In Prince Caspian, part of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles, the children Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy all find themselves in Narnia after a long absence. Aslan, the great king and lion, is nowhere to be seen. Lucy, the youngest of the children, particularly aches to see him. One night she wakes to a great stirring in the forest, and to a voice calling her. While the other children sleep, she ventures forth through the woods and into a clearing. Here’s what happens:
A circle of grass, smooth as a lawn, met her eyes, with dark trees dancing all round it. And then—oh joy! For he was there: the huge Lion, shining white in the moonlight, with his huge black shadow underneath him.
But for the movement of his tail he might have been a stone lion, but Lucy never thought of that. She never stopped to think whether he was a friendly lion or not. She rushed to him. She felt her heart would burst if she lost a moment. And the next thing she knew was that she was kissing him and putting her arms as far round his neck as she could and burying her face in the beautiful rich silkiness of his mane.
“Aslan, Aslan. Dear Aslan,” sobbed Lucy. “At last.”
The great beast rolled over on his side so that Lucy fell, half sitting and half lying between his front paws. He bent forward and just touched her nose with his tongue. His warm breath came all round her. She gazed up into the large wise face.
“Welcome, child,” he said.
“Aslan,” said Lucy, “you’re bigger.”
“That is because you are older, little one,” answered he.
“Not because you are?”
“I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”2
That’s a perfect description of those who train themselves in God’s goodness and sovereignty: every year you grow, you find him bigger.
The best way I know to embody this Godward orientation is thankfulness. Thankfulness is a secret passageway into a room you can’t find any other way. It is the wardrobe into Narnia. It allows us to discover the rest of God—those dimensions of God’s world, God’s presence, God’s character that are hidden, always, from the thankless. Ingratitude is an eye disease every bit as much as a heart disease. It sees only flaws, scars, scarcity. Likewise, the god of the thankless is wary, stingy, grudging, bumbling, nitpicky. He’s by turns meddlesome and apathetic, suspicious then indifferent, grubbing about in our domestic trifles one moment, oblivious to our personal catastrophes the next.
But to give thanks, to render it as Scripture tells us we ought— in all circumstances, for all things, to the glory of God—such thanksgiving becomes a declaration of God’s sovereign goodness. Even more, it trains us in a growing awareness of that sovereign goodness. You cannot practice thankfulness on a biblical scale without its altering the way you see. And the more you do it, the more you find cause for doing it. Inherent in a life of thanksgiving is an ongoing discovery of God’s sufficiency, his generosity, his fatherly affection and warrior protection. “To the faithful,” David said of God, “you show yourself faithful” (2 Sam. 22:26).
In Guelph, Ontario, there’s a riverside park landmarked with large and intricate sculptures: a dinosaur, a man riding a bicycle, a child and his mother. But these are no ordinary sculptures. Each is made from the debris collected from the riverbed. Every year, the city drains the river by a system of channel locks, then invites people from the community to scour the river’s muddy floor and clean up the garbage scattered along it. A welter of refuse is dredged up: shopping carts, tires and rims, car hoods, baby strollers, bikes and trikes, engine blocks, rakes and shovels, urinals, copper plumbing, wine bottles, shoes, thousands of pop cans. Mountains and mountains of rust-scabbed rubbish, slick with algae, are hauled out. Rather than truck all this garbage off to a landfill, the city calls its sculptors together (though most of the pop cans are turned in for refund and the money donated to park conservation). Each artist is given a mound of junk and commissioned to make from it beauty. The created works are then showcased along the very river from which the raw materials have come.
God does that. He works all things together for good for those who love him and are called to his purposes. He takes junk and sculpts art.
And the primary way we participate in that is thanksgiving. Be thankful in all things. Be thankful for all things.
Like the apostle Paul.
One day Paul and Silas were in Philippi, in Macedonia, in what today is northern Greece. The two friends were going to “the place of prayer” (Acts 16:16). The first time they went there, they met Lydia, a local businesswoman, and led her to faith in Christ (see Acts 16:11–15). She would later become a key leader in the Philippian church. This time, a slave girl with a “foreign” spirit meets them on the way. The girl has been a jackpot for her owners. The spirit in her shows her things, hidden things, future things. Her owners exploit her as a soothsayer and fortune-teller. They’ve grown rich off her captivity. When the girl spots Paul and Silas, her sixth sense kicks in, and she follows them around, shouting, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who are telling you the way to be saved” (Acts 16:17).
This is good marketing. A girl, already widely sought for her “spiritual” insights, to whom many in the city ascribe supernatural powers, now broadcasts, at no charge and with approval, the evangelists’ identity and work. It’s like some syndicated horoscope columnist advising people to listen to Franklin Graham. Why quibble with that? If Paul was the least inclined to exploit the slave girl— everyone else does—he might have kept mum.
But Paul cares more about the girl than he does his own advertising campaign. He cares more about her freedom than his own success. He cares more about her coming to know the Most High God herself, finding the way to be saved, than about her telling others about such things while she remains on the outside.
