Do You Contend for the Truth? – DevoMail with Skip Heitzig

Imagine there was a blind man standing on the edge of a cliff, crying out for directions. Now imagine you were down below with a crowd watching all this unfold. How ridiculous would it be if somebody next to you yelled up to the man, “It doesn’t really matter which way you go, as long as you’re sincere”? In this situation, the right information is vital. It’s not about sincerity; it’s about truth.

I’ve learned that the only acceptable religion in America today is that of sincerity—in other words, it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you’re sincere about it. Really? Try asking that blind man on the precipice if sincerity is all he needs.

As we learned last week, the apostle Paul noticed there were spiritual quacks giving this kind of wrong direction to people in the church at Ephesus, so he instructed the young pastor Timothy to “preach the word!” (2 Timothy 4:2)—the absolute truth of God as revealed in Scripture.

Put another way, Paul was saying, “This is not the time to tone it down. If anything, this is the time to amp it up and preach the truth, even if people don’t want to hear it.”

Jude 1:3 gives a similar exhortation: “Contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.” That doesn’t mean be contentious for the faith, but fight for the faith, for the truth. Nurture it. Hold on to it. Stand firm in it.

The tendency among many Christians is to make it all about how you feel, not about what’s true. Now, feelings are valid, but they can never supersede discernment and truth. Our calling is to believe, love, speak, and contend for the truth. I thank God for the men and women in our country who, like Paul, are not afraid to stand up for the truth and preach the Word, even when the world finds their message intolerable.

So what would you say to the spiritually blind person who’s on the edge of a cliff crying out for directions? Don’t be afraid to preach the Word. Don’t be afraid to reject the religion of sincerity. And don’t be afraid to contend earnestly for the faith, taking every opportunity to step up and—with love, humility, and certainty—tell people the truth.

Skip Heitzig

When You’re Kinda Struggling Through Holy Week — and don’t feel holy at all

[Ann Voskamp]

When You’re Kinda Struggling Through Holy Week — and don’t feel holy at all

So, my Grandma Ruth, she told me if you found a man who’d weep over a story — that was a man you could marry.

The morning of Palm Sunday, the porridge boils over and burns on the stove.

A girl here tries on three dresses, slumps into the kitchen and declares she has nothing to wear. A younger girl here can’t find her something for her hair — only this mangled bow one that’s missing the barrette. Caleb points out that someone’s dropped their orange peels all down the back garage steps.

I’m strangling down a frustrated rant.

Malakai, reaching for milk for his porridge, slips off his chair and splits his lip right open on the edge of the table.

There is blood dripping on our kitchen floor on Palm Sunday — for real.

And on the kitchen table, there’s a bent silhouette carrying a cross.

He’s nearing the Story’s climax.

Twice, Jesus weeps in the Story.

When He saw where death had laid out Lazarus, when he saw his friend’s tomb, when he stood with the crying Mary, His Spirit moved like over the face of the waters, and water ran down the face of God.

That’s what Grandma had said: A man who can break down and cry — is man who will break open his heart to let your heart in.

Jesus wept.

He had loved Lazarus.

Our God is the God to find comfort in because ours is the God who cries… the God tender enough to break right open and let His heart run liquid and He is the river of life because He knows our heart streams. One day He will wipe all tears away because He knows how the weeping feel: He has loved us.

I hold a crying Malakai and his bloody lip on a messy Palm Sunday and our tears and love mingles with God’s.

Palm Sunday — the second time in the Story when the pain breaks Him and when the palm branches wave, our God weeps: When Jesus approached Jerusalem, “he wept over it and said, ‘If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace…”

If only you had known what would bring you peace…

We want more comfort — and He offers us a Cross.
We want more position — and He offers us purpose.
We want more ease — and He offers us eternity.

God cries because His people cry for things that won’t bring them more peace.

The people that praise Him quiet on Palm Sunday on the way into the city — are the same crowd that cry “Crucify” loud on Good Friday when it doesn’t go their way.
[Don’t believe things can change? Just look at Palm Sunday — to Good Friday — to Resurrection Sunday. Always believe, always keep hoping — things can change.]

And yeah — I can be the woman who praises Him quiet when it goes my way — and who complains loud when it doesn’t.

This is what happens when God doesn’t meet expectations. When God doesn’t conform to hopes, someone always goes looking for a hammer.

I can bang my frustration loud.

The Pastor would say it on Sunday — that the people’s Hosanna was a cry that literally meant “Save us! Save us!”

Jesus weeps because we don’t know the peace that will save us. What brings us more peace is always more praise.

There are days when Christ comes to me in ways that look as lowly as coming on a donkey and I’m the fool who doesn’t recognize how God comes.

