""Therefore say: 'This is what the sovereign Lord says: Although I have removed them far away among the nations and have dispersed them among the countries, I have been a little sanctuary for them among the lands where they have gone.'"
Ezekiel 11:16 NET
Beloved of God, if this Lord's Day finds you worshipping alone or with only your household, take heart from that word of the Lord. I pray you would indeed find Him to be "a little sanctuary" in this time of isolation and exile from the house of God.
In addition, I offer you these words of encouragement from 19th-century English pastor Charles Spurgeon. He struggled with the autoimmune disease gout, which regularly kept him from attending worship services in the church he pastored. His wife also suffered with chronic illness that rarely permitted her to hear her husband preach in person. These thoughts encouraged me. I pray they bring hope and comfort to your heart too.
"Now, notice, God says to his people, when they are far away from the temple and Jerusalem, 'I will be to them as a little sanctuary.' Not, 'I have loved the people, and I will build them a synagogue, or I will lead others to build for them a meeting-place; but I myself will be to them as a little sanctuary.' The Lord Jesus Christ himself is the true place of worship for saved souls. 'There is no chapel in the place where I live,' says one. I am sorry to hear it, but chapels are not absolutely essential to worship, surely. Another cries, 'There is no place of public worship of any sort where the gospel is fully and faithfully preached.' This is a great want, certainly, but still, do not say, 'I am far away from a place of worship.' That is a mistake. No godly man is far away from a holy place. What is a place of worship? I hope that our bed-chambers are constantly places of worship. Place of worship? Why, it is one's garden where he walks and meditates. A place of worship? It is the field, the barn, the street, when one has the heart to pray. God will meet us by a well, a stone, a bush, a brook, a tree. He has great range of trysting-places when men's hearts are right….
"Now, dear friends, God says, 'I will be to them as a little sanctuary,' that is to say, an accessible throne of mercy, an accessible place of mercy. When men have no mercy on you, go to God. When you have no mercy on yourself -- and sometimes you have not -- run away to God. Draw near to him, and he will be to you as a little sanctuary….
"If at this time you have lost many of the comforts of this life, and seem bereaved of friends, then find in God your 'little sanctuary.' Go home to your chamber with holy faith and humble love, and take him to be your all in all, and he will be all in all to you. Pray after this fashion -- 'O Lord, so work in me by thy Spirit that I may find thee in all things, and all things in thee!'
"The Lord has ways of weaning us from the visible and the tangible, and bringing us to live upon the invisible and the real, in order to prepare us for that next stage, that better life, that higher place, where we shall really deal with eternal things only. God blows out our candles, and makes us find our light in him, to prepare us for that place in which they need no candle, for the glory of God is their light; and where, strange to tell, they have no temple, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple thereof. The holy leads to the holiest: living upon God here leads to living with God hereafter. Oh, that God would gradually lift us up above all the outward, above all the visible, and bring as more and more into the inward and unseen! If you do not know anything about this, ask the Lord to teach you this riddle; and if you do know it, ask him to keep you to the life and walk of faith, and never may you be tempted to quit it for the way of sight and feeling. For Christ's sake we ask it. Amen."
From Charles Haddon Spurgeon, "A Little Sanctuary"
Three
riders rode silently through the silent, black night, even their eyes darkened
except in the passing illuminations when the clouds exposed the
moon. When they heard the crunch of gravel beneath the horses’
hooves, they smiled to themselves, knowing that at last they had reached the
dry riverbed which marked the last leg of their journey.
Suddenly
the horses started and reared, spooked by some invisible
danger. Before the riders could quiet them again, a Voice sliced
through the darkness: “Halt, riders. Gather stones from
this riverbed, and I assure you, when morning breaks you will be both sad and
glad.”
Stunned
into silence, after a moment the riders shrugged and broke into nervous
laughter. “We’ve nothing to lose,” said their leader. As
one man in the pale moonlight, they stooped, and each chose a handful of stones
to toss into a pocket. Their horses calmed, they remounted and rode
on until morning.