So Paul turns and casts the spirit out of her.
And then, as is often the case, when heaven breaks in, all hell breaks loose.
The girl’s owners are furious. Their “hope of making money was gone” (Acts 16:19). This gospel stuff can be bad for local industry and economy. They seize Paul and Silas, haul them before the city magistrates, and there create a ruckus. The magistrates have Paul and Silas stripped and beaten and handed over to the jailer, who places them in a cell within a cell and shackles their feet for good measure.
And there they sit, in the cramped gloom of the prison house. Cold metal bites their raw flesh. Its weight presses on their throbbing muscles and aching bones. Blood fills their mouths with a coppery taste. Bruises bloom like dark flowers on their backs, swell like tumors on their faces. The fetid air of the cell breeds infection in their open cuts. Blood thickens around their wounds.
This is their reward for doing good, for loving the least of these.
What would you do? Curse, moan, demand? What would you feel? Anger, self-pity, terror? Would you nurse thoughts of vengeance?
Paul and Silas sing. Paul and Silas pray. Paul and Silas hold church. They take Sabbath. They rejoice in the suffering. They consider it pure joy to go through trials of many kinds. They worship the God who can make art from junk.
And all the while, both prison guard and prisoners listen.
Then a miracle happens. An earthquake hits, of such magnitude that the chains fall off the prisoners, all of them, and the cell doors fly open, each of them.
But that’s not the miracle. This is: just as the jailer who tossed Paul and Silas into the inner cell, who clamped the chains on their ankles—just as he is about to kill himself because he thinks all his prisoners have escaped, a voice rings out from the shadows: “Don’t harm yourself! We’re all here!” (see Acts 16:28).
It’s Paul shouting.
We’re all here?
I can understand that Paul and Silas would stay. I can understand that they would refuse to seize an opportunity for their own advantage if it involved another’s loss. They already showed that spirit with the slave girl.
But who’s we? Who else has refused to seize this opportunity, t
o grab freedom through this one narrow window suddenly opened, soon to shut?
Who’s we? It’s the other prisoners. It’s those who sat and listened to two men singing in the rain, singing in their pain, praying in their agony—two men who didn’t succumb to the voice of complaint but instead raised the voice of thanksgiving.
Who’s we? It’s all those who, before this instant, never imagined thankfulness as a possible response to life’s hardships and injustices. It’s all those who, until this moment, could not conceive of a God so good and so present that he is able to conjure good from evil. It’s all those who are surprised to find, right here in the pit, a God sovereign enough that those who place themselves under his care consider it pure joy when they go through trials of many kinds.
We are all those who discover, this very night, a God worthy to be praised in all things and for all things.
We’re all here.
The Philippian jailer rushes up to Paul and Silas with one question: “What must I do to be saved? ” (Acts 16:30). What must I do to meet the God you know, the God whose love inspires thankfulness no matter what, the God who can subdue the hardest heart, the God who can put into the hearts of captives compassion for their captor?
Of course they’re all here. They have just found the God who sets prisoner and prison guard free. The God who makes art from junk.
Where else would they go?
That’s the first orientation for good Sabbath-keeping, the Godward one. It is to practice, mostly through thankfulness, the presence of God until you are utterly convinced of his goodness and sovereignty, until he’s bigger, and you find your rest in him alone.
SABBATH LITURGY:
Practicing the Sovereignty of God
One thing stops God dead in his tracks. It is paltry and flimsy, but tenacious enough to shatter all God’s advances. Even grace, abounding in our sin, cannot break it.
I speak of pride.
Pride usurps God. Pride inverts the universe’s deepest truth: that we need and serve God. Pride gets this exactly backward. Pride is the delusion that God, if he exists, is awfully lucky I’ve shown up and should mind his p’s and q’s lest I change my mind.
The twin of pride is despair. It is to collapse into a sense that not even God is good enough or big enough or smart enough to sort out the mess I’ve made or stumbled upon. In despair, we are consumed by the lie that God, if he exists, is too inept or distracted or apathetic to even notice us, let alone come to our aid.
Judas was a man who went from one to the other, pride to despair, in a blink. His betrayal of Jesus is an act of unmitigated pridefulness, the swaggering assurance that he knew what was best and had every right—even a moral imperative—to go after it. He was cocksure in his actions, driven by a sense of higher wisdom. But that quickly fell to pieces, and then Judas acted out of utmost remorse. No one and nothing, he felt, could salvage his blunder. The only thing left to do was hang himself.
Judas represents an extreme, but the pattern itself is commonplace: one minute certain we can do things better than God, the next convinced that not even God can make things better. Peter, who is often contrasted with Judas, was like that. Boastful and bullheaded, given to brags and bullyrags, he promised great feats, committed great blunders, and then slunk away in defeat. He crowed with cocky self-admiration, and then, hearing the cock crow, wept with shameful humiliation.
