HasAnyoneSeenTheTractor?

Am I Content?

I haven't posted anything in quite a while as a result of a serious medical emergency in our little church.  You can read the whole story (and it is a compelling one) on my wife's blog.

Things have settled down a bit, and I was reading out of a wonderful little book by Thomas Watson called The Art of Divine Contentment.  It's a reprint of a very old book--Watson was a Puritan preacher and wrote the book in 1655.   Not surprisingly, his key verse is from the fourth chapter of Paul's letter to the Phillippians:  "I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content."

In his chapter, "How a Christian May Know Whether He has Learned This Divine Art," he gives five tests to determine whether we are learning, as Paul learned, to be content.  They are definitely worth sharing briefly:

1.  A contented spirit is a silent spirit.  He does not have one word to say against God.  Psalm 39:9.

2.  A contented spirit is a cheerful spirit.  "He not only submits to God's dealings, but rejoices in them. . . .  A sullen melancholoy is hateful."

3.  A contented spirit is a thankful spirit.  "Others will belss God for prosperity, but he blesses Him for affliction."

4.  No condition comes amiss to him.  A contented Christian knows how to come to terms with any condition.

5.  A contented Christian will not "run into sin to rid himself of trouble."  He will not "stir until God opens a door."

I found these to be incredibly insightful and Biblical.  I have to admit that many times I don't pass one, let alone all five, of these tests.  But I find these sorts of things to be encouraging.  As Paris Reidhead once said, these are the echoes of truth passed down through the ages.  And, every once in a while, we come across a modern-day Christian who gets this contentment thing exactly right.  (See my wife's blog about Abril on Thursday, Feb. 12).

The Art of Divine Contentment is a must-have for your bookshelf and is available from Reformation Heritage Books.

Thoughts on Spiritual Growth through Affliction

I taught in our home fellowship recently on the issue of spiritual growth that comes through various forms of affliction.  Here are a few quotes that I used from some noted authors.  They were worth sharing.

 “God wants us to choose to love him freely, even when that choice involves pain, because we are committed to him, not to our own good feelings and rewards. . . .   Job clung to God’s justice when he was the best example in history of God’s apparent injustice.  He did not seek the Giver because of his gifts; when all gifts were removed he still sought the Giver.”  Phillip Yancey, Where is God When it Hurts.

 “We want not so much a father in heaven as a grandfather in heaven—whose plan for the universe was such that it might be said at the end of each day, ‘A good time was had by all.’  I should very  much like to live in a universe which was governed on such lines, but since it is abundantly clear that I don’t, and since I have reason to believe nevertheless that God is love, I conclude that my conception of love needs correction.”  C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain.

 This “environment so manifestly not designed for the maximization of human pleasure and the minimization of human pain, may be rather well adapted to the quite different purpose of ‘soul-making.’”  John Hicks.

 “Persecution and affliction are a normal part of the Christian life. . . . Satan does not fight against himself.  So, when those in the midst of false religions seem to be having an easier time than Christians, it should not be surprising.”  Edith Shaffer, Affliction.

These all seemed right on to me.

Clearing Pasture

Why should I start at the plough of my Lord, that maketh deep furrows on my soul?  I know He is no idle husbandman, he purposeth a crop.

Samuel Rutherford, The Loveliness of Christ.

We have all heard many times the use of everyday agricultural terms as metaphors for the Christian life.  Pruning, plowing, harvesting, watering, threshing:  all concepts drawn from our agricultural past and used not only by the inspired Word of God but also by modern-day preachers whose only connection to the land may be no more than watching Little House on the Prairie.

I can't throw any stones here.  It has only been 5 years since we bought our beautiful little homestead and started trying to make it habitable for man and beast.  We have cattle, chickens and a garden now, and I can say without hesitation that all the agricultrual metaphors are finally beginning to make sense in ways that I never fully understood before.

One truth from the homestead that seems ubiquitous is this:  if you leave something alone and don't improve it, it will eventually be overrun by weeds, bugs, trash trees, ants, termites--you name it.  Take my pasture, for example.  It hasn't been used for serious grazing in decades, and, when we bought it, it was almost completely taken over by trash trees and weeds.  It served no agricultural purpose until I hired a local dozer operator to clear the junk from the pasture.  Now we are disking, remineralizing, and seeding.  Work, work, work.  But without it, the homestead would collapse from inattention.

My wife's blog recently posted the following quote:

"People do not drift towards holiness.  Apart from grace driven effort, people do not gravitate towards godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, or delight in the Lord.

We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance;

Toward disobedience and call it freedom;

We cherish the non-discipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation;

We slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves that we have been liberated."

D.A. Carson

The reformers taught us that salvation is a gift of God, by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.  They taught us that we could not work our way into heaven.  But the Bible is also exceedingly clear that a growing faith is one that is disciplined.  It is a faith that has the final goal always in mind and that results in an ever-changing life that is becoming more and more like the life of Christ.

Consider, for example, Hebrews 12:11, "Now no chastening seems to be joyful for the present, but painful; nevertheless, afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it."

Or 1Timothy 4:7-8, "On the other hand, discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness; for bodily discipline is only of little profit, but godliness is profitable for all things."

Even as I make my way through my 40s, I am continually amazed at how much pasture clearing I still need.  That song I used to love as a teenager--is it really bringing forth godliness?  Really?  How about that piece of junk from Best Buy or Walmart?  Is it essential for the journey, or is just a weed?  Do I truly express love in the way the Bible commands, or am I hiding behind my gift of discernment?  Ouch.

So, if you have been a believer for many years and may be starting to think that you might finally be "getting there," go out and take a look at your garden or at your chicken coop and consider what happens without constant, purposeful, and visionary agricultural discipline.