When
they stopped to water their horses and swallow their meager breakfast, one of
them remembered the stones. He emptied his pocket and gasped in
amazement. Seeing him, the other two followed suit and stared in
wonder. The handfuls of river rocks they had gathered in the night
had been transformed into rubies, sapphires, diamonds, and pearls.
As
the Voice had foretold, as morning broke they were both sad and
glad: glad they had obeyed the strange command, but weeping with
sorrow that they had not filled pockets and saddlebags to overflowing with all
they could carry.*
*************
The
unexceptional pebbles of our daily existence are the raw material Providence chooses
for the altar on which to offer ourselves back to God as a living
sacrifice. It is not the poverty of our offering but the glory of
His acceptance which transforms them into something beautiful and
enduring. Obedience in our ordinary duties becomes the outward and
visible sign – the sacrament, if you will – of the inward and spiritual grace
of His love abiding in those who obey.
The
consecrated heart discovers this transforming grace of God in every place and
activity He assigns. The commonest thing – from data entry to dishes
to preparing lesson plans to changing diapers – takes on the very glory of
heaven when done as unto the Lord.
Some reading
this may protest, “But I have POTS (or fibromyalgia, ME/CFS, Long COVID,
autoimmune disease, MS) and all I can do is lie on the couch. I can’t even read
or watch screens much right now. How am I supposed to work as unto the Lord? I
can’t work at all.”
I have been
there too. I am so thankful you are here. I recorded a reading of this post
largely for you. From my experience of life and Scripture, I can say this: if
my portion for the day is to rest a sick body, do physical therapy, swallow
pills, and navigate all that is involved in accessing medical care, even that
can be offered to the Lord as worship. If all I can do is receive care
from others, alone in a dark room and largely deprived of sensory stimuli, I
can offer my suffering to the Lord and trust Him to receive it. I can pray when
able and offer my silence and listening to Him when unable. I can seek from the
Lord a cheerful and grateful heart toward my helpers. I can lean all my weight on the everlasting arms of God and glorify Him by resting in His grace.
No matter the
life circumstance, even in prison if it comes to that: as I keep the windows of
my soul open toward Jerusalem all
day long, inviting the wind of His Spirit to blow through me, the humblest
duties become means to receive His grace.
What
is this sacramental life? For one thing, it is more easily described
than defined. As a child, I had an African violet in my bedroom
window. I never lost my amazement that, no matter how I turned it in
the morning, by the time I came home from school it had tilted itself toward
the sunlight coming through the window. When we returned to the
United States from the mission field, I would laugh at my nine year-old dog
Steinway. After 3 years of separation under my parents’ care, he
didn’t want to lose me again, I suppose, so he followed me around the house all
day long. Even when we were in the same room and I was in plain
view, he followed me with his eyes. The Ebony Dog who succeeded him
would do the same thing. His whole being was oriented toward me. The
sacramental life is like that: practicing the discipline of fixing
my eyes on Jesus, no matter what, until it becomes habit; continually adjusting
my attitude and actions in the changing circumstances of life so that the
direction of my gaze remains constant in the midst of it all.
*************
Granted,
this truth is easier to write than to live. The world, both without
and within the church, opposes it, the flesh shuns it, and the devil thwarts
it. Contemporary Christless society believes work is what we do to
earn money in order to be able to spend the rest of our time doing as we
please. On the contrary, the Scriptures teach that it is in our work
as well as our rest that we fulfill God’s design for us. Adam was
given the task of cultivating the garden in the day of his creation, not as punishment
for eating the forbidden fruit. It is only the toilsome frustration
of work now which results from sin. Even in the church, we tend to
glorify “full-time Christian service” (which being interpreted is paid
employment in gospel ministry) as somehow more holy than other vocations, but
the Scriptures teach that we are to do all things to the glory
of God (Col 3:17). Was Jesus less holy and obedient to His Father in
His first thirty years of submission to His parents, learning Joseph’s
carpentry trade, and supporting his widowed mother and siblings as was His
responsibility as the oldest son, than he was in His three years of public
ministry? Was the apostle Paul following Christ at a distance during
the days he spent making tents so that he would not place a burden on the
churches to support him? Yet in our elevation of professional
Christian ministry (especially missions) above all other careers, is this not
what we imply?