But eventually he got it right. And his secret, as far as he had one, was that he learned to practice the sovereignty of God.
Acts 3–4, for instance. Peter and John perform a miracle in Jerusalem, and then Peter seizes the opportunity to preach one of his shoot-from-the-hip, come-to-Jesus sermons. This lands them in trouble with the “law,” the Jewish high council known as the Sanhedrin. Peter seizes that opportunity to preach at them. They are astonished at his courage. He is one who speaks with authority.
But they order him and John to shut up about Jesus anyway, “to speak no longer to anyone in this name” (Acts 4:17)—a rather comprehensive prohibition. They threaten Peter and John with dire consequences if they persist.
The Peter we knew before would have folded long before this point. He would have wormed his way out, found some escape hatch, and slipped through it. The Peter we meet now is emboldened by each fresh challenge. The Sanhedrin note this: “When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13). Confidence in ourselves—our educations, our pedigrees, our abilities—is pathetic. But confidence in Jesus Christ, which comes only by walking with him, is astonishing. Peter has quit the one and perfected the other.
It’s what happens next, after the Sanhedrin release John and Peter, that gives us the clearest account of how Peter replenishes his Christ-confidence:
On their release, Peter and John went back to their own people and reported all that the chief priests and elders had said to them. When they heard this, they raised their voices together in prayer to God. “Sovereign Lord,” they said, “you made the heaven and the earth and the sea, and everything in them. You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David:
“‘Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the Lord and against his Anointed One.’
Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness. Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus.”
After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly. (Acts 4:23–31)
The prayer ends with the trouble these men face. But it doesn’t begin this way. It begins with this: “Sovereign Lord.” And it moves from there into naming and recounting the height and depth and weight of his sovereignty: God made all, rules all, and overrules all that stands in his way.
These men practice the sovereignty of God. They establish, clear and solid, the truth of God’s kingship. They rehearse the reality of God’s overarching, undergirding might. As they grow, God starts to look bigger.
And only then, as a kind of addendum or footnote, do they pray about the problem they have: Oh, by the way, God: we had some trouble in town today, some blowhards making empty threats. Could you clear it up?
God then sends a fresh infusion of the Spirit. They grow some more. God sends his Spirit, but not to keep the disciples safe: to make them more dangerous.
Are you in the midst of a situation where, as you pray, you find yourself putting the problem first? If so, you’re starting where you should end. You’re rehearsing the problem, making it seem larger than it is, when what you need to do is rehearse God’s greatness and bigness. Then the problem shrinks to its right portions. Oh, by the way . . .
As a Sabbath Liturgy, I recommend practicing the sovereignty of God. Today when you pray, start with God. Survey what he has made. Recite what he has done. Proclaim who he is.
And after you have been with Jesus long enough, and feel your courage brimming, and he looks bigger, see if there’s still an Oh, by the way . . .
FIVE
THE REST OF TIME:
Stopping to Number Our Days Aright
Sabbath-keeping is more than time management. It is a fresh orientation to time, where we think with holy imagination about how the arc of our moments and hours and days intersects with eternity. “Teach us to number our days aright,” Moses asked God, “that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Ps. 90:12). Teach us that this is not just another day of the week, but the day that the Lord has made.
This is God’s time-management technique.
There’s a right way to tally up days. There’s an arithmetic of timekeeping, and God must tutor us in it. Wisdom is not the precondition for learning this arithmetic. It’s the fruit of it. Wisdom comes from learning to number our days aright. You don’t need to be wise to sign up for God’s school. But if you’re diligent, attentive, inquisitive in his classes, you’ll emerge that way.
It’s easy to get this wrong. God’s school is not like most. It’s not regimented, age-adjusted, fixed in its curriculum. The classroom is life itself, the curriculum all life’s demands and interruptions and tedium, its surprises and disappointments. In the midst of this, through these things themselves, God hands us an abacus and tells us to tally it all up.
Meaning?
Meaning, work out where time and eternity meet. Pay attention to how God is afoot in the mystery of each moment, in its mad rush or maddening plod. He is present in all that. But too often we are so time-obsessed we take no time to really notice. I have a pastor friend in Toronto who one day after a Sunday service received a note: “Pastor Peter, I would appreciate it if you prayed shorter prayers. Your pastoral prayer this past Sunday was twelve minutes, forty-three seconds in length. Please strive for greater brevity.”
The note was unsigned. The only thing we know about this man, this woman, this child, is that the writer is so bound in time— counting the minutes—that he or she has never learned to number his or her days. This person can tell time but not discern seasons.
But miss that, and you miss wisdom. For only those who number their days aright gain wise hearts. Only they become God’s sages: those calm, unhurried people who live in each moment fully, savoring simple things, celebrating small epiphanies, unafraid of life’s inevitable surprises and reverses, adaptive to change yet not chasing after it.
The Rest of God Page 8
