I could not attribute any rational meaning to a single act, let alone to my whole life. I simply felt astonished that I had failed to realize this from the beginning. It has all been common knowledge for such a long time. Today or tomorrow sickness and death will come (and they had already arrived) to those dear to me, and to myself, and nothing will remain other than the stench and the worms. Sooner or later my deeds, whatever they may have been, will be forgotten and will no longer exist. What is all the fuss about then? How can a person carry on living and fail to perceive this? That is what is so astonishing! It is only possible to go on living while you are intoxicated with life; once sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere trick, and a stupid trick! That is exactly what it is: there is nothing either witty or amusing, it is only cruel and stupid (Tolstoy).

Tim Keller, A Reason for Living:
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You might decide simply to have as good a time as possible. The universe is a universe of nonsense, but since you are here, grab what you can. Unfortunately, however, there is, on these terms, so very little left to grab — only the coarsest sensual pleasures. You can’t except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behaviour of your genes. You can’t go on getting any very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it. You may still, in the lowest sense, have a “good time”; but just in so far as it becomes very good, just in so far as it ever threatens to push you on from cold sensuality into real warmth and enthusiasm and joy, so afar you will be forced to feel the hopeless disharmony between your own emotions and the universe in which you really live (CS Lewis).

Dr. Frank James III tells the story of the martyrdom of a slave girl who, in her death, became a great witness to the cross of Christ.

I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church (Colossians 1:24).

Today is the anniversary of Saint Augustine’s birth.  It is a particularly special day for me because no man — with the exception of Jesus — has had as much impact on my life as Augustine.  I have said this before, and I think it is true, that, when I die, Augustine’s feet will be the 2nd I get in line to kiss — that is only after I have spent a day or two wiping tears from the feet of the Lord himself.

About 4 years ago, I picked up a copy of Augustine’s City of God.  Shortly thereafter I began reading the Confessions.  In each of these books I saw for the first time something I had never seen before.  I saw a man desperately, unashamedly in love with God, and he made no attempts to downplay it out of a fear of looking silly or weak.  Augustine was a lover of God, who has only been rivaled in his lavish, penned expression of love for God by King David.

As I read Augustine’s account of his own depraved and sinful life — a story that was routinely interrupted by affectionate praise for the Savior he loved — I was amazed.  I’d never seen anything like it.  His language was so full and overflowing with emotion that it made my own heart “throb with a bewildering passion.”

And at the center of it was one sentence that changed my life:

He loves You too little who loves anything together with You which he loves not for Your sake.

Anything, Augustine? I asked.  Anything, he replied through the pages he’d left me.

I loved a lot of things and a lot of people, and most of them I didn’t love for God’s sake.  Was it for God’s glory that I watched TV, listened to music, or posted on my blog?  Was it with God in mind that I spoke when around my friends?  Was it love for God motivating my love for my family?  Was it for God’s sake that I ate and drank, slept and got out of bed, put on my clothes and breathed?

It wasn’t.  And I was terrified.  More than that, I saw something Augustine had that I wanted.  God became more glorious to me than he had ever been before.  I wanted to know this great God who brought Augustine to his knees before him, tearing his hair and beating his breast.  I found myself on my own knees, mourning over my sin and weeping in joy.  My experience was like that of Augustine 16 centuries earlier:

I began to search for a means of gaining the strength I needed to enjoy You, but I could not find this means until I embraced the mediator between God and men, Jesus Christ.

I thank God for Augustine, for his providence in bringing him to me, and for the sentence that changed my life.

If I had not felt certain that every additional trial was ordered by infinite love and mercy, I could not have survived my accumulated sufferings (Adoniram Judson).

From How Few There Are Who Die So Hard: The Cost of Bringing Christ to Burma.

Sometimes talking about Jesus makes us vulnerable — especially if it’s done seriously and with open hearts. It makes us vulnerable because the cross of Christ declares our failures, flaws, insecurities — all the things we don’t want others to know about us — to the world. For people who want to boast in themselves, it is very difficult to boast in Christ.

