One Whom Jesus Loves

 

I love Easter! Not only is it less stressful and more relaxed than Christmas, Easter celebrates the most important event in Christian history. Several years ago, I put together an extensive Easter playlist. I tweak it a bit every year, but it currently stands at 56 songs with a runtime of 4 hours and 4 minutes. The first half of the playlist is carefully arranged to follow the chronology of Holy Week while the second half celebrates the resurrection before pointing to the Second Coming in the last few songs.

As long as the playlist is, it only begins to scratch the surface of the music that has been written to celebrate Jesus’ death and resurrection. Thousands of songs have been written about this one event in history. And why not? Jesus loved us so very much that He came to die for us, and then He defeated death itself!

I have enjoyed going through the book of John over the past year, both at church and in my personal reading. One thing that has stood out to me is that the author refers to himself several times as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” Growing up, I always heard this talked about in a joking way, as if John was being a bit bold and presumptuous. It wasn’t until last year that I read a different perspective, which I believe is closer to the truth. John was placing his identity in being loved by God. He did not talk about himself as an apostle, evangelist, or author—though he was all of those things. He identified himself as loved by God.

In our world today, there is a lot of talk about identity. What political party do you belong to? What gender do you identify as? What denomination are you a part of? In our personal lives, we can often worry about how others perceive us through what we do, titles we hold, achievements we are proud of, or shortcomings we are ashamed of. But what would happen if you saw yourself first and foremost as one whom Jesus loves?

One of the songs on my Easter playlist is “When Love Sees You” by Mac Powell. It’s from the album Music Inspired by the Story, which I highly recommend. The chorus and bridge speak to how Jesus sees us:

“Tell Me your story, show Me your wounds
And I'll show you what Love sees when Love looks at you
Hand Me the pieces, broken and bruised
And I'll show you what Love sees when Love sees you.

I see what I made in your mother's womb
I see the day I fell in love with you
I see your tomorrows, nothing left to chance
I see My Father's fingerprints

I see your story, I see My name
Written on every beautiful page
You see the struggle, you see the shame
I see the reason I came.

I came for your story, I came for your wounds
To show you what Love sees when I see you.”

God looks at us with the greatest love that has ever been or ever will be. It is immense beyond measure and incomprehensible. As we celebrate on this Easter, I invite you to place your identity in being loved by Jesus.

He is risen! He is risen indeed!

 

--Concetta Swann

 Life Lenses

If you’ve ever been to the eye doctor, you’ve probably experienced when they put a big metal mask in front of your face and proceed to flip through different lens options and combinations until you can see clearly. Many times they’re going back and forth and back and forth because it’s hard to tell the difference between one or the other.

We all walk through life with lenses, whether you’re wearing a pair of glasses or not. They’re in how we see the world, the experiences we’ve had that give us first hand knowledge in different areas. New lenses drop down in front of us, altering that understanding or personal perspective. 

These are some lenses I have in front of me that have shaped the way I understand, empathize and see life:

Being an only child

Attending 6 different schools between K-12th

Having a parent with a mental illness

Having a parent with stage 4 cancer

Playing sports

Moving to new places and knowing no one

Teaching elementary students

Being married and having kids

Most recently the lens that dropped down in front of my eyes was losing my dad. 

All of these things significantly shape the way I think about things, who I relate to, and the decisions I make. 

Do we have any in common? Are there some differences? I think about how the common ones mean that we can empathize with one another and support one another. Some of these things are hard. When we experience something new or challenging, it broadens our capacity to walk alongside others going through the same things. 2 Corinthians 1 talks about how Christ comforts us in our trials and struggles so that we in turn can comfort those around us who may be going through the same thing. 

It wasn’t until I lost my dad that I truly understood how many friends and family members have felt walking through the deep grief and life changes that come from losing a parent. As much as there is pain, there is also the gift of community and being able to relate to one another and bear one another’s burdens.

When we have different lenses it shows how the church functions as a body. Not only do we have different gifts and skills, but we also have different experiences. God uses those differences so that we are full and multifaceted as a church family. There is beauty in differences. We come together as a family often despite differences and learn how to love one another as Christ loves.

Over time the lenses are added to, perspective and understanding grows and shifts. But all the while, we need something (someone) to hold fast to and who holds us fast. So that while life throws new things at us, we won’t be blinded by and lean on our own understanding. We would get our prescription wrong if we didn’t have the correct training to give us a clear vision. (Prov 3:5)

Those constants are who I am in Christ, that I believe I am who He says I am, and He is who He says He is:

I am a sinner.

I am saved by grace.

I am a child of God.

