Becoming an Expert

I used to write a lot of poetry. I wrote so much poetry, I even started to read poetry. As far as I can tell, that’s the main audience for a poet: other poets. I started writing poetry in high school. I probably wrote a lot of “Roses are Red,” poems even in junior high. Poems like:

Roses are Red
Violets are Blue
Your shirt has polka dots
So does your face.

I was really into the twist at the end: the surprising insult combined with the surprising non-rhyme really tickled my funny bone.

My junior and senior years of high school I really amped it up. I wish I had an example of one of those poems to share, to make my point a little more dramatic, but I think I threw them out in a fit of embarrassment a few years ago. Those high school poems were really, really terrible. I didn’t realize how bad I was at writing poetry at the time. I knew they weren’t the greatest poems, but I hadn’t yet realized they were actually the worst. So, in college, I kept writing poems. All the way through college, I wrote poems. Here’s a poem I wrote after staying up all night as a college freshman:

Ink on Nose

When I write on my nose, I wonder whether the ink grows over a pimple.
Pimple, dimple, hemple, stemple,
nose grows
ink knows
pimple flows to my toes.

Not good. Not only was I writing bad poetry, I was also still fighting acne. It was a cry for help.

By the time I graduated from college, though, I was a really good poet. I got the prime reader’s slot at poetry gatherings. I won a poetry contest. I even briefly considered becoming a professional poet (but, then again, there aren’t many professions I haven’t briefly but seriously considered).

Between the first batch of poems I wrote in high school and the last poem I wrote while I was still in college, I wrote hundreds of poems. I spent thousands of hours explaining to the poetry-reading public (other poets) how much I wanted a girlfriend. I got better at writing poetry because I wrote a lot of poetry. The same principal applies to every endeavor we have on this earth. And we know it. It’s not a surprise. If you want to be good at anything, you have to practice. There’s a popular book that I have heard quoted dozens of times, while I have not even bothered to learn the title, that says that it takes 10,000 hours of doing an activity to become an expert at it. Professional athletes, comedians and writers talk about this all the time, and I try to write for at least a couple of hours everyday because I want to be an expert at writing.

Until today, I never considered becoming an expert in prayer. I have wanted to pray. I have wanted to talk to God and to hear from God, but it never occurred to me that I might get better at those things, that I could become an expert in prayer. Prayer is not something you produce, like a poem, and it is not something you can perform, like a pass in a football game. It feels a little irreverent to say that we should practice at prayer, but, like writing, practicing the act is the same as performing it. The only way to get better at writing is to write, and the only way to get better at praying is to pray. There are no drills. But if God created us so that it takes practice and commitment and determination to become good at writing poetry and shooting baskets and even talking to girls, then it makes sense that it takes practice to become a prayer expert. It takes time. It might even take 10,000 hours. It will be the best-spent 10,000 hours of my life.

I Tried to Give Blood

I tried to give blood, once. I went to the donor center, and stepped right up and sat in the chair and they looked at my arm and said, “You’ve got good veins.” I knew I had good veins. I had pride in my veins back then. My daily habit at that time was to lift weights for about an hour-and-a-half a day, then use the elliptical for 30 minutes a day and then swim for 45 minutes a day. It was an insane work out, and if I had known how muscles work I would not have done it that way. My muscles weren’t getting much bigger because they never got to rest. But my veins were sticking out more because I was running out of body fat--and water.

I’ve been reading the book of Job this week. Job’s three “friends” were actually sinning while telling him how sinful he must be because they were quite proud of how sinless they were. Anyway, I was no Job: I was proud of my veins.

The nurse told me I had nice veins, stuck the needle in my arm and told me to let her know if I had any dizziness or light-headedness. I told her almost immediately that I had these issues. She told me to count down from 100 or say the alphabet backwards--I guess to keep my mind focused on something--and then I started hearing static. I told her I was hearing static, and then I passed out. When I came to she was putting a blanket over me. I had only been unconscious for a couple of seconds, but it was long enough for me to pee my pants.

That’s right. I peed my pants. Right there in front of everybody. She didn’t put the blanket over me because she thought I might be chilly; she put the blanket over me to hide the pee spot. They gave me a gigantic pair of scrub pants to wear, and I put them on and sat there eating cookies and drinking kool-aid for a couple of hours, trying to recuperate enough to drive home.