God enters every moment the way He chooses and this is always the choice: wave a palm or a hammer.

How many times have I wondered how they could throw down their garments before Him on Sunday and then throw their fists at Him on Friday? But I’m the one in the front row:

If our thanksgiving is fickle, then it turns out that our faith is fickle.

I stroke Malakai’s forehead. Press mine to his.

“Can we just go get up and try again, Mama?” Malakai murmurs it, takes the cloth from his lip and I see the wound. Wipe his wet cheek.

I hold him. Just hold him long at the beginning of Holy Week, with these tears on the fingertips. Ready for praise on the lips. Keeping company with the Christ who cries, His heart broken wide open to let us in.

And this Holy Week, there’s a woman who wipes the drool from her father’s chin and carries him down the hall to the toilet.

And there’s a mother who lays down bits of her singular life to wash the bowls and the underwear of the teenager calling her a whore.

And there’s a missionary far away from a microphone or a spotlight, who bends in a jungle, in a brothel, in a slum, in a no-name, unseen part of the globe, and nobody applauds.

Are the realest sacrifices of praise not the ones shouted at the beginning of Holy Week, but the secret, sacred rites, that are gifts of praise that are given back to Him, gifts to Him and the world, offered with no thought of return on investment — just given when the only spotlight is His light — and your one flaming heart?

Maybe Holy Week is the week you ask yourself:

Who’s defining the terms when it’s an honor to be awarded by people

and a sacrifice to be called by God?

Maybe the call of Holy Week — isn’t so much about trying to carry your Cross across a lit stage… but to carry your daily Cross down the Via Dolorosa, to take the broken way of suffering.

Maybe the best way to let your life be a genuine Hosanna to Him — is to live given in places where it’d be easy for no hosannas to ever be sung.
The word “altar” comes from the Latin ‘altus’ meaning high — because real altars are not where crowds see and applaud the sacrifice. But real altars and sacrifice are where only Him in the Highest Heaven sees.

And I nod to our boy at the beginning of Holy Week, “Yes, yes… let’s — try again.” And the kid slides off my lap.

And there’s this walking together in into Holy Week, daring to walk with this brazen, unwavering thanks to Him that bends low enough to serve in hidden ways.

The way to worship Christ is more than raising your hands like you’re waving palm branches — it’s stretching your arms out like you’re formed like a Cross.

Cruciform.

True worship isn’t formed like a hand-waving crowd — true worship is formed cruciform.

Holy Week begins with Palm Sunday — and the only way to live a holy life is with palms open wide. To live given and hidden and surrendered — cross-formed. Cruciform.

The silhouette of Christ there on the table, He carries a cross, leans forward like He’s leaning into a story, leaning into a glory story that could be ours.

Who doesn’t want choke up, about weep, that we could marry our vision to His, our hearts to His?

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how to face the challenge facing all women

Rain on a tin roof this morning.

The rocking chairs out in the ash grove sit quiet, solid — steady in the wind.

Steady in the wind. They’re calling for another inch of rain today, for it to just keep coming.

Our Hope-girl makes brownies, shakes the popcorn over the stove.

And there’s this deep peace that keeps coming about not coming and going at all.

About listening to rain on the roof and riding down the river with the kids on old tractor tubes and picking cherries out in the orchard with the youngest boy and us all smelling like campfire for days.

About sitting on forgotten back gravel roads with our girl who is taller than me now, us licking spoons dipped in strawberry sundaes and watching the storm come in from the west.

About holding babies as light sun warmed pebbles in our arms.

It’s happens when we rest — that we relinquish our ambitions to be like God.

There was an invite to a retreat in Italy, an invite to a retreat in British Columbia.

Invitations aren’t obligations. Invitations are options.

The Farmer says it quiet to me over bacon and eggs flipped sunny side over: Every yes automatically says no somewhere else.

I say my quiet nos. And we wander away to the woods, pitch tents, walk bare foot, feeling how we’re tents of meeting and holy ground can be anywhere.

After stars come out and we finally zip the last tent flap close, you can hear this growling. You can hear our Hope-girl nudging Shalom dozing off in her sleeping bag: “Shalom — is that your stomach?” Um, no —- that would be two raccoons scrapping like wanna-be bears right on the other side of the tarping plastic, not your sister’s stomach!

So on the morning of our 20th wedding anniversary, the Farmer and I wake up in a tent on a leaking air mattress with a rock driving angry into my back and him smiling exhausted from chasing away racoons in the middle of the night — but we have all six of our bed head grinning kids right there around the campfire wanting to know where the sausage is?

Laughing hard over raccoons and growling stomachs and slapping down mosquitoes the size of water buffalo.

And their mama’s standing there like a fool memorizing their faces.

