If You Could See What I See

(Happy Valentine's Day, Sally!)

all of my life
i have dreamed
that somehow love would find me
now i can't believe you're standing here

If beauty is all
in the eye
of the beholder then i
wish you could see
the love for you that lives in me

(Chorus)
And you would know you have my heart
If you could see, what i see
that a treasure's what you are
if you could see, what i see
Created to be
the only one for me
If you could see, what i see

I know there are days
when you feel
so much less than ideal
wondering what i see in you

It's all of the light
and the grace
your belief in me drives me to say
that i promise you
a faithful love, forever true

(Chorus)

if you could see
then you'd understand
why i fall down to my knees
and i pray my love
will be worthy of
the one who gave his life
so our love could be

if you could see
what i see(x2)

You're created to be
The perfect one for me
If you could see
What i see

if beauty is all
in the eye
of the beholder then i
am beholding...
true beauty

A Snapshot of God

I think sometimes it better to simply reflect on God's Word. Below is a excerpt from Job 9. Please consider it in the context of his response to his "friends." But also consider that out of the deep anguish of our souls, God can produce silver and gold and diamonds. Prayerfully soak up these verses. Allow the Spirit to strengthen, expand or maybe even redirect your view of God via His very words.

        [1] Then Job answered and said:

        [2] “Truly I know that it is so:

                        But how can a man be in the right before God?

        [3] If one wished to contend with him,

                        one could not answer him once in a thousand times.

        [4] He is wise in heart and mighty in strength

                        —who has hardened himself against him, and succeeded?—

        [5] he who removes mountains, and they know it not,

                        when he overturns them in his anger,

        [6] who shakes the earth out of its place,

                        and its pillars tremble;

        [7] who commands the sun, and it does not rise;

                        who seals up the stars;

        [8] who alone stretched out the heavens

                        and trampled the waves of the sea;

        [9] who made the Bear and Orion,

                        the Pleiades and the chambers of the south;

        [10] who does great things beyond searching out,

                        and marvelous things beyond number.

        [11] Behold, he passes by me, and I see him not;

                        he moves on, but I do not perceive him.

        [12] Behold, he snatches away; who can turn him back?

                        Who will say to him, ‘What are you doing?’

I now send forth this post with a deep sense of its many defects; but with an earnest prayer that it may do some good. (JC Ryle)

To God Alone be the Glory

The Root That Supports Us

Remember it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you. (Rom 11:18)

How often do we mentally assent to a truth like this, yet in very practical ways live exactly the opposite? "God holds the future" we might say. Yet we fret and worry and devote inordinate resources to plan our retirements (or college funds). "God's Word will never return void" is a great, churchy Bible-based cliche. Yet we fret and worry and orchestrate our preaching and our services and our witnessing so the we have the best chance of affecting the outcome.

What is it that is in us that needs so desperately to be in control. We do not want to be the branches, do we? None of us want to be the worker bee; we all want to be the queen. What drives this? And why does this invade all aspects of our lives?

The short answer is that we are sons and daughters of our father Adam and mother Eve. Their catastrophic sin and the heritage they passed down to us was that they wanted to be like God. And since God is the only true root, part of the implication of their sin was they wanted to replace God at the root of things. Be in control. Make the decision. Affect the outcome.

And now, we want the same. We want control, power and influence. We want praise, honor and glory. What is hardest of all to see and most painful to realize is that this not just about retirement or planning church services. This seeps down to our essence of our standing before God. I challenge you to take an informal survey of people who profess to be saved. Ask them, why they think they are saved. For the ones who are able to articulate this (don't be surprised if several can't), many (dare I say most) will answer along these lines: I trusted Christ or I put my faith in Jesus or I invited Jesus into my heart.

Now, I realize that a part of our salvation experience is accepting the free gift of grace and surrendering our lives to Christ. And yet to have our minds fixated on our side of the equation is to invert the root and the branches. If Jesus didn't die for our sins there is no sacrifice to accept. If Jesus, through the Spirit isn't seeking us there is nothing to open our hearts toward. Additionally this inverts the pride and humility components of the gospel. There is nothing for us to be proud of in the gospel. Spiritually, we are blind and lame and dead. God is the one who orchestrated everything and rescued, restored and redeemed us. The glory is His. The honor is His. The humility is ours.