Our
own flesh, the self-life, plays right into this idea. After all,
it’s far more glamorous to write a book for the Christian bestseller list than
to write a letter to a shut-in cut off from other Christian fellowship, or a
note to tuck in a child’s lunchbox. It’s much more gratifying to the
ego to cook a meal for a roomful of grateful, hungry people at the local
homeless shelter than for a kitchen of grumbling teenagers who seem only to
complain. It may be more motivating to build a house for Habitat for
Humanity than to keep up with the home repairs on a honey-do list. It’s
often easier to travel half a world away to preach Christ to those you will
never see again than it is faithfully to live out the gospel and speak when God
opens doors among your usual acquaintances, who may make life uncomfortable for
you if they don’t agree.
The rewards for public ministry are also public; we have our
compensation in the applause of the watching crowd. The rewards for
a life lived in quiet obedience carried out before the face of God are
primarily between the soul and her Lord, although such a life cannot help but
bear fruit in the character and outward life as well, as we become what we
behold (2 Cor. 3:18). Does that make them less
precious? Hardly. What can be sweeter than going about my
day in the constant companionship of my Best-Beloved? Jesus promised
exactly that treasure to those who abide in Him by keeping His
commandments: “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My
Father will love him, and We will come to him, and make Our abode with him. . .
. Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in
My love. If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love;
just as I have kept My Father’s commandments, and abide in His
love. These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may be in you,
and that your joy may be made full” (John 14:23; 15:9-11, NASB1995).
Finally,
the devil is all too happy to support this notion of work as something that
keeps us from doing “real ministry” and drains the joy from life. If
believed, this idea may produce a sloppily done or entirely neglected duty, all
for the sake of “ministry.” On the other hand, as Lazarus’ sister
Martha illustrates, we may be easily distracted by work as an end in itself so
that we miss God’s still, small voice speaking to us through it. The
thorns which choked the growth of the seed in the parable of the soils, after
all, are the cares and worries of the world. Either error,
forsaking duty for ministry or losing sight of God in the busyness of work,
comes from the enemy and distorts the truth.
*************
“But
how can I expect to hear a still, small voice in a carpool of noisy
pre-schoolers shouting?” or perhaps “. . . when the only beauty in my work is
the fake ivy peeking over from the next cubicle?” I never said it
was easy, but I assure you: insofar as you gather the pebbles of the ordinary
and offer them to God, you will be both sad and glad. More
importantly than my lone opinion, the testimony of the Christians of the past
assures you of the same truth.
Brother
Lawrence wrote of it as the “practice of the presence of God” in his book by
that name. Though a monk, his duties differed little from those of
the average housewife (excepting the carpool of screaming kids). He
learned the art of constant conversation with God even as he scrubbed pots and
worked in the garden, and it transformed his attitude and
relationships. This can begin simply, with a hymnal over the sink, a
recording of sacred music or Scripture playing in the car, prayer reminders
where one will see them often, or Scripture memory cards next to the computer
for those inevitable delays while the program opens or document
saves. Whatever reminds us to look back to Jesus when we lose our
focus will help us on this journey.
Martin
Luther wrote, “The works of monks and priests, however holy and arduous they
be, do not differ in one whit in the sight of God from the works of the rustic
laborer in the field or the woman going about her household tasks, but that all
the works are measured before God by faith alone. . . . Indeed, the
menial housework of a manservant or maidservant is often more acceptable to God
than all the fastings and other works of a monk or priest, because the monk or
priest lacks faith” (quoted in Os Guinness, The Call, 34).
