Working up at First Pres. in Concord, NH

Today we made some more progress on the renovations at First Presbyterian Church in Concord.

All I had was my iPhone, so keep your expectations low. But here's a Before video, from when I got there at 10 a.m.:

And here's an After video, from when I left at 3 p.m.:

Here are a couple external pics. If I had time right now, I'd line some additional ones up side-by-side for X-eye 3D. :)

Will the dust praise you?

I've been reading Psalm 30 regularly for several months; a friend asked me to read it when I pray for him. Verse 9 has caught my attention:

What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the pit? Will the dust praise you? Will it tell of your faithfulness? (Ps. 30:9, ESV)

At first glance, this verse could seem to indicate that the psalmist believes in a final death for the righteous. If the righteous die but go on to have eternal life with God, then certainly they will be praising God. So it might seem that the psalmist thinks even the righteous who die return to dust and have no eternal life, given that he's concerned that the dust cannot praise God.

But consider these words from the Lord's prayer:

Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. (Matthew 6:10, ESV)

Instead of being concerned that the dead cannot praise God at all, the psalmist is concerned that the dead cannot praise God here, or tell people here of God's faithfulness. The psalmist is appealing to God's desire for his own will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, and arguing that God's continued blessing to keep the psalmist alive will enable him to do God's will here.

And, after all, those in heaven already know all about God's faithfulness. The psalmist wants to be a witness to God's faithfulness here on earth. And that isn't possible after death -- except by what we leave behind, such as this written psalm. The psalmist is now with God, praising God. And we're reading the psalm God put on his heart, so we can praise God and tell everyone of his faithfulness.

Training our souls

At various times in my life, I have worried about aging. Contemporary culture orients us to see our worth, our value, our meaning, in terms of the things we can do, the pleasures we can pursue, and the power we can wield. This is dangerous; holding these things at the center of our hearts disorients and disorders our souls; instead of worshipping our creator God, we worship power, pleasure, accomplishments, etc. And when our souls are so disordered, the value of a person apart from her accomplishments (or potential for accomplishments) is leeched away.

Sometimes I've been caught up in that kind of thinking to an extent, and wondered why life would be worth living if I become immobile, or bed-ridden, or generally less able than I am now. Or what if even my mind were to degrade, so that I may be mobile, but unable to think clearly or remember?

First, I should pause to note the fantastic arrogance and self-centeredness that underlie such a thought. This is an anxiety available only to someone young who is blessed with mobility and opportunity in life -- worrying about when those will be taken away. Millions of people, young and old, don't have such blessings. But each of us is like Job in her own way. We are all constantly living in the blessings of God, and there is always more that could be taken away. We must be grateful for what God has given us, and be faithful to love him in all circumstances.

My thought for a while has been that if my life is ordered around my purpose as a worshipper of God, then that's something I can do even when I am old and have more limited options. Even then, I can still read scripture and pray. Even then, I can sing in my heart.

But what if my mind is taken as well? This week I was struck by another thought.

Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it. (Proverbs 22:6, ESV)

I pray regularly for my son using these words. But all Christians are God's adopted children, our whole lives!

And they were bringing children to him that he might touch them, and the disciples rebuked them. But when Jesus saw it, he was indignant and said to them, "Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it." And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them. (Mark 10:13-16, ESV)

My soul belongs to God; my soul is like a child. I am to train my soul in the way it should go -- in constant worship, constant exaltation of God above all else. (E.g., see: Colossians 3:17, Philippians 4:4-7, Psalm 19:14, Romans 12:1-2.) And someday, when I lose capacities I enjoy now -- perhaps even my will, my capacity to make choices -- my soul will already have been trained for the long run.

Who and what are we, really?

In Crossroads of Twilight, the character Egwene thinks the following observation:

The thing was filth, the theft of another person's will, of their whole being. Someone who was Compelled did anything you ordered. Anything. And believed it was their own choice. [1]

Note the assertion (or assumption) that a person's "whole being" consists of her will. Or, perhaps more subtly, a person's "whole being" seems to be tied up in her beliefs about her choice-making capacity. Is that who we are? Are we gloriously, staunchly, victoriously, and merely the results of our choices? Or the capacity for choice itself?

There are many signs that Choice is deified in our culture. Here are a couple of easy examples:

1. The debate over abortion is between those who see themselves as valuing Life, and those who see themselves as valuing Choice.
2. The debate over physician-assisted suicide is at least largely concerned with a person's right to choose death over life.

The deification of Choice in our culture (in many more spheres than those two examples) is a regression. Consider pre-Christian philosophy for a moment. M. T. Owens, Jr. summarizes Aristotle's view of freedom as follows:

Aristotle seems to reason in this way: to allow ourselves to be driven by passion is easy. But to be totally driven by passions is slave-like, or even beastly. To be a man one must act as a man. He must fulfill his nature. [2]

Of course, we don't really believe that whatever any consenting adult chooses is OK; there are limits. For example: at present, even though recreational drug use doesn't obviously limit anyone else's liberty, in the U.S. we still do not allow just anyone who so wishes to indulge. And even if we assume that in the future, recreational drug use will be increasingly legalized, surely there are other choices that will still be outlawed.

"To be totally driven by passions is slave-like." The Apostle Paul was aware of this phenomenon, and connected our fleshly passions with sin:

Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. (Rom. 6:12) 

And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. (Gal. 5:24)

My two easy examples above are just that -- easy examples of the deification of the idol of Choice in our culture. And yes, those are two examples of sin problems in our culture. And yet the underlying sin -- worshipping the idol of Choice, indulging our passions without subjecting them to the lordship of Christ -- is more serious and far-reaching than either of those easy examples.

Unlike Aristotle, we moderns don't like to think that there is any such thing as human nature, a way, established externally, that we are supposed to be. We want, instead, to create our own identities through self-definition, by choosing whom we will be. What springs to mind first, and most forcefully, if you ask yourself "who am I?" Here are some potential common answers:

• a nationality
• an ethnicity
• a parent who wants perfect children, or a child who craves parental approval
• a political position (Libertarian, Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal, progressive, traditionalist, pro-Life, pro-Choice, feminist, etc.)
• a sexual orientation (or opposition to one)
• your gender
• a church grouping (R.C., S.B., PCA, ELCA, etc., etc., etc.)
• a geographical location (a Bostonian, a Texan, etc.)
• other...

All of us forge our identities in the image of one or more categories like these, and all too often those categories override the one, most important category, the category of those who need the Gospel: sinners offered eternal salvation by Christ's death and resurrection, and renewal and refining by his Holy Spirit. None of those other categories can truly compete with the Gospel category. When we spend more of our time and energy on some of those other categories than we do on our identity in Christ, we necessarily suffer, because we're not fulfilling God's purpose for us. (See Colossians 3:1-3.)

I have to work every day on the object of worship at the center of my life. Each day -- am I primarily concerned with the work of the Holy Spirit and what he may be calling me to do, so that God's purposes for me become the desire of my heart? All of us are prone to self-worship, and we all need the Holy Spirit to work in us to redirect us continually to God-worship. Each day -- am I a person centered on my own capacity for self-definition, or am I an adopted child of God, centered on my identity in him?

[1] Jordan, Robert. Crossroads of Twilight. New York: Tor, 2003. p. 811. Print.
[2] Owens, M. T., Jr. "ARISTOTLE'S POLIS: NATURE, HAPPINESS, AND FREEDOM." Reason Papers 6.Spring (1980): 69-77. www.reasonpapers.com. Web. 2 Sept. 2013. <http://www.reasonpapers.com/pdf/06/rp_6_7.pdf>.