And I peed on myself for nothing. They threw the bit of blood they had taken from me in the trash. But I’m no Job. I didn’t return the pants for about eight years.

I wonder sometimes if I have anything to add to the world at large because I haven’t encountered much personal tragedy. (I am aware that the story of when I peed my adult pants is comic, not tragic.) Struggles create character, just like exercise builds muscles. We may need a rest time between struggles in order to allow our character to fully heal between bouts, but without hard times we become soft people. That, perhaps, is part of the reason that it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than it is to put a camel through the eye of a needle. And, perhaps, it’s why so many Americans have trouble believing in anything; most people in the middle and upper classes have never really struggled. We’ve never had to believe in anything. We’ve got our beds and our food and our iPhones. We even have extra blood. Who needs God?

Rough times can sharpen a person into a useful tool for God. Why did bad stuff happen to Job? For the glory of God. No matter what happens, I am convinced that everything will ultimately bring glory to God. Even peeing my pants.

Fear

I am afraid of snakes. I have always been afraid of snakes. Just a few weeks ago, my wife and children witnessed a pair of garter snakes mating in our backyard. One of my children ran into my room and excitedly told me what they had discovered. I said, "Oh no," and then I put my feet up on the bed, away from the ground. I did not go outside. Last Sunday, they found a turtle in the backyard. I got up and looked at the turtle. Turtles are cute. Snakes are gross.

I am also afraid of God. Such fear, David the psalmist-king says, is the beginning of wisdom. What does he mean by that? I have heard many times that all is meant is “respect.” I think it is much more than that. Reading through the Bible, you will find that when people encountered God--whether they were holy men or not--they freaked out. Some examples: When Moses encountered God on the mountain, the entire crowd of Israelites thought they were going to die. They begged Moses to tell God not to do that again. When Daniel saw God, he fell on his face and couldn’t move until an angel touched him and told him to get up. When Ezekiel saw God, he fell on his face and couldn’t move until an angel touched him and told him to get up. When Isaiah saw God, he fell on his face and couldn’t move until an angel told him to get up. (Do you see a pattern?) When Jesus stood on the mountain and Moses and Elijah stood on it with him, Peter and James and John couldn’t believe their eyes, and then God the Father showed up, too, and the three disciples fainted, and didn’t regain consciousness until it was all over. John the Revelator, on the Isle of Patmos, saw God, and he fell on his face and couldn’t move until an angel came and touched him and told him to get up.

Falling on their faces was not an act of respect, or of reverence, it was their reaction to something terrifying. My favorite story like this is about Jesus Himself. The guards and priests’ servants and the rest of the mob that accompanied Judas to arrest Jesus did not have any respect for Him. They did not revere Him. 

Check out John 18:2-6: 

Now Judas, who betrayed him, knew the place, because Jesus had often met there with his disciples. So Judas came to the garden, guiding a detachment of soldiers and some officials from the chief priests and the Pharisees. They were carrying torches, lanterns and weapons. 
Jesus, knowing all that was going to happen to him, went out and asked them, "Who is it you want?"
"Jesus of Nazareth," they replied.
"I am he," Jesus said. (And Judas the traitor was standing there with them.) When Jesus said, "I am he," they drew back and fell to the ground.”

“I am,” of course, is the name God gave Moses when Moses saw the burning bush. Jesus told them that He was God, and they were terrified. Did you ever wonder why the only person that got hurt when this mob came to arrest Jesus was the servant that Peter attacked? Even after Peter attacked him, nobody got stabbed or beaten down with a club. Jesus had already disarmed them. They were afraid.

Next time you have some time alone with the Lord, think about how awesome and holy our God is, that His very presence would knock you on the floor with your teeth chattering. That thought will give you a holy fear, and it will help in your worship of our awesome God.

The Old Testament God

A remark that I overheard recently, and one that drives me nuts, is that the nature of God changes through the Bible. More specifically, many amateur religious scholars have noted with pride that the God of the Old Testament is an angry God, while the God of the New Testament is a loving God. This remark is off base, and is usually made by people who have only read Cliff's notes on the Bible.