Elisabeth
Leseur, a housewife in upper-class French society in the late nineteenth
century, began to follow Christ as the rather unexpected consequence of her
husband’s attempts to persuade her to abandon the trappings of her childhood
religion and join him in militant atheism. When the Lord opened her
eyes to the folly of the arguments before her, He drew her into a personal
relationship with Himself for the first time, as her previous religion had been
merely formal with no sincerity. How did she respond to this turn of
events? She began her own self-study program of the New Testament
and the lives of Christians from history and sought to live out the life and
love of Christ with her husband and the friends her social station required her
to entertain. She lived out 1 Peter 3, despite continual ridicule
from family and friends and increasingly poor health, which prevented her from
leaving her home at all in the last years of her life. She sought to
conduct her life in keeping with resolutions such as the following:
To go more and more to souls, approaching them with respect and
delicacy, touching them with love. To try always to understand
everything and everyone. Not to argue; to work instead through
contact and example; dissipate prejudice, to reveal God and make Him felt
without speaking of him; to strengthen one’s intelligence, to enlarge one’s
soul. . . ; to love without tiring, in spite of disappointment and
indifference. . . . To learn from the Heart of Jesus the secret of
love for souls and deep knowledge of them: how to touch their hurts
without making them smart and to dress their wounds without reopening them; . .
. to disclose Truth in its entirety and yet make it known according to the
degree of light that each soul can bear (Robin Maas, “A Marriage Saved in Heaven: Elisabeth
Leseur’s Life of Love,” https://catholicladylive.blogspot.com/2011/02/marriage-saved-in-heaven.html).
Her life motto became, “Every soul that uplifts itself uplifts the
world.” After her death, the crowds of people touched by her
charitable works and correspondence, reading her journal, and her life itself
became the means of her husband’s conversion. He later entered
vocational Christian ministry and labored to keep her memory alive and honored.
The
more well-known Christian teacher Oswald Chambers writes frequently of the
“drudgery of discipleship” in his devotional classic My Utmost for His
Highest. For example, in the September 11 entry, he notes, “The
things that Jesus did were of the most menial and commonplace order, and this
is an indication that it takes all God’s power in me to do the most commonplace
things in His way. Can I use a towel as He did? Towels
and dishes and sandals, all the ordinary sordid things of our lives, reveal
more quickly than anything what we are made of. It takes God
Almighty Incarnate in us to do the meanest duty as it ought to be
done.” Again, in the October 21 entry, he writes, “We do not need
the grace of God to stand crises, human nature and pride are sufficient, we can
face the strain magnificently; but it does require the supernatural grace of
God to live twenty-four hours in every day as a saint, to go through drudgery
as a disciple, to live an ordinary, unobserved, ignored existence as a disciple
of Jesus. It is inbred in us that we have to do exceptional things
for God; but we have not. We have to be exceptional in the ordinary
things, to be holy in mean streets, among mean people, and this is not learned
in five minutes.” No, nor in five lifetimes, it sometime seems.
Finally, EvelynUnderhill,
the twentieth-century English writer on mysticism and the spiritual life, summarizes
these truths. She writes, “A spiritual life is simply a life in
which all that we do comes from the center, where we are anchored in
God: a life soaked through and through by a sense of God’s reality
and claim and self-given to the great movement of God’s
will.” Furthermore, “Some people appear to think that the ‘spiritual
life’ is a peculiar condition mainly supported by cream ices and corrected by
powders. But the solid norm of the spiritual life should be like
that of the natural life: a matter of porridge, bread and butter,
and a cut off the joint. The extremes of joy, discipline, vision,
are not in our hands, but in the Hand of God. The demand for
temperance of soul, for an acknowledgment of the sacred character of the
normal, is based on that fact – the central Christian fact – of the humble
entrance of God into our common human life. The supernatural can and
does seek and find us, in and through our daily normal
experience: the invisible in the visible” (The Soul’s
Delight, 11 and 45).
