Careful now...

If I'm not careful, I can end up saying some fairly negative things when circumstances unexpectedly go sour on me. It's not even just the big problems that can lead to this, but even the little things that go wrong at the wrong time that can really get me murmuring. Contexts in which I'm particularly vulnerable are when I'm already under pressure, or when many things go wrong in quick succession, or when things break that I don't have the cash or the capability to fix. And the more serious the issue, the more tempted I feel in allowing myself to go down the tubes.

So it strikes me as appropriate that after King Ahaz of Judah had been made aware that Israel and Syria were teaming up to attack him, Isaiah's first words to Ahaz were, "Be careful, be quiet, do not fear..." (Isaiah 7:4). When things go wrong -- even dreadfully wrong -- I truly want those words to immediately run through my mind:  Be careful -- be quiet -- do not fear.

I need to be careful about where I allow my thoughts to wander; about not creating my own little atmosphere of negativity by the thoughts I allow myself to entertain; about where I see God in it all; about not seeing my problems as greater than God.

I need to be quiet lest I speak out of unbelief, and simply discourage myself; lest I give voice to thoughts I'd be wiser to repent of; lest I speak like a fool who refuses to see God in my circumstances; lest I babble on about my fears, thereby increasing them, when I have no need to fear at all!

Isaiah's command to not fear is such a familiar one that we read so often throughout the Bible, but it seems to me that Isaiah's first words, to "Be careful, be quiet" were just as important for someone facing what feels like an overwhelming trial. If we take care regarding how we respond to life's troubles, they will be much less likely to get under our skin and irritate our soul, and we will find ourselves much more often able to face life's difficulties with faith rather than with fear.

© 2011 by Ken Peters

Having eyes to see God in it all

It's true that bad things happen to good people, and so often that leaves us with unanswered questions and a struggle to find God in it all. But I'm struck with how often the Bible says that the adversity or affliction that God's people experience is actually from God. Isaiah 30:20 says, "And though the Lord give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet your Teacher will not hide Himself anymore, but your eyes shall see your Teacher." James 1:2-3 says, "Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness." Though it doesn't explicitly say there in James that the various trials are from God, it's certainly implied by the fact that those trials are described as tests intended to help us to grow. Growth is from God, and so are the tests that produce growth.

It's so valuable for me to recognize this on a daily basis. If I can see life's trials -- big or small -- as something that are often from the Lord for His good purposes, I won't be so vulnerable to offense with God if they persist. Yet so often, I find it hard to see God in the midst of trials. All I can see are the troubles. But God is there, ever wanting to teach us and ever eager to see us grow, and will always eventually reveal Himself amidst our circumstances so that we can see Him as our Teacher in it all.

I really need God's help to see Him at such times, but even if He chooses to hide Himself for a time (see Isaiah 8:17), I want to learn to approach life's difficulties with faith that God really does want to use life's troubles to help me grow increasingly steadfast as I walk in this uneven world. Only then will every problem truly be an opportunity -- for my good and God's glory!

© 2011 by Ken Peters

He moves in inscrutable ways

I often find myself trying to figure God out. Why'd He do that? Why didn't He do that? Why is He taking so long? So many "why" questions can be asked in such a tumultuous world. And so many more such questions can be aroused as we read about how God hardened some to reject the Gospel and softened others to accept it (Romans 10:20-21; 11:25; see also 11:26-27). But then I feel stopped in my tracks by the apostle Paul's response in Romans 11:33 (ESV)... "Oh, the depths of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and how inscrutable His ways!"


I don't think I have ever used the word "inscrutable" in a conversation. It means mysterious or beyond comprehension. In other words, God's ways won't always make sense to us. He has mercy on some and hardens others (Romans 9:18). He creates some for destruction and others for glory (Romans 9:23). And as Christians, the Bible tells us that God ordains that we should suffer in afflictions (1 Thess. 3:3) as well as succeed in good works (Ephesians 2:10). What a mishmash! It's tempting to want to argue with God about such ways, but then I wonder who am I as such a small and limited created being to argue with such a great and infinite Creator (Romans 9:20)?


