Amen,yes it is.  But only for those who see their sin and pride.   For we cannot know the magnitude of God’s love until we have seen the utter wretchedness of our own sin.  I am more and more convinced of this as I continue to read through the Gospels with my family.   Christ constantly has run-ins with those who do not see him as a Savior and who refuse to see their need for a Savior.  The other day in Matthew 19 we read about the rich young man who was told that if he would be perfect he must sell all and follow Jesus.  The young man went away sorrowful because his possessions were great; they were his substitute Savior.   Jesus goes on to teach his disciples that it is not easy for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.  In fact, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.  The disciples were astonished.  “Who then can be saved?” they wonder.  Christ answers, “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

I think this verse should serve as a warning and an encouragement.  The warning is not just for the materially wealthy, for there are many potential substitutes for a Savior.  Talent, success, beauty, family, career, education, and even religion and morality can all be used as a substitute for Jesus.  Those who are well don’t need  a physician, but only those who are sick.  This is why the Gospels are flooded with stories of  harlots and Publicans who repented and turned to Christ, while the Pharisees sought to crucify Him.   So the warning is that being a good person, a nice person, a morally religious person is not enough.   As C.S. Lewis puts it in Mere Christianity, “Niceness, wholesome, integrated personality – is an excellent thing.  We must try by every medical, educational, economic, and political means in our power to produce a world where as many people as possible grow up”nice;” just as we must try to produce a world where all have plenty to eat.  But we must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls.  A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world – and might even be more difficult to save.  For mere improvement is not redemption…”  This is an important warning for parents too, and I was reminded of this after I shut off the song that had been continually playing.  How I long for Drew to grow in his knowledge of God’s love and passionately shout about it from the depths of his heart along with John Piper!   But you see, although  I can insist on outward obedience from him, supervise his media intake, the books he reads, the friends he hangs out with, require respect, good manners, a clean room, homework and schoolwork done punctually and neatly, and even take him to church and provide a good education for him, I CANNOT CHANGE HIS HEART! I cannot deliver him from his most desperate need.  I cannot save him or be his savior.  I need to be a good parent.  It’s my responsibility to do all of the above, but none of it will save his soul.  And so this passage serves not only as a warning for my own personal life, but also for my parenting: do not confuse anything with redemption.

But it is also an encouragement.  Because nothing is impossible with God.  As hard as it is for a “rich” man to enter the kingdom of God, it is not too hard for God.  God can save harlots and Publicans, and God can even save Pharisees.   In fact, perhaps one of the most dramatic conversions in the New Testament is that of the apostle Paul, a Pharisee of the Pharisees.   Every conversion is a miracle.  God can find those who know they are desperately lost, and God can show those who think they are found that they are actually desperately lost.  God can save those who didn’t have the blessing of growing up in a Christian home, and God can miraculously save those who did.   Because God in eternity looked down with pity on His fallen race and planned their salvation through His Son’s death on the cross, I can have hope and confidence in His grace and mercy in my own life and in the life of my son.

Now that’s love folks.

The leaves are not falling. Not yet. They are changing, growing, accepting a new role. When they do fall, I shall rake them. I will scrape this sidewalk until the cast-off many-colored robes are mounded high. Then I will heave them into my yard. I will watch my sweatered children discover and rediscover the joy of playing with death, the joy of jumping, laughing, sneezing, and rolling in the remnants of another year, the joy of being buried and resurrected, of climbing in and out of a grave.

Whoever thought leaf piles could be sanctifying. Thank you N.D. Wilson for helping me see so much more in what seems to be so little.

Ironically, I alluded to Matthew 15 the other day in my post about my struggles with complementarianism, and the next day we read that chapter.  It’s been an interesting passage to study and a convicting one to apply.  In this passage, the Pharisees and scribes are upset that the disciples of Jesus transgress the tradition of the elders by not washing their hands before they eat.  Jesus retorts, “Why do you transgress the commandment of God by not honoring your parents?”  Apparently, although God had revealed His will to His people, to honor their parents in their frail old age by providing for them, the Pharisees and scribes had decided and were teaching that it was perfectly acceptable to use the financial resources that had been set aside for this reason and spend them on the Temple.  They would then turn to their parents and justify this action by saying that their provision for them is instead going to be used in service to God.