But merely talking about Christ and boasting in Christ are different things. It is far too easy for us to cover up our insecurities by talking about Christ without boasting in him. We discuss things in very theoretical, theological ways. We make generalizations and speak in broad terms rather than speaking about our own needs. We choose safe, stale language to describe ourselves rather than heart-felt language which opens us up to mockery or criticism. We maintain a veneer of control over our lives despite the fact that our hearts are full of turmoil. We fail to talk about someone we love and instead talk about facts concerning him.

The problem is quite often not what we say but how we say it. We are masters at dodging the guilt and shame we’re due. And we do it because we are more afraid of the sinners we speak to than we are in love with the One we speak about.

But Paul did something entirely different. He boasted in his weaknesses in order to glorify Christ (2 Corinthians 12:9-10). When we aren’t most vulnerable, Christ isn’t most glorified because he died for us while we were yet weak. Be vulnerable for Christ’s sake.

Jesus was a “man of sorrows” (Isaiah 53:3) who told his followers to deny themselves and follow him to Golgotha with crosses on their backs.  He said those who try to save their lives will lose them, but “whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:24-25). The apostle Paul said, “I die every day!” (1 Corinthians 15:31). The Christian life is a life of death. So for the sake of those who want to lose their lives for Christ, here are 12 ways to die while playing volleyball. (more…)

We tend to have permanently casual relationships that never grow into real intimacy.  There are things we know about each other, but they fool us into thinking that we know the human beings who live within the borders of those details.  So we fail to pursue them with good questions.  This sets the stage for all kinds of misunderstandings.  Our effectiveness as ambassadors is blunted because we don’t know others well enough to know where change is needed or where God is actively at work.

Think about it.  Most of the conversations you had today were mundane and rather self-protective.  We spend most of our time talking about things that are of little personal consequence — the weather, politics, sports, and entertainment.  There is nothing wrong with this except that it allows us to hide who we really are. . . . We are all skilled at newsy but personally protective conversations (Paul Tripp, Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands 163).

I have forgotten. And only partly do I remember the unbearable beauty of her face.
‘Is it?… Is it?’ I whispered to my guide.
‘Not at all,’ said he. ‘It’s someone ye’ll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders green.’
‘She seems to be … well, a person of particular importance?’
‘Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on earth are two quite different things.’ . . .
‘And who are all these young men and women on each side?’
‘They are her sons and daughters.’
‘She must have had a very large family, Sir.’
‘Every young man or boy that met her became her son–even if it is was only the boy that brought meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.
‘Isn’t that a bit hard on their own parents?’
‘No. There are those that steal other people’s children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives’ (CS Lewis).

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I think that much exposure to sensuality, banality, and God-absent entertainment does more to deaden our capacities for joy in Jesus than it does to make us spiritually powerful in the lives of the living dead. . . .

All Christ-exalting transformation comes from “beholding the glory of Christ.” “Beholding the glory of the Lord, [we] are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Whatever dulls the eyes of our mind from seeing Christ powerfully and purely is destroying us. . . .

It’s the unremitting triviality that makes television so deadly. What we desperately need is help to enlarge our capacities to be moved by the immeasurable glories of Christ. Television takes us almost constantly in the opposite direction, lowering, shrinking, and deadening our capacities for worshiping Christ.

One more smaller concern with TV (besides its addictive tendencies, trivialization of life, and deadening effects): It takes time. I have so many things I want to accomplish in this one short life. Don’t waste your life is not a catchphrase for me; it’s a cliff I walk beside every day with trembling.

TV consumes more and more time for those who get used to watching it. You start to feel like it belongs. You wonder how you could get along without it. I am jealous for my evenings. There are so many things in life I want to accomplish. I simply could not do what I do if I watched television. So we have never had a TV in 40 years of marriage. . . . I don’t regret it.

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This is not about how useful we can become, or how successful our ministries appear to be.  It is about being conformed to the image of Christ.  Absolutely everything in our lives is directed towards our conformity.  God is not served by human hands as though he needed something from us.  He’s granted us the privilege to participate in a great work that he is doing.  But the great goal of God is not to make us successful servants.  The great goal of God is to make us conformed to the image of Jesus Christ (Paul Washer).

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