On the days when I get really frustrated with God's ways or God's timing or God's choices, I think it's really important for me to remember that I'm not God and can't possibly expect to fully grasp his ways. Like Job, I sometimes need to cover my mouth before answering God rashly (Job 40:4). Yes, God has revealed a great deal about Himself to us in His Word, but that can tempt us to think that we should always have enough data to be able to figure God out. And yet, however much God has revealed to us about Himself, we need to remember that His thoughts and ways will still always be higher than ours (Isaiah 55:8-9), and that He will continue to move in inscrutable ways. So on those days when I'm frustrated with God, it's far better for me to simply yield to His ways and trust "the depths of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God" than to get offended because I can't figure Him out.

© 2011 by Ken Peters

Inspired to say...

The writer of Psalm 91 boldly declares, "I will say to the Lord, 'My refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust'" (Psalm 91:2). In light of such a verse, it sounds quite certain that he really did say that, and that he truly believed what he said.  He said, "I will say to the Lord...", and then he spoke of his trust in God and of his intention to find his security in Him -- all in the shadow of some very serious troubles that he then goes on to mention in verses 3-8: a fowler's snare, deadly pestilence, night terrors, arrows and destruction!

And yet in my much smaller struggles and challenges, I can find myself wondering if I'm prepared to say the same thing. When I'm facing the fowler in my life, can I always say to the Lord what the writer of Psalm 91 said? Can I always say, "I will say to the Lord..."? When things are going wrong all around me, will I say with confidence that I consider God a safe refuge and a secure fortress? In other words, do I really trust God?

To make this question more real, imagine that I just received a large unexpected bill, and just noticed an unwelcome noise under my van, and also just got saddled with a truckload of work with an imminent deadline. Will I then say to the Lord, "My refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust"? "I will say" sounds so certain, so declarative, so confident, even though troubling circumstances can so easily create doubts in us. But "I will say to the Lord" sounds like all that confidence is in God because of who He is and what He promises to those who love Him: "I [God] will be with him in trouble; I will rescue him and honor him." (Psalm 91:15). Such confidence in God doesn't need to be worked up by struggling people. It's a confidence that's inspired by who we know God to be and by what we know He's capable of doing!

So whatever I may feel like, and whatever my circumstances may feel like, I'd be wise to look to the God "who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all" (Romans 8:32) and to join the psalmist in wholeheartedly declaring: "I will say to the Lord, my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust!"

© 2011 by Ken Peters

The path of a cloud

Today marks my blog's third birthday. After three years of blogging, it's obvious that I'm beginning to change the pace at which I add new posts. After initially averaging 7+ posts a month for the first 20 months, I tapered off to four or five a month in 2010, and now only find myself writing about three posts per month thus far this year. I alluded to the reason for this dramatic drop in production in a post I wrote in February, which essentially said that I suddenly began feeling the need to slow down my writing in order to better keep up with living what I write. That feeling hasn't changed, and occasionally leaves me wondering about discontinuing this blog altogether. But however much I may be tempted to quit, I still have my moments when I suddenly feel a strong desire -- nay, even a compulsion -- to write about something particularly meaningful to me at the time. And if someone out there in blogland ends up encouraged or stirred by such posts, so much the better.

So in lieu of this momentous occasion, and just to see how it would turn out, I created a wordcloud of the past six months of posts on The View from Here (which you can click on to see it enlarged on Wordle).










© 2011 by Ken Peters

Holy Saturday

I never pay attention to the Saturday between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday. It's like the oft-ignored middle child of the Easter weekend. After all, it's nothing but an in-between time -- dead space between two major events. Right?

Upon reflection, I'm not so sure. In some circles, this day is called Holy Saturday. It's the day Jesus was in the ground. A precious seed buried. The disciples struggling with uncertainty. A time of unresolved tension and unanswered questions. Yet even though it was a day of discouragement for all those who mourned Jesus' death, it was also a day not far from breakthrough -- a day of then unknown possibilities.