*************
The
invisible in the visible, the pearl latent in the grain of sand, the diamond in
the lump of coal, God’s grace conveyed to the human heart in the ordinary
duties at hand in each day. . . Anything done for the glory of God, in
dependence on His Spirit, in obedience to the commands of Christ, may be lifted
to our Lord as a sacrifice of praise. To quote Lilias Trotter, "Meeting
His wishes is all that matters."
May He strengthen us to learn the discipline of
offering each moment and task in faith to Him, to be transformed by His glory
into the means for His grace to take fuller possession of our hearts through
the sacrament of the ordinary.
* My version of a story John Baldwin told my church youth group
in the summer of 1990 (although some details have no doubt altered in my
memory); I have found the story used as illustration various places but not
succeeded in tracing the source. If you know, please let me know so I can
attribute it correctly.
Above all, remember God is faithful. His mercies are new every morning, and His compassions never fail. He is faithful, and His faithfulness is great. He is good and kind, trustworthy and true.
You listened to a writer recently who quoted another writer, who said, "Every writer only has one theme, and mine is love." That got you thinking, what is your one theme?
What you're realizing and don't really want to accept is that your theme is brokenness, or perhaps better, the sufficiency of God's grace in brokenness. Your imagination keeps returning to the idea of the kintsugi Christian, a broken person mended with gold, more beautiful after the breaking than before. It is a beautiful idea, but the cost of such a testimony frightens you. So much brokenness already. So many losses. Is that to be the pattern always? If His golden beauty in the soul's dark night is the theme of your song, is breaking and mending, breaking and mending, breaking and mending to be the rhythm of all the days of your weary Shadowlands pilgrimage?
I don't know that. Loss is engraved so indelibly in this postlapsarian life, as it was on our Savior's (and is even now in ascended, nail-scarred glory); such a rhythm is a distinct possibility.
But I know this: if such is your calling, your testimony, God will be faithful in it. He will unfold joys and beauties in the brokenness that would not be yours otherwise. The grace and courage and strength will be there when you need it, though likely not before. The fearful imaginings of impending losses, realized in full, omit the imaginings of the sweet presence of God in their midst.
What's more, consider the outcome of such breaking and mending, breaking and mending, breaking and mending. Every cycle will make you more of gold and less of clay. Every breaking will cause His light and glory to shine through you more brightly, until your journey is complete and you are like Him when you see Him face to face.
Courage, dear heart. Life is hard. There will be more death-shadowed valleys before the end. But Christ is worthy. He is worthy, and He is with you. You will never be alone or abandoned by Him.
Dive ever deeper into His presence in His Word, and soar ever higher into His presence in prayer. If brokenness is to be your theme, let Him be your song in the house of your pilgrimage.
Yielding is the definite, deliberate, voluntary transference of undivided possession, control, and use of the whole being--spirit, soul, and body--from self to Christ, to whom it rightfully belongs by creation and by purchase (Ruth Paxson, Life on the Highest Plane).
After 35 years of walking with the Lord, I have not yet outgrown the need of that reminder. Every loss of a treasure is an invitation to yield all of myself, all that I treasure, all over again. The letting go is not only taking my hands off, but transferring the beloved into His hands, those hands forever marked with the price of His love for me. In those hands, there is peace.
Blessed Easter, crumbles. Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. Hallelujah!
We are all of us gospel amnesiacs, in need of preaching the gospel to ourselves again and again, as long as it's called "Today," until the Lord returns. Over the next several weeks, here are half a hundred things (one per year) I need to remind myself of, things I would want to tell my younger friends and family when they are old enough to have ears to hear. May the Lord bless them to your encouragement as well.
Rose window, Little Chapel in the Woods, Denton, Texas, 2021
31. Gratitude is the will of God for every Christian. When things are going well, we may forget gratitude because we forget how desperate we are for Him. It is all too easy in the flesh to become complacent and even entitled. The sin of ingratitude is a much graver failing in God’s sight than we are inclined to think it (see Romans 1, much of Exodus and Numbers). On the flip side, trust, dependence, and gratitude are foundational to experiential communion with our Father.
