeat after me: GOD HAS NOT GIVEN US A SPIRIT OF FEAR, BUT OF POWER, OF LOVE, AND SELF-DISCIPLINE!! Now you will never forget this verse!!

God has given us his Spirit as proof that he keeps his promises. God has given us his Spirit so that we can be about life, peace, health, and doing his will. God has given us his Spirit to enable us to do what he has called us to do. God will not leave you in the lurch! He has called you, and he has given you His own Spirit to do what seems impossible to you today!! I don’t know exactly how you will experience the work of the Holy Spirit in your life, but I know how you will know it has been happening. You will know the Holy Spirit has been working in your life when you see you have become more like Christ in your priorities, your thoughts, and in your actions. God has not given us a Spirit of fear – so do not be afraid. God has given us a spirit of power – so do what He has called you to do, believing that nothing is impossible for Him. The Spirit of God is in you, working to fulfill God’s call on your life, and to make you more like Christ!!

Around the Office: Funny Valentines

Well, at least I think they’re funny. A few years back our college group had a Valentine’s Day party. We decided to kick it old school, and make the kind of Valentine’s bags that you used to do in elementary school, and then put little Valentine notes in them.

Here’s my bag:



After I started drawing, I realized that the humor would depend on this actually looking something like a diagram of a heart. Thankfully, in the recesses of my brain I remembered 4 chambers, and red and blue arrows for arteries and veins. Beyond that it was a guess.

In my heart bag I got this note:



I looked at it, and thought – Hmm’k. A strangely colored bear stencil. I opened it up and…



Hahahahahahaha!! I love that woman! “Jamaica me beary happy” (wipes tear from eye).

My Favorite Picture of the Devil

Maybe it’s strange to have a favorite picture of the devil – I don’t know. But I’ve got one.

Here at the church we have a variety of stained glass windows depicting scenes from the life of Jesus. One is his temptation in the wilderness. This passage, by the way, is one the central texts for the Lenten season. Jesus was led by the Holy Spirit to spend 40 days in the wilderness, fasting.

While there, the Bible says he was tempted by the devil. This is an amazing passage, one of those where each detail and each phrase is fraught with meaning. Yes – fraught.

But for now, I’ll just tell you why I like this picture so much.

If you look from a distance, or sort of squint, it looks like Jesus is talking to an angel. Look a little closer, and you realize it’s the devil. At that realization, it seems like it’s an old-school medieval portrait of Satan – bat-wings, horns, and tail. Look even closer and even those details are revealed as something more.

The first thing you notice when you determine “that’s not an angel” are the scalloped edge of the wings. But it’s subtle. You can’t tell from a distance. And this is appropriate for the way the devil is spoken of in scripture. I mentioned before that the Bible is scarce on details for the devil – there’s no systematic demonology in scripture. Most of what we traditionally think of on that subject is Christian (or Jewish) tradition - but not doctrine.

But there is this: “For even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.” – 2 Corinthians 11:14. The devil in disguise is represented well in this picture.

Side note: it is interesting to see how many Christian heresies have their origin in a purported message from an angel. I’m not naming any names…I'm just sayin'.

Once you get past the angelic disguise, the devil is in the details, so to speak. What might be a tail is actually a serpent – a la Genesis 3 and Revelation 12:9. What looks like horns is actually a crown. And check out the devil’s bling. Gold armband, gold wristband. He is decked out. If Rolex had been around in the first century, he’d be sporting one. Jesus, in contrast, is strangely devoid of jewelry. Interesting. On the one hand a proud and vainglorious spirit, on the other, One who took on the form of a servant and wouldn't give in to temptation, even when offered all the kingdoms of the world and their glory.

That’s my favorite picture of the devil.

P.S. A long time ago, our church had postcards printed with the various stained glass window pictures on them. The other day I ran across a stack featuring the picture while looking for some thank-you notes. I had a brilliant idea. “Get Thee Behind Me, Satan” cards! Send them to fellow Christians who are hindering the work of the kingdom! I have offered them to a couple of my minister friends, and although they didn’t take me up on the offer, they could quickly think of some likely recipients. Let me know if you need some…but don’t send them to me!