This is part of Paul's thrust throughout Rom 11 and moving into 12. We must have full view of God's redemptive purpose and plan if we are going to be an effective part of it. We must see and know that He is the root. We must see and know that He graphs in the branches and cultivates them. We must see and know that His purposes and plans go way beyond what we see or can even conceive. We must see and know that everything He equips us for is fueled by and driven from His mercy.

So in the words of Romans 11: Do not be arrogant; remember the kindness and severity of God.


I now send forth this post with a deep sense of its many defects; but with an earnest prayer that it may do some good. (JC Ryle)

To God Alone be the Glory

And again He taught them

And again, as was his custom, he taught them. (Mk 10:1)

It is interesting to me that in a "throw away" transitional sentence, Mark, by the inspiration of God, both communicates volumes about Jesus' earthly ministry and calls us to learn, really, deeply, repeatedly learn from Him as well. It brings to mind a statement I read just a few days ago. It is God's Word itself that teaches us. And, Mark 10 is an awesome resource for calling us to follow hard after Christ.

First, we are called to have deeply dependent faith. Men and women who follow Jesus are exhorted to have a faith as dependent as a child, How often do we look to God like that? Simply trusting that He is always on our side. Somehow knowing that everything will be o.k. Not worrying if we've outrun His love. Not concerned that we will wake up tomorrow and find that He is gone.

Next we are challenged to get our priorities straight. One can always meet an external code, especially one that is man-centered (or worse yet, man-made). But one can never meet the internal requirements of God. Please note that Jesus loved the young man (and us) enough to keep pressing the issue until his heart was revealed. He will do the same for us, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear and a child-like faith to trust that He can save us out of the mess we've created for ourselves.

Beyond this, Jesus underscores by lesson and by personal testimony, that true faith does not terminate on ourselves. The primary terminus is God, who deserves all praise, but out of the gratitude and worship that our salvation generates comes a service to others that is beyond comparison. Mark 10:45 is the epitome of this truth. But we must not leave it simply in Christ's repertoire. He has called us to imitate Him in this.

The chapter is closed out by an example of the child like faith described at the beginning. The blind beggar will not be kept from Jesus and simply asks for what he needs most: his sight. Oh, if we could drop our pretense before God and "barge into His presence" and ask for the deepest aches and needs of our hearts.


I now send forth this post with a deep sense of its many defects; but with an earnest prayer that it may do some good. (JC Ryle)

To God Alone be the Glory

Hold on to Jesus

Steven Curtis Chapman

I have come to this ocean
And the waves of fear are starting to grow
The doubts and questions are rising with the tide
So I'm clinging to the one sure thing I know

I will hold on to the hand of my Savior
And I will hold on with all my might
I will hold loosely to things that are fleeting
And hold on to Jesus
I will hold on to Jesus for life

I've tried to hold many treasures
They just keep slipping through my fingers like sand
But there's one treasure that means more than breath itself
So I'm clinging to it with everything I am

Like a child holding on to a promise
I will cling to His word and believe
As I press on to take hold of that
For which Christ Jesus took hold of me

Hold on for life

To God Alone be the Glory

Who will deliver me from this body of death?

Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Rom 7:24-25)

Who among us, if we are honest, has not asked this question? Who among us, if we are honest, has not at some point looked at our lives and asked along with Job "Who will say to him, ‘What are you doing?’" Who among us, if we are honest, has not wanted to simply quit, start over or simply walk away?

If you think about it, that is the dilemma facing Paul in Romans 7. It is also the dilemma that faced Job. Even Nicodemus in John 3 is probing this question. There's a sense of this in what the author of Hebrews is addressing and also the churches that received the book of Revelation were facing this issue. Friends, when these aches arise in our hearts, we are not alone.

We do need a dose of reality as we face these times in our lives. One reality that we can't escape, but often try to anyway, is the fact that we are all physically dying. If you are reading this and are on the "upward slope" of "the hill", you may agree intellectually, but may not appreciate the pervasiveness of this reality. If you are "over the hill", you are beginning to grasp that your body is a finite machine that is wearing out. And for all of us, we are one accident, one illness, one phone call away from having this reality smashed into our face. Do I say this to depress? No, but to remind us all that physically we are all living in a body of death.