Does that sound like it could be relevant for anyone dealing with disappointment and confusion in their walk with God? It does to me. It's a beautiful picture of the fact that, with God, there can be hope in the darkness; expectation amidst apparent defeat. A seed may be buried, but there's something going on just beneath the surface. And it's about to sprout forth! This helps me to see that I needn't be so fearful of the unresolved things in my life.

Life is so full of untidy outcomes and unexplainable circumstances, that it's helpful to reflect on a Holy Saturday when God waited...  He chose to let the followers of His Son live in the empty, worrisome space called uncertainty before He moved that stone. In God's wisdom, there needed to be a Saturday, when the minutes may have felt like hours, before the events of that glorious Sunday unfolded!

There's something holy about waiting when God is the One who's in charge. And there's something good about feeling the tension of an uncertain outcome that provides us with the thrilling opportunity to trust God in the dark rather than only when it's obvious how God plans to see us through. I think I need to develop a greater appreciation of the Saturday before Resurrection Sunday.

© 2011 by Ken Peters

The appeal of heroes

Rotten Tomatoes has a list of the most anticipated movies for 2011. What a list. What is it that attracts us to all these movies with such highly unrealistic, larger-than-life characters who save the world from all those wantonly evil villains out there?

I know I might see a few of those movies, and yet I feel a little guilty about it. I think that the reason I'm interested in some of them is because of the thrill ride they can be. And when done well, they can also provide such a sense of satisfaction in how they show an underdog-turned-superhero pulverizing an horrifically evil and egotistical bad guy (even if -- or maybe especially if -- the hero is a little bit flawed himself).

But I think the reason I feel a bit guilty about liking such films is because I wonder how much there's some kind of replacement-theology going on out there? What I mean is, I wonder if -- in the absence of people's convictions regarding a God who wants to save them amidst the obvious troubles of this world -- people feel the need to invent their own saviours to quell the need we feel for them. And then I go to be entertained by them. Is it wrong for me to find some sense of satisfaction in such flawed saviours?

Possibly, but what I'm more inclined to think is that the true Gospel story of a humble Saviour rescuing hell-bound sinners is such a compelling one, that story writers who don't even know the Gospel story aren't able to avoid re-writing it again and again and again. It's ingrained in us. People love the story of a saviour when all hope is lost, and God has provided such a Saviour! And there's nothing wrong with revelling in such a theme on a big screen. I simply hope that more and more people will recognize who the real Saviour is -- this Jesus who has offered Himself up for us -- and that more and more people in this volatile world will begin to find Him even more compelling than the Hollywood heroes ever could be.

But will they recognize a hero who humbly rides into town on a donkey, only to be crucified among criminals?

© 2011 by Ken Peters

A pale blue dot

Just the other day, I added a framed image to my office wall. And every time I look up at it, I'm awestruck. Really. Every time my eyes glance in its direction, I stop whatever I was doing and I stare in wonder.


The print I bought and framed is an image of what has come to be known as The Pale Blue Dot. I've written about it before. Here's some background information on my picture from that previous blog post...

It's a wonderful image taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 while it was on its way out of our solar system, more than 4 billion miles away from earth, and gives a very real sense of our smallness. As Voyager 1 grew increasingly distant, Ground Control on Earth commanded it to turn around and take some pictures of our solar system. From that vast distance, in one of the pictures, Earth can be seen as an infinitesimal point of light visible in a ray of sunlight (enlarged in the image to the right, or click on the image to the left to enlarge it).

As the famous astronomist Carl Sagan later said, "That's here. That's home. That's us." That little dot is where "everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives... every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam."

So now, as I sit at my desk, sometimes stressing over a phone call I need to make or worrying about something I just said in a call I just completed, or sometimes struggling with a project I need to complete or wondering how on earth I'll meet a deadline, I just look up and I get a dose of perspective. Because whatever I'm stressing over or struggling with, it's probably not as earth-shattering as I may think it to be. And whether I succeed or fail at some tiny task at some tiny point in the history of this tiny dot in the universe is probably not as important as I may be tempted to think.