As always,Jesus is pretty scathing in his condemnation of their spurious Scripture-twisting. Now it’s easy to read this passage and totally get that the Pharisees are the bad guys.  But it’s not so easy to read this and get that we are the bad guys(i.e. sinners) and can be guilty of the same sort of hypocrisy in a plethora of ways.  I’ve been thinking that perhaps it’s because we have false ideas about what exactly God’s will is.  We think of God’s will only in terms of the specific plan that He has for us or the specific ministry or service that He wants us to accomplish for Him.  I don’t think the Bible gives us a warrant to think of God’s will solely in that way.  Earlier in Matthew when Jesus is preaching the Sermon on the Mount, He chillingly describes a scene on Judgement Day where many are crying out to Him, “Lord, Lord, didn’t we prophesy in your name and cast out devils in your name and do many wonderful works in your name?”  And Jesus answers that He never knew them, that only those who do the Father’s will shall enter the kingdom of heaven.  Just think for a moment about all the things that these people have done in service to God – they’ve prophesied, they’ve cast out devils, they’ve done many wonderful works.  These are no slouchers.  They wouldn’t look like backsliders.  These are probably men and women that we would be impressed by – impressed by their passion,their evangelism, their sermons, their blog, their ministries.  But Jesus, whose approval is what matters, is far from impressed.  Why not?  They neglected His Father’s will.  The things that God revealed to them were ignored and rejected as unimportant or peripheral.  Like the Pharisees in Matthew 15, the commandments of God were transgressed and replaced with the tradition of men. And their justification of this was that they were serving God.

My application in my earlier post is just one of many possible applications.  Certainly the man who desires to attend seminary(not a bad desire either), but neglects God’s revealed will to love and provide for his wife is ultimately doing the same thing.  He is saying to his wife, as the Pharisees did to their parents, that what you would have gained by being my wife I am going to give in service to God.  I don’t think  God will be impressed, no matter how outwardly successful his future ministry is.  We simply don’t have the option to ignore what God has commanded. Even if spiritual leaders give us counsel to do otherwise; we are ultimately accountable to God.  A reason that I think something like this could happen and perhaps the same reason why it happened to the Pharisees of Jesus’ day is that providing for one’s parents or one’s wife is so unexciting, so ordinary, so, well, almost boring.  We are always tempted to  think of God’s will in terms of the extraordinary, the exciting, the adventurous, the revival meeting, the mission’s trip, the youth rally,the conference, the outreach activity, service to the Temple.  I’m not doubting that God doesn’t ever want us to be involved in any of these. But at the expense of ignoring His revealed will?  What I am pointing out is the obvious parallels between Christ’s warning in the Sermon on the Mount and in Matthew 15 to our time and evangelical culture.

So how do we determine God’s specific will?  Well, we begin by never neglecting His revealed will.   We don’t wait for a funny feeling in the pit of our stomach as a sign that our decision is right.  We don’t look to the sky to see if God is writing a message to us.  We don’t fret over the uncertainty of our decisions.  We rest in our Father; He is not an unreasonable Parent who hides His plans and then punishes us if we fail to find them.  We weigh the possibilities against what we already know is the will of God for us.  Then, we make the best possible decision in light of that.

When John and I decided to have me accept a teaching position at The Latin School, this is the process we went through:  We knew that God’s revealed will for me was to love my husband, to love my children(child in my case), and to care for my home.  In other words, my home and family were to be a priority.  We also knew that God has created men and women in His image and that we are to have dominion over the earth.  This means that each human is gifted with a measure of intelligence and ability that they are to use to their full potential for the glory of God and the benefit of humanity.   Well, there was no writing in the sky, no feeling of “peace” over this decision, we simply tried to “be not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is.”   So we considered if this teaching position would interfere with God’s revealed will or complement it.  After we had considered that my teaching salary would provide for Drew’s education at the school and give us a considerable discount on tuition, that I would be contributing to our family’s finances in a beneficial way, that I would have the time to still manage our home with John’s help and due to the four day program that the school has, and that I would be using my love for and gift for teaching, it seemed like a good decision.  So we went with it!  Not a dramatic decision making process, I know, but God has only asked us to be wise.  And, more importantly, He has promised to provide all the wisdom we need if we but ask.

I think a significant final point to make is that the Pharisees’ hearts were deceived.  Their inclination was not to please God, but to win approval from men.  But for all who have the Spirit of God dwelling in them, this is not the case.  Our hearts have been transformed and are continually being transformed so that we more and more understand what the will of God is through the reading of His Word, where He has revealed it to us. More and more we should desire to please Him and Him alone.   And the more we grow and mature in Christ, the more our specific decisions will reflect this.

May passages like Matthew 7 and Matthew 15 serve to warn us and encourage us to follow God’s will, God’s commandments.  I know I have been challenged!