I have a hope and a future.

He is Holy.

He is Just.

He is True.

He is my creator, He knows me and He loves me.

He is love.

These things are what I must cling to first. Because these things are stable and sure, I can let the experiences God gives add to my life, add to my understanding, add to my disappointment, add to my strengthening. 

So, what are your life lenses? What experiences have shaped your vision? What remains constant through your changing prescriptions? Who holds you fast?

He Is Risen!

        In the end of the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulcher.  And, behold, there was a great earthquake:  for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it.  His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow:  and for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead men.  And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not ye:  for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified.  He is not here: for He is risen, as He said.  Come, see the place where the Lord lay.  And go quickly, and tell His disciples that He is risen from the dead; and, behold, He goeth before you into Galilee; there shall ye see Him:  lo, I have told you.  And they departed quickly from the sepulcher with fear and great joy; and did run to bring His disciples word.  

And as they went to tell His disciples, behold, Jesus met them, saying, All hail.  And they came and held Him by the feet, and worshipped Him. Then said Jesus unto them.  Be not afraid: go tell My brethren that they go into Galilee, and there shall they see Me.

Now if Christ be preached that He rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?  But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain and your faith is also vain.  Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that He raised up Christ: whom He raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not.  For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.  Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished.  If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.

But now is Christ risen from the dead.

        These passages have been precious to me all of my life.  My mother insisted that we memorize them.  She sang them to us as well.  Easter is my very favorite time of the year.

Over the years I have played Mary, the mother of Jesus, in several dramatic presentations, including in a pantomime behind a sheer curtain in The Redemption, an oratorio by Gounod.  In this last I felt the grief of the march to Calvary, the crucifixion. I placed myself at the cross and felt an intensity of grief I had not felt before.

In 2015 I went with Tom Kilpatrick and Bill Summers to Israel.  We were at Gordon’s Calvary and the Garden Tomb on Good Friday.  I begged Bill to allow me to quote these Scriptures. It was a very moving experience.

In 1977 or 78 I was in Israel with the Sandbergs and Martins.  Tom was also in Israel, but I did not expect to see him.  But as we were going into a little Arab restaurant in the Old City, there was Tom.  We had a free afternoon so Tom invited me to join him and Mike Bentley, a Temple grad who was a missionary in Israel, for the rest of the day.  It was an unforgettable afternoon.

        First we went to a little gift shop that had a special connection with the Dead Sea Scrolls.  The owner had bought the first scrolls from little Arab boys.  He had one of the jars that the scrolls had been hidden in and a small fragment of a scroll.  I got to feel those two and wonder who had valued the Scriptures so much that they had hidden them only to have them discovered centuries later.  In that shop I bought a widow’s mite from about 70 A.D.  That was the year that Jerusalem was destroyed.  There would have been no widow’s mites after that tragic year.

Our next stop was  Gordon’s Calvary and the Garden Tomb.  This time no one else was around.  There were no tour groups crowding the small garden.  I sat and read Scriptures and prayed under a huge mustard tree.  I believe that is probably the exact place where Jesus was buried.  It fulfills many of the descriptions in Scripture.  But my faith is not based on whether that is the place.  I know my Savior lives.

The last place we visited was Bethany, now a small Arab village.  Earlier the whole group had visited Bethany.  We had stopped outside the village at a cave which our guide assured us was the exact place Lazarus had been buried.  That had been a stretch for me.  But now at twilight with no tour buses belching their fumes and noise, I saw the village much as it might have been when Jesus walked there. The dusty narrow streets were deserted. We could hear an occasional donkey’s bray and other animals settling for the night.  We went through a gate into a courtyard, then up a flight of stairs to the home of a Greek Orthodox priest. The room was dark.  (The priest went into another room to move what was evidently his only lightbulb to the cord hanging down in the room we were in.)  He read from the Old Testament in Hebrew for us.We had come to a walled house with a flat roof and no lights.  It was easy to imagine Lazarus’  lying in a home such as this, not too far from where I sat, his sisters moaning and saying, “Where is Jesus?”  And when Jesus came, death had already come.  His sisters then said, “If you had been here, our brother would not have died.” And Jesus wept.  He loved Lazarus, just as He loves us. But then He spoke to Martha.“I am the resurrection and the life.  He that believes in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.  And whosoever lives and believes in Me shall never die.  Do you believe Me?”

As we grow older, deaths seem to be piling one after another. This year I have lost three dear friends and gone to funerals for others.  I miss Jessie, Doris, and Steve.  But because of the resurrection, I will see them again. Last year they celebrated Easter in Heaven.  In that little house in Bethany I heard Jesus say “Whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die.” Because He lives, we too shall live.  