One of the great homesteading books of all time is, surprisingly, Tolstoy's classic, Anna Karenina.  I'll wrap up this entry with a brief quote from a beautiful passage in the book when the protagonist begins to realize the importance of the land he has inherited from his forefathers and the necessity of disciplining the land.  It's an awfully good metaphor for the task before us as believers, parents, and children of a loving and righteous God.

Now, involuntarily it seemed, he cut more and more deeply into
the soil like a plough, so that he could not be drawn out without
turning aside the furrow.

To live the same family life as his father and forefathers--that
is, in the same condition of culture--and to bring up his
children in the same, was incontestably necessary.  It was as
necessary as dining when one was hungry.  And to do this, just as
it was necessary to cook dinner, it was necessary to keep the
mechanism of agriculture at [the homestead] going so as to yield an
income.  Just as incontestably as it was necessary to repay a
debt was it necessary to keep the property in such a condition
that his son, when he received it as a heritage, would say "thank
you" to his father as Levin had said "thank you" to his
grandfather for all he built and planted.  And to do this it was
necessary to look after the land himself, not to let it, and to
breed cattle, manure the fields, and plant timber.

L. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, pt. 8, ch. 10.

Check out the book, and keep clearing.

Rethinking My First Blog

I wrote my very first blog last night.  It was awfully fun just sitting down and writing something.  I know of two people who have read it:  my wife and a very dear friend of many years.  If no one else reads it, that will be more than fine.

My dear wife suggested that I re-read the statement about the verse in Phillippians promising that I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.  My point was supposed to be that the verse has frequently been taken out of context to make it sound like Jesus is there so we can do superhuman feats of strength, when, in fact, it is in the middle of Paul's discussion of contentment.  In context, the verse seems very clearly to mean that He will strengthen us in the area of contentment in all circumstances.  Richard Swenson, in his landmark book, Margin, writes about this verse and poses the questions:  can you really do ANYTHING?  Is that really what Paul meant?  Can you go 100 days without sleep?

That point seems clear enough, but I inadvisadly referred to harried mothers taking children to lessons as an example where the verse might be used out of context.  My intent is not to say anything about busy mothers; I could just have well have said something about dad's who work for big law firms and have to keep up with a Boy Scout troop.  And that's probably the example I should have used.

Oops.  I'll learn.

It didn't rain today, so blog number two will undoubtedly be out soon on the issue of pasture maintenance and the 12th chapter of Hebrews.

Rain's My Choice

"It hain't no use to grumble and complain;

It's jest as cheap and easy to rejoice--

When God sorts out the weather and sends rain

W'y rain's my choice."

James Whitcomb Riley, Farm Rhymes, 1883

My wife and I absolutely adore used bookstores.  The family owned shops, full of dust and chaos.  Where else can you find something like Farm Rhymes?  I suspect you would search long and hard at the local Barnes and Noble for such a charming little volume.

When I opened the book to a poem called "Wet-Weather Talk," I knew it needed to be on our bulging bookshelf.  When God sends the rain, "W'y rain's my choice."  Simple, profound, true.  And also one of the great struggles for followers of Jesus.

I have been thinking about the whole issue of contentment lately, because I've caught myself on several occasions not making God's rain my choice, so to speak.  If I understand correctly what the Bible has to say about contentment and grumbling, they are polar opposites.  Godly contentment is the mark of a mature believer, and grumbling is the sinful lack of contentment.

I have been a grumbler lately and not real happy about it.

We have our plans, our expectations, our goals, and our desires.  But God wants our contentment more than He wants us to achieve what we think we need.  One of the things I love so much about life on a homestead is that so much is out of my control, and circumstances are always conspiring in the little, daily things to chisel away the grumbling, old man to create something that is hopefully a little more like Jesus.  How many times has a chain saw broken down right when I really needed it to work?  Or rained when I needed it to be dry?  How about the time I was going to paint a storage box, and the back pasture caught fire and burned up instead?

These are little things, really, but they illustrate on a daily basis this most vital truth.

And the people spoke [grumbled] against God and Moses, "Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?  For there is no food and no wter, and we loathe this miserable food."

Numbers 21:5. 

The Puritan preacher, Thomas Watson, said over 350 years ago that grumblers are rebels, and a rebel is "as one who deals with the devil."  "Satan," he writes, "takes great advantage of our discontent.  He loves to fish in these trouble waters."  The Art of Divine Contentment.

So the question that I have to put to myself is, am I really ready to go beyond just reading about the perseverence of other saints at the same time I am demanding that God arrange things for me precisely the way I want them?  When God sends the rain, will rain be my choice?  God has been sending a little bit of drizzle my way lately, and I have not received it well.  I wonder how I will react if and when He sends a real, Old-Testament-style deluge.

One of the most misused statements in the Bible is, "I can do all things through Him who strengthens me."  Phil. 4:13.  It has been used to kick off church building programs and convince harried mothers that they really can get their children to six soccer practices and a game every week.  But the verse follows Paul's confession that he has learned contentment in all circumstances--in want and in prosperity.  He then acknowledges that he has attained this contentment through Christ who has strengthened him.  This little verse that has been sort of the cornerstone of me-centered Christianity is actually all about contentment.

So my New Year's resolution is to be a non-grumbler (I suppose that's not good English, but it makes the point).  I don't want to be a rebel, and I don't want Satan fishing in my troubled waters.

Tomorrow, the weather forecast is calling for lots of sun, and that's great because I have a lot to do.  The pasture is badly in need of attention.

But if God sends rain, why rain's my choice.

P.S.  Thanks to the good folks at Fireside Books in Tyler, Texas.  Check them out!