There is another reality that we need to keep in our minds. It is the fact that we are all in spiritual jungle. This picture is too nuanced to fully paint today, but the image we should all have in our minds is that while God has given us a clearing in the jungle by grace through the death of Jesus, the jungle keeps encroaching. We, by the power of the Spirit whack at the vines and insects, the snakes and the underbrush, but if we pause or get distracted, the jungle begins to over power us. And we feel ourselves drifting back to that body of death.

At this point, if we are honest, I think each of us can say with Paul "Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?" And while being at the end our ropes, or feeling like it, is not what we wish for or hope for or strive for, it is a place each of us has been (or will be some day). The question is how do we respond? Do we respond like Job's friends, with empty, pious religion? Do we respond like Nicodemus, probing but not grasping the simplicity of the answer. Do we respond like Job who sensed God was in the midst of everything yet needed Him to prove himself or at least explain what was going on? Or, do we respond like Paul and say this may be a struggle and this may be a fight, but thanks be to God because there is now no condemnation for those who are in Jesus Christ?

You see what Job's friends and Nicodemus missed, what Job himself didn't see until God revealed himself but what Paul understood is that what we have here is not the end. Our physical bodies will fail and die. Our spiritual battles will require effort and strength and training and blood, sweat and tears. And we will lose some of those battles. But the decisive battle has already been won. There is a mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. Who will rescue me from this body of death? Jesus will!

So as we move forward, our hope is not in physical deliverance and protection, even though God may graciously give us both. Our hope is not in spiritual victory, although we strive, in the Spirit's power to grow up into Christ. Our hope is that Jesus died to deliver a people to himself. And that the Triune God had a plan from beginning to end to rescue and protect his sheep and present them faultless before his throne  And that one day, every tear will be dried, every tongue will praise God and the Lamb, every sin will be vanquished and we will receive a body of life. And we will walk with God.

I now send forth this post with a deep sense of its many defects; but with an earnest prayer that it may do some good. (JC Ryle)

To God Alone be the Glory

Enough of Jesus?

And they began to beg Jesus to depart from their region. (Mk 5:17)

Jesus' encounter with the demon possessed man is familiar to most of us. It is a clear demonstration of Jesus' authority even over a spiritual world that is adamantly opposed to Him. Yet, what sticks with me, in varying degrees, each time I read this account, is the reaction of the observers. They beg Jesus to depart.

To depart?

When I think about this, I wonder who would actually ask Jesus, the real-in-the-flesh Jesus, to depart. Please note, this is not a passive, I will just keep my head down, ignoring of Jesus. This is an active, I don't want you in my city, begging of him to depart.

I think there's a sense in my mind, and probably in yours too, that I would never do that. Perhaps we think (or hope) that we would be more like the demon possessed man after he was rescued, begging to go with Jesus. And while it may be the inclination of our hearts to want to see ourselves this way, the point of this episode is that apart from grace, nobody wants Jesus.

Clearly the demon possessed man was not inviting Jesus over for coffee. Clearly the demons themselves, although they probably saw Jesus most readily, wanted nothing to do with him. Clearly the townsfolk want Jesus to get lost, even after his miraculous work. What made the difference? Jesus did. He spoke into one man's life and he was changed. The demons were gone, sanity was restored and worship and discipleship had begun.

But what about the people from town? Their reaction is a lot like the reaction to Jesus in our own day. Jesus is fine in church. Jesus is fine for religious people. Jesus is fine on Sunday. But don't bring Jesus into my hurting marriage. Don't bring Jesus into my selfish lifestyle. Don't bring Jesus into my political decisions. Please Jesus, just leave us alone. And, according to Rom 1, the most terrifying curse of God is when He does exactly that.

I need to wrap this up with a question. Where are we in all of this. As I said earlier, I think we all want to view ourselves as the rescued demon possessed man. And, in one sense, if we are believers in Christ, we are. However, I need press this a little harder. How often to we still resemble the townsfolk? How often to we look at Jesus then look at some portion of our life and say, in effect, "Jesus please leave me alone"? How often do we say, consciously or subconsciously, "I have enough Jesus"?

Note this: It is a very dangerous thing to beg Jesus to depart. He may just do it.


I now send forth this post with a deep sense of its many defects; but with an earnest prayer that it may do some good. (JC Ryle)

To God Alone be the Glory