• First, I grew up not easily being squeezed into any sort of feminine stereotypes, though the attempt was definitely made.  I had and continue to have very little interest in many traditional female occupations such as sewing, crafts, cooking, shopping, manicures, etc.  Like it was said of Jane Austen’s character, Elizabeth Bennet, “I infinitely prefer a book.”  I had no problem getting better grades than the boys in both high school and college, and so I think I mentally toyed around with egalitarianism and even feminism, due to misunderstanding what exactly the Bible was talking about in regards to gender roles. I mistook feminine stereotypes for gender roles.
• Second, since I have been an adult and married to my husband, John, I have had the privilege of having several couple – friends where stereotyping is not practiced, yet where Christian men and women joyfully accept their Biblical roles as husband and wife.  I blossomed under those friendships.  As Kathy Keller puts it in ch. 6, these friendships became a “safe place” to learn about and  practice gender roles.  Without the constraints of a legalistic approach to gender roles, John and I were free to work out the details of how it would look in our own marriage.
• Third, last year my family and I moved.  We moved to a different part of the country where aspects of the evangelical culture were different, and it was a bit of, well, a shock.  Here  complementarianism leaned a lot more towards the traditional end of the spectrum, where I perceived certain work being viewed as “women’s work,” where it appeared(at least to me) as if only the men were interested in intellectual pursuits, and although the concept of a man Biblically being the provider for his family was loudly taught, apparently certain seasons of life were considered exceptions to God’s revealed will for Biblical gender roles, such as seminary or church planting, where it was acceptable for the wife to be the sole provider, along with also bearing the burden of managing the housework, managing the finances, etc.  I was, quite frankly, inwardly offended by what I deemed as legalism and hypocrisy of Matthew 15-like proportions.  I began to mentally question whether I really was a complementarian, if this was how words like “submission” and “headship” could be, in my opinion, manipulated.  I offer these confessions, not to be disparaging, but to be transparent about my own perceptions, feelings, and struggles.
• Fourth,  God had to teach me several things through this year-long journey to remembering why I am a complementarian.  He taught me that His Word is the final rule and authority for all of life, regardless of how it may often be badly applied.  I was a complementarian because it was what I saw that the Scriptures taught,not because all the Christians around me were really good at it. In fact, as a sinner, I wasn’t always really good at it either. So, He taught me not to judge others(which I confess I am still in the process of learning). I do not know anyone’s heart or motives, and love always thinks the best of others.  Also,we will all stand before God someday and give an account of ourselves.  It is enough to worry about my own spiritual life, my own application of gender roles to my own marriage, without worrying about others.  He also taught me to be very, very grateful for the marriage that I have.  It is a safe place to be a complementarian as a woman . It is a safe place to practice a scary word like submission.  I can  gratefully embrace John as my servant-leader because he lives out both sides of the coin – He is my servant and my leader.  During the almost fifteen years of our marriage,  He has loved, led, and served me, as Christ did the Church, by ultimately providing for me and protecting me.  He would no more lay the burden and stress on me to be the ultimate provider, than Christ would have sent the Church out to provide for their own salvation, or than he would send me out to confront the man robbing our home.   I respect that and him tremendously, and God, in His grace and wisdom, has given me exactly the husband I need.   Yet, John has always respected and supported my personhood.  He has always encouraged me to grow spiritually and intellectually and to use my gifts as one created in the image of God.  He may be the ultimate provider of our home, but he has never had a problem with my contributing to our finances by using my gifts to work outside the home in a variety of ways throughout the different seasons of my life during our marriage.  And, although I may be the ultimate nurturer-manager of our home, he has never considered work like cooking,cleaning, or child-care to be solely my domain because it is beneath him as a man.   He is far from perfect, and our marriage is far from perfect(though mostly because of my contribution to it).  No one has it all together; we are all sinners in need of constant repentance,yet I am grateful for the maturity and wisdom that God has granted in a large measure to my husband.

Enough with my background(and bragging about my husband).   Though perhaps now, anyone reading this post can understand my nervous feelings about reading Kathy Keller’s chapter on gender roles.  Let me dispel that fear by trumpeting my praise of this well-written, Biblically -balanced, winsome, and celebratory chapter on gender roles.   I have never read anything as good as this on the subject, nor have I ever read anything that I agreed with as wholeheartedly.  No matter where you find yourself on the spectrum of gender roles – egalitarian, feminist, traditionalist, or complementarian, I think you would profit from this chapter.