Do you believe?  I do!

Hallelujah!  He is risen!

                                                                           Faith Himes Lamb

Habits

 

As I write these words, I have a pot of pinto beans cooking on the stove. I love pinto beans, and they are especially good with onions and mustard accompanied by a wedge of crunchy cornbread—not soft, sweet, pseudo-cornbread but firm, crunchy bread, baked in an iron skillet. This is how my mother made cornbread, so it seems right to me. And I’m not the only one.

When I was a student at Concord College (now Concord University) in Athens, West Virginia, many of my dorm mates went home every weekend, returning to campus in waves all Sunday afternoon. One such day as I left my room to head over to the cafeteria, I passed an open door where two or three girls from my home county were gathered around plates of cornbread and beans fixed the right way—crumbled bread topped by beans and bean juice. One of the girls had been home and had returned with this treasure. They offered me a bite, and I was tempted but decided not to interfere.

The things we grow up loving seem good to us, don’t they? Often those things—like the beans and bread—are products of necessity, but that doesn’t change the fact that this love can carry over into decades of adult preferences. (I want to acknowledge that childhood hurts can also have lasting effects, but that’s a topic for another time.)

I’ve been reading a book recommended by missionary Melissa Baccarella. It’s called You Are What You Love by James K.A. Smith. The subtitle is The Spiritual Power of Habit and I’m finding it to be very thought-provoking. This book is the kind that makes me wish I could start over with some things, but one thing it makes me grateful for is the habit of church-going that was developed in me as a child. My habit of being in church on Sunday morning put me in the right place to hear God’s word week after week; it filled my mind with beautiful music and wholesome words; it gave me friends who might notice if I weren’t there. And one day, when I was far from God in my daily practices, it drew me into the vestibule of a church to listen for a few minutes to the service. Probably no one present that day knew I was there, but God was speaking to me and making my heart tender to his leading.

Like beans and cornbread, a habit of going to church is simple but nourishing. Other habits over the years—praying before eating, reciting scripture on the drive to school, collecting missionary cards—have also fed my soul and helped shape my thinking. In his book, Smith covers several areas of life in which habits help shape our loves and our attitudes. Thumbing back through the book recently, I saw that on two separate pages, I had penciled in a statement from Anne Lamott: “We crave what we eat.” I have found this principle to be so true in recent years, applicable to many areas of life.

My encouragement to you today is this: If there is something you know you should do, but you find you don’t love it, just keep doing it. Make it a habit, and one day, you may find yourself craving that very thing.

Proverbs 16:3 says, “Commit your works to the LORD, and your thoughts will be established.” Eat the beans, take the walk, kneel in prayer. Then do it again tomorrow.

Only a Spatula

 

Sometimes I get discouraged in my work at the TN Baptist Children’s Homes. I am a case manager for older residents, and sometimes I feel so disconnected from them. They do not want to meet with me or listen to anything I am trying to teach them. (They already know everything. Maybe you can relate?) I feel like giving up. I ask God why He even brought me there to work. God is addressing my questions and complaints in an unexpected way. He is using a chapter on “Self-Existence” in Jen Wilkens’ book, “None Like Him” to correct some of my thinking. It seems that, unintentionally, I have been trying to steal God’s glory by making this ministry about me. I want these young people to, at the least, not hate me, and maybe even like me, but several are hateful, ungrateful, and unteachable. Sometimes they are downright ornery and disrespectful! Don’t they recognize my gifting?!  When the rewards – praise, gratitude, and adoration – don’t come, I get discouraged, and the doubts about my calling begin. I start to think something I deserve is being withheld. When the fruits of my labor do not manifest, I want to quit. 

Another example of my self-reliance is when I see God answer my prayers in amazing ways, and I begin to feel a sense of self-satisfaction. Saying to myself, "I did the work of spiritual warfare" – like I did something special! Even prayer can become about me! Mercy, what I mess I am! 

I find myself trying to do what only God can do. I cannot save a soul or change a heart.

When a chef uses a spatula to bake a lovely cake, we praise the chef, not the spatula. I have forgotten that I am only a spatula – a tool in God’s hands. He can use me if He chooses or select another tool.

It’s free-ing to allow God to be God. If my TBCH kids refuse Him and I have done my limited part, it is not my problem. When they do not recognize my heart for them or hard work on their behalf, that’s okay, because I am only a spatula.

So, to all my fellow spatulas, let God be God, and don’t try to steal His glory!

joyce hague

(image by bulbandkey.com)