Because it doesn’t matter what any gatekeeper says: Mothering a mess of kids is as important as preaching to a stadium for a month of Sundays.

The size of your ministry isn’t proof of the success of your ministry.

The very Son of God had a ministry to 12. And even one of them abandoned Him. Forget the numbers in your work. Focus on the net value of  your work.

The internet age may try to sell you something different, but don’t ever forget that viral is closely associated with sickness — and focusing on numbers can make you nauseated.

I begged grace from Max Lucado a few weeks ago with this note that I wouldn’t be able to speak as planned.

There was ocean-depth wisdom in his gentle words: “Ann, we have the option of hundreds of speakers. Your kids only have the option of one mom.”

Your most meaningful work in the Kingdom of God may not be the big things that you do — but the one little person you love.

Someone sends me this interview last week that Indira Nooyi, CEO of Pepsi, named by Fortune the #1 most powerful woman in business in the world in 2009 and 2010, and mother of two. who gave what some are deeming the interview of the year:

“I don’t think women can have it all. I just don’t think so. We pretend we have it all. We pretend we can have it all… Every day you have to make a decision about whether you are going to be a wife or a mother, in fact many times during the day you have to make those decisions…”

I think about Indira’s Insight while I make decisions in the garden.

While I bend over each strawberry plant, press the delicate white petals between thumb and index finger —and then just pluck it off. So there’ll be no strawberries this year.

It’s what you have to do: “Pick off all first blooms to ensure subsequent harvests are more plentiful.”

If you ever intend for the strawberries to produce heavily throughout the season, you have to choose to sacrifice the first harvest, so that all the growth and energy could be more efficiently invested into producing later crops.

Cut out that which seems good to invest in the best.

It is the law of life: Early sacrifice for later bounty.

I stand over the schedule and there’s Indira’s Insight and there’s this saying no, there’s this trimming back, letting go.

It can be hard to prune good things that are blooming. It can be hard to remember why you are pruning.

Because there’s a counter-intuitiveness to it, this plucking off certain life activities that will yield good fruit. Some might even think it foolish to pare back, when the bloom and gifting apparent; a good harvest inevitable.

Yet it’s the pruning of seemingly good leaves that can grow a better life. 

To allow later seasons to yield the longed-for abundant crop.

It takes courage to crop a life back — but it’s exactly the way to have the best crop of all.

What seems like hard work that’s taking an eternity today — is exactly what may make the most difference in eternity.

Indira’s Insight rings loud. ‘You can have it all’ — isn’t the whole truth.

No matter where you are — it’s never all easy.

A crop is made by all the seasons and the only way to have it all — is not all at the same time… but letting one season bring its yield into the next.

This is how to have no fear — each season makes a full year.

What can seem like a plucking of dreams — may be the wisest of investments.  In the later harvest. The sweetest one.

You can see it when you pluck the strawberries, hoe the beans, cut the lettuce, when you stand there in the thickening dusk:

You can see that the garden is one and the garden is a myriad of plants flourishing in their own space, their own way, their own time. Heaven forbid that you’d try to make all the cherry tomatoes into zucchini plants.

Heaven forbid any woman would go around and try to make all women into an image of herself.

Heaven forbid any woman would set up her life as a standard instead of making grace the standard of her life.

One woman’s thrift store donation is happily another woman’s thrift store sensation. And one woman’s ‘no’ can happily be another woman’s ‘yes’. One isn’t necessarily wrong and the other one right.

It’s the differences between us that makes us a Body and not a uniform.

Christ makes us a Body — not a faith factory. He calls us to be Christ followers — not cookie cutters. Break the measuring sticks of comparison — or we break our own souls.

Because the bottom line simply is: If you aren’t encouraging women to live out their particular calling, you may just be idolizing a particular idealized form of yourself.

Malakai carries in a bowl of rain wet spinach from the garden. The tomatoes are still flowering, the peppers shooting up.

There’s this fierce trust that the Spirit will bring the bounty of a feast in His time to feed and grow the Body in His way.

And yeah — we each get to make our own unique decisions knowing we’ve heard God’s unique calling for us.

People will always have opinions about you. But you live for God because He’s the only one who has intimate knowledge of you.

Hope and I wash the kitchen down while the brownies cool.

The sun breaks through. The roof falls silent now. Rocking chairs still in the grove, armrests dripping soundlessly. Steady in wind. Knowing what they’re about. The evening light falls long and quiet across the counters.

Often the evidence of maturity is response-ability — the ability to make the right response at the right time.

There are crops finally coming to maturity —  yeses and nos coming in their own right time.

“You want to have one of the brownies out in one of the rockers with me?” Hope looks up from the tap, her cloth in hand.

And there are holy yeses that are just to the one.

To a girl at the sink with a bunch of flowers.