Gratitude to God when everything about us seems to be going wrong is our shattered alabaster vase of costly perfume, and that act of faith is precious to our Father. He is still on the throne. He is still at work. He will bring “all the things” together in goodness and beauty and use them for His glory, our good, and the gain of the church (Romans 8:28ff). Even if none of the hard eucharisteos (i.e., thanksgivings) improve in this life, they are actively working glory for us in eternity. Furthermore, the blessing of belonging to God because of the death and resurrection of Christ is better than I deserve, whatever this earthly life may bring. Anything better than hell is a grace from His hand, and He is so much better to me than hell.
Yes, I live with pain, weakness, crosses, burdens, griefs, and difficulties every day, but I do not bear that alone. The Triune God is with me and will not leave me or forsake me. Christ has borne my sin and all the wrath I deserve; in exchange, He has clothed me with His righteousness and given me His Spirit to give me knowledge of God and a desire to do His will. How can I not thank Him? Blessed be His name.
And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. (Colossians 3:17, ESV).
...giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ (Ephesians 5:20, ESV).
Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you (1 Thessalonians 5:16–18, ESV).
32. All of life except sin can be worship. When we continually draw the gaze of our hearts back to our Beloved, we can live our days in interior conversation and communion with Him. Brother Lawrence called this “the practice of the presence of God.” Jean Pierre de Caussade called this “The Sacrament of the Present Moment.” I call this “The Sacrament of the Ordinary.” Anything is worship that I do for the glory of God, in obedience to the commands of Christ, in dependence on the Holy Spirit living in me to enable me.
33. There are no cookie-cutter Christians. God designed each one of us as a unique fragment of stained glass in the rose window of the invisible, eternal church He is building. He doesn’t want another Elisabeth Elliot or Amy Carmichael or Beth Moore or Florence Nightingale. He doesn’t want another Chuck Swindoll or Tony Evans or Billy Graham. He wants the first you.
34. Do you remember the children’s table grace, “God is great; God is good; let us thank Him for our food”? This points to profound spiritual truth. “God is great,” so He is able to meet our needs and orchestrate every detail of our lives and this world. “God is good,” so He will do so, and He will rule in love and grace toward His children. Like Aslan, He is not safe (but great), but He is good. David expressed it this way:
Once God has spoken;
twice have I heard this:
that power belongs to God,
and that to you, O Lord, belongs steadfast love.
For you will render to a man
according to his work (Psalm 62:11–12, ESV).
35. God’s love goes with us into the hottest fires, most overwhelming floods, and darkest pits of despair and depression. He may hide His face, but He will never withdraw His hand from His son or daughter. The treasure of knowing the fellowship of His suffering transforms our worst times into the most intimate moments of our walk with Christ. “There is no pit so deep that His love is not deeper still” (Corrie ten Boom). Elisabeth Elliot said it this way: “The deepest things that I have learned in my own life have come from the deepest suffering. And out of the deepest waters and the hottest fires have come the deepest things that I know about God” (Suffering Is Never for Nothing).
36. “Courage is not the absence of fear; courage is fear walking” (Susan David). I would add that courage is fear walking in the Lord’s will. Knowing He is the one who called me, who appointed this path, encourages me that He will enable what He commands.
37. Contentment and joy are less a function of circumstance and more a function of the habit and orientation of the heart. If I am not content and cannot rejoice in the Lord in my current job/home/marriage/income/church, chasing happiness through change is not likely to give lasting help. Happiness is a wild bird that cannot be had by pursuing it but alights on my soul as a byproduct of loving the Lord and loving my neighbor.
38. Discontent and self-pity are less a function of circumstance and more a function of the habit and orientation of the heart.
39. Friendship, music, laughter, and children’s books are good medicine for a bruised and aching soul.
40. If you are a Christian, God is not angry with you. Jesus bore your sins and all the wrath deserved for them so that you could be free of condemnation and have eternal life.
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1, ESV).
What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written,
“For your sake we are being killed all the daylong;
we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:31–39, ESV).