Kathy frames the discussion with the concept of being part of the Great Dance of the universe: “Though Tim and I have both been clumsy and clueless at times, we have found that in submitting to our own divinely assigned gender roles that we discovered one of God’s great gifts for getting in touch with our deepest selves, as well as entering into the Great Dance of the universe.”   “Male and female are “like opposites” to one another. They are like two pieces of a puzzle that fit together because they are not exactly alike nor randomly different, but they are differentiated such that together they can create a complete whole.  Each sex is gifted for different steps in the Great Dance.”

While Kathy is unapologetic in defending the Biblical view of male headship and female submission, she never resorts to stereotypes or  legalistic lists of do’s and don’ts.  In fact, she purposefully avoids them: “This is one part of the glory of marriage, in the Biblical conception.  Two people of different sexes make the commitment and sacrifice that is involved in embracing the Other.  It is often painful and always complicated, but it helps us grow and mature in ways no other experience can produce, and it brings about deep unity because of the profound complementarity between the sexes…The external details of a family’s division of labor may be worked out differently across marriages and societies.  But the tender, serving authority of a husband’s headship and the strong, gracious gift of a wife’s submission restores us to who we were meant to be at creation.”

Kathy also offers hope to those who may not have a spouse who shares their desire to follow Biblically-designated gender roles with the godly counsel  to concentrate on your own behavior, since it is the only thing you can really control: “You can be sure that if you aren’t getting any satisfaction from obeying God, you will surely get none from avoiding his pattern.”

Finally, she concludes the chapter with the question:”Why not give it a try and inhabit the “Jesus-role(servant-leader or helper-subordinate)” that your part of the marriage calls you to?”

I know that my desire to live out my part of the “Jesus-role” that I have been called to has been increased and strengthened through the reading of  this chapter!

I see a stage, a world where every scene is crafted. Where men act out their lives within a tapestry, where meaning and beauty exist, where right and wrong are more than imagined constructs. There is evil. There is darkness. There is the Winter of tragedy, every life ending, churned back in the soil. But the tragedy leads to Spring. The story does not end in frozen death. The fields are sown in grief. The harvest will be reaped in joy. I see a Master’s painting. I listen to a Master’s prose. When darkness falls on me, when I stand on my corner of the stage and hear my cue, when I know my final scene has come and I must exit, I will go into the ground like corn, waiting for the Son.

That is the world I live in, and I would have it no other way. As Wilson alludes to The Silver Chair and Puddleglum’s stand against the witch, I join Puddlegum in saying,

Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things-trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.

This world is beautiful but badly broken. St Paul said that it groans, but I love it even in its groaning. I love this round stage where we act out the tragedies and the comedies of history. I love it with all of its villains and petty liars and self-righteous pompers. I love the ants and the laughter of wide-eyed children encountering their first butterfly. I love it as it is, because it is a story, and it isn’t stuck in one place. It is full of conflict and darkness like every good story. And like every good story, there will be an ending. I love the world as it is, because I love what it will be.

- N.D. Wilson, Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl

One thing that I found very interesting was the stark contrast to the ways in which we were called to praise in these two Psalms. Psalm 65 begins with a call to praise by calling us to wait in silence on God, almost like you have just seen some breathtaking image and are at a loss for words. In Psalm 66, the Psalmist calls us to “shout for joy to God…sing the glory of his name.” Very different calls, but both very worshipful and fitting. Interestingly, the focus on the shout for joy is on the joy. It is not a contest for who can shout the loudest, rather, it is a call to proclaim with joy the greatness and glory of God with your mouth. We are all familiar with the verse in Psalm 100, “Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth!” (Psalm 100:1 ESV); growing up, I had often heard the emphasis placed on the noise with comments such as “It doesn’t matter if you have a nice voice, just make a joyful NOISE to the Lord” or “Just sing out.” This misses the mark completely as the emphasis is to be on the joy that is to accompany all we say in regards to God. Obviously, we don’t all have to have golden voices like Andrea Bocelli, but the point is that we joy in God, we rejoice in the God of our salvation, we proclaim the truths of God with joy. When we see all that God has done throughout history and in our lives; we are to respond joyfully in Him, we are to with joy exclaim, “Look at that!” That is what the Psalms are doing.

As you read the Psalms, remember they are poetry, they are pointing you to something greater. Even as they point back to specific events in history as Psalm 66 does, don’t just see how that must have been awesome for them; look further into the Psalm and see how awesome that is for you. See God parting the Red Sea in verse 6 and know that same God is reigning today just as He did then. When you read of how God sovereignly allowed the trials and tribulations of life mentioned in verses 10-12, know it is the same God who preserved life, guided steps, and brought them out to a place of abundance (v. 9, 12). When you read those verses, don’t just think of how awesome that was for them, but know that this is the same God that is sovereignly working all things together for good in your life now.