Tag Archives: mundane

Gospel, Routine, and Numbness

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Jared Wilson:

How do we present the gospel in a nonroutine way in order to prevent people from becoming numb? My answer is counterintuitive. I think we do this by routinely presenting the unchanging gospel in a way that does justice to its earth-shaking announcement. This doesn’t mean we have to set it up with a power ballad or even dress it up at all. But it does mean we communicate it like it’s life or death stuff. People who know the gospel’s power will share it powerfully.

One would expect repetition of the message in anticipated ways to grow stale, but I believe ever-increasing showmanship is what actually numbs people. . .

Gospel Wakefulness, (Wheaton: Crossway, 2011), 16.

Epiphany for an Idiot– Sometimes We Learn by Saying, “I Don’t Want to Be that Guy.”

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Hopefully I learned something last night. I was able to spend the day in study at Bethlehem’s downtown campus. Melissa was here at the house with Elizabeth all day. I was hoping to do something special that night. The Twins had an afternoon game, so that was out. So instead I decided to take her to one of her favorite restaurants from NC, Schlotzsky’s, which we recently discovered to have a location in Bloomington. I figured a nice and simple dinner followed by a night together would be sweet. We’d just walk around the mall or something afterwards…

That was the problem. We spent an hour or so walking around the mall. And it sucked. I felt sick about it later last night. I felt like I squandered a good evening with my family. How I could be so stupid to have some of the sweetest gifts that God has given me right there and instead I spent the whole time walking around looking for something “entertaining” to do together.

Being together would be enough. I just want to be with them. We don’t have to necessarily do anything. I reject the culture that has conditioned me to think otherwise. By God’s grace, it took being an idiot last night to get that. I think I learn that way pretty often. I do something and say in assessment, “Wow, I don’t want to be that guy.”

A Poor Man With Groceries, Karl Marx, and the Entirely-Supreme, All-Satisfying God

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For labor, life activity, and productive life appear to man at first only as a means to satisfy a need, the need to maintain physical existence. Productive life, however, is species-life. It is life begetting life. In the mode of life activity lies the entire character of a species, its species-character; and free conscious activity is the species-character of man. Life itself appears only as a means of life.

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 63

Yesterday I saw a man pushing a cart down the road. It carried was a bag of Aldi groceries that he had securely placed as he slowly tread through the melting snow. That was his food, he eats it to survive.  Labor, paid, buy, eat, labor, paid, buy, eat… He made me think about Marx.

Marx struck a nerve, you know. Alienate man from his labor, abort any sense of production, make him only a creature living to survive, eradicate all leisure, and take away the reality of God–how can the outcome be anything but absolute sabotage?

And most people live there. Leisure numbs us to this truth. But take away leisure and people just do what they do to survive. There lives are small and pitiful. One fleeting pleasure substitute after another. But there is something glorious all around them… here is the infinitely great, all-satisfying, supremely valuable God who through the death of His Son reconciles to Himself all who believe.

Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

Psalm 73:25-26

The MLB Network

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I think that this is the greatest thing that’s happened to television since the History channel. The MLB Network– all baseball, all the time.

The streaming newsline at the screen’s bottom is even only baseball. No hockey, no soccer, just baseball.

We don’t watch television at home. And we definitely don’t have Direct TV. But my parents have it and tonight before we live for Minneapolis tomorrow, I am watching.

MLB Network, yes.