But in addition to realizing that, I find that the pale blue dot in that image leaves me utterly amazed at how God took notice of each person on this "mote of dust," and despite how infinitesimally small we are, God sent His Son Jesus to this precious jewel in this vast universe to rescue us from our sins and to offer us a new and infinite life with Him! That kind of love leaves me in awe every time I look up from my modest pursuits and stare at a simple dot. And it leaves me lost in wonder as I think that God cares enough to draw near to us here and to wrap us in His loving arms!

© 2011 by Ken Peters

Every Command is a Promise (church bulletin cover)

There’s great hope when God tells us to do what’s impossible to do. He knows we can’t do it, and He really doesn’t want us trying to do it as if we thought we could do it ourselves.

For example, we know that God strictly commanded Israel to “drive out all the inhabitants of the land” (Numbers 33:52), and we know that it was actually God who was “driving out before you nations greater and mightier than yourselves” (Deuteronomy 4:38). In fact, God promised that it would be “the Lord your God who fights for you” as the children of Israel took the land (Deut. 3:22). So in light of all that, it makes sense for Moses to say, “...that you may go in and take possession of the good land that the Lord swore to give to your fathers by thrusting out all your enemies from before you, as the Lord has promised” (Deut. 6:18-19).

Notice it doesn’t say, “...as the Lord has commanded.” This is because God promised to do the very same thing that He had commanded His people to do. And this is why we never need to fret when God asks us to do what seems impossible. Because as we take a step of obedience to do what God has commanded, God steps in to help us accomplish what’s in His heart for us to do. We have a part – He has a part. We can’t do our part without Him, and He doesn’t want to do his part without us. So we do our part in faith-filled dependence on Him, and He does His part out of grace-filled love for us. What a wonderful arrangement!

It seems to me that this means that when God’s grace is involved, every command God gives us contains a promise that it’s by His strength that it’ll happen. That’s why I don’t want to get stressed out when God tells me to do what seems impossible — because as a child of God, we can be sure that whatever God commands is also a promise!

© 2011 by Ken Peters

I Act the Miracle

I found a very helpful devotional on John Piper's blog today. It's something I very much needed to hear, as it seemed to relate very well to what I'd just recently posted to my own blog, and I plan to listen to the longer version for which a link is provided below. Check it out, and perhaps you'll also find it a helpful insight!...

When it comes to killing my sin I don’t wait for the miracle, I Act the Miracle.

Acting a miracle is different from working a miracle. If Jesus tells a paralyzed man to get up, and he gets up, Jesus works a miracle. But if I am the paralyzed man and Jesus tells me to get up, and I obey and get up, I act the miracle. If I am dead Lazarus and Jesus commands me to get up, and I obey, Jesus works the miracle, I act the miracle.

So when it comes to killing my sin, I don’t wait passively for the miracle of sin-killing to be worked on me, I act the miracle.

For example, Paul says, “If by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (Romans 8:13).

So he tells me to put my sin to death. I should not wait for God to kill it while I remain passive. But he tells me to kill it “by the Spirit." Sin-killing is a miracle of the Spirit. But I do not wait passively, I act the miracle.

Again Paul says, “I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10).

So Paul works hard to kill the sins of lethargy and distraction in his ministry. “I worked harder than any of them.” But the decisive animation of that work is the grace of God. It is a miracle. But Paul does not wait passively, he acts the miracle.

Or consider Philippians 2:12-13. “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12-13).

Paul commands me to work out my salvation, because God is the one who works this in me. My willing and working is God’s willing and working. It is a miracle. But I do not wait passively, I act the miracle.

I spoke to the Bethlehem College and Seminary Chapel about this crucial act of miraculous sin-killing in my own life. These are lessons I learned afresh on my leave of absence. They feel very fresh, very important and very powerful in my life right now. It is a very personal message.

I invite you to listen or watch “I Act the Miracle.”

© 2011 by Ken Peters