Bible Verses That Freak Me Out #20 - "Put your hand into my side" - John 20:27

“Then He said to Thomas, “Reach here with your finger, and see My hands; and reach here your hand and put it into my side; and do not be unbelieving, but believing.” – John 20:27

The above painting is one of my favorites. It’s “The Incredulity of Saint Thomas,” by the Italian Baroque artist Caravaggio, painted in 1602 in Rome.

Caravaggio is quite the character. He’s a spectacular artist. This article describes his style as “radical naturalism which combined close physical observation with a dramatic, even theatrical, approach to chiaroscuro, the use of light and shadow.” One of his contemporaries describes his personal character as follows, “after a fortnight's work he will swagger about for a month or two with a sword at his side and a servant following him, from one ball-court to the next, ever ready to engage in a fight or an argument, so that it is most awkward to get along with him.” He was an artist, all right. He was exiled for killing a man in a brawl.

The “radical naturalism” mentioned above manifests in some interesting ways in his work, which you can review here. A lot of his paintings have very visceral, or even violent subjects. A partial explanation of that he is working in Renaissance Italy, with work largely commissioned by churches on Biblical themes – and there are a lot of violent biblical stories. And, of course, he seems to have been a violent person in general.

But, man, look at the list! Amongst the “Baskets of Fruit” and portraits, you’ve got several crucifixions, “Boy Bitten by a Lizard,” “Tooth Puller,” two different “The Sacrifice of Isaac,” and two different pictures of Jesus’ flogging. Both of his pictures of St. Francis have a skull in them! He seems to have been particularly enamored of beheadings – there are two different paintings of David with Goliath’s head, three of the beheaded John the Baptist, one from the apocryphal book Judith with her in the act of beheading a guy, and Medusa’s chopped off head. Wow.

All this to say – Caravaggio has a thing for visceral paintings. And the above is no exception. It’s one of my favorites because it tells a little story in itself of how the scene described in the Bible might have happened.

The title is “The Incredulity of Saint Thomas” – but look at Thomas' expression (click on the picture to enlarge it). That isn’t doubt. Or at least, not the kind we normally associate with Thomas. It’s the “I can hardly believe this is happening to me” kind of doubt, as opposed to the “I don’t believe what you are telling me” kind that we normally associate with him.

Look at the expressions on the other disciples’ faces. Look how their heads are grouped together – they want to be as close as possible to the action.

Look at who is guiding Thomas’ hand. Jesus is holding his wrist, guiding his hand to the place where He was stabbed with a spear. Jesus' pierced hand is at the center of the painting. He is not just having Thomas touch the wound, but put his hand inside the wound, just like the verse says. This is the part of the painting that astounds me, and made the verse come alive for me in a new way. It’s as if Jesus made the invitation for Thomas to touch His wounds, and Thomas initially refused. And Jesus said, “No - you said you wanted to touch the wounds – so touch the wounds.”

Have you ever felt someone’s scar? Placed your hand on flesh that has been torn and then put back together? It sends shivers down your spine. It puts you in the moment - lets you imagine the hurt that person must have gone through in a unique way. Maybe that’s the expression on Thomas’ face. Thomas wasn’t there when Jesus received that wound. The disciples behind him weren’t there either. They had fled, and abandoned Jesus to die. Is Thomas imagining what it must have been like for his Lord? Is it that Thomas, from touching Jesus’ wounds, more than any of the other disciples, realized what it must have been like to die on the cross? And now, seeing Him alive, is that why he says, “My Lord and my God!”- ? It is at that moment that John has him express more than anyone else in the gospels has about who Jesus is.

Finally, look at Jesus’ face. Caravaggio has it in shadow, to symbolize that even at this most intimate moment, He is still unknowable to some degree. But His expression is not one of frustration, or anger. He wants Thomas to know – He wants Thomas to believe, and to understand exactly what has happened. He wants to erase any doubt that He is alive.

He still wants to do that.

“Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed.”

A Nice Change

50 or so years ago in the United States of America:



Tonight, the newly elected President of the United States of America:



You might want to save tomorrow's newspaper.