In Genesis, the first book of the Bible, the oldest of the OT, God creates the whole world and wipes it out with a flood and then recreates it again. OK, I can see a little anger there. But he saves Noah-- who was the only righteous one left--and his family, and every species of animal. Then He chose Abraham and promised to bless the entire world through Abraham's ancestors. God used Jacob even though he was a liar, and Joseph even though he was a spoiled brat and nobody liked him.

In Revelation, the last book of the Bible (in the New Testament), God promises to destroy the whole world with fire and then recreate it again. I can see a little anger there. He promises to save those whose names are written in the Book of Life. And whose names are in the Book of Life? The good people? The charitable? The ones who have done enough good things to earn a reward? No, no, no. Most of those people will not find their names in that book. Instead, He picks people like Jacob, who were liars but believed in Jesus. He picks people like Joseph; people nobody likes for good reason but who will give themselves up to the will of God. He picks people like Abraham, whom He called righteous. Was it because of his goodness that Abraham was righteous? No. “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness” (James 2).

After Genesis, after the blood of an unblemished lamb was placed on the doorpost of every Hebrew home to keep Abaddon--the Destroyer--from killing the eldest sons, the Israelites are ordered by God to start wiping out the godless Canaanite nations. This sounds extremely angry. But this is only a picture of what the godless will go through in hell. And it will not just be the Sodomites (Genesis; Jude 7) who will burn for eternity. The good, moral people, who have done good works and are sure that they have earned their way into heaven will burn for eternity, too. Jesus tells us this over and over again in the parables. Everyone knows that the Pharisees were bad guys, right? But they were not bad because of their actions (at least not until they asked Rome to crucify Jesus for them), they were bad because they depended upon their actions to save them instead of depending on God. And now God has made known his love and his grace through Jesus. “So the servants went out into the streets and gathered all the people they could find, the bad as well as the good, and the wedding hall was filled with guests” (Matthew 22:10). No one can earn grace, but he freely gives it to those who call on Him. This is true of God in both Testaments, and the God of the New Testament promises heaven to those who don't deserve it, but he also promises hell to those who don't accept his gift of grace. The Old Testament is a tame picture of both how kind and how angry He is revealed to be in the New Testament.

Two Kinds of Sons

The Parable of the Prodigal Son is a parable that never really got to me when I was a kid. I thought it was pretty cool that the father (who represents God) would take that terrible kid back. I saw that it was a picture of God's grace, but I was never able to put myself in the prodigal's place. I could never imagine myself doing what he did. But Jesus didn't title the parable “The Parable of the Prodigal Son.” And if He had bothered giving His stories titles, He probably would have been more likely to call this parable “My Two Sons.” (It wouldn't have been a cliché back then.) This story is not only a picture of God's grace but is also a warning for those of us who consider ourselves “good.”

In Luke 15:11, the parable starts out with a father and two sons. The famous son--the prodigal son --says to his father, “I wish you would die already so I could have all of your money now.” His father gives him the money without dying, and the bad son spends his fortune on sex, drugs, rock-n-roll and Pilates classes, gets so hungry he starts to covet the food in the dumpster behind the Waffle House and finally decides to go back home to beg his father to give him a job mowing the lawn.

The other son, the one who usually gets ignored, is the good son. In Luke 15:29, the good son claims to have been pretty much perfect, and his father doesn't argue. We don’t even know anything about this kid except that he obeys his father and wants justice and his own dead calf. At the end of that story, the father invites everyone into the party (Heaven) to celebrate the return of the bad son. Only one person did not go into the Heavenly metaphor: the good son. Why? Because the good son believed that he had earned the right to the fattened calf by following the rules. Instead of relying on his father’s grace, he was relying on justice. He never did anything wrong; therefore, he deserved his inheritance. He did not need grace from his father; his father owed him.

Many people make this mistake. We think that if we do everything right God has to be on our side. He owes us. But Jesus came and made it clear that it doesn’t work that way. Jesus died on the cross "while we were still sinners" (Romans 5:8). Because this is the case, we know that He doesn’t owe us, we owe Him. God doesn’t let us into Heaven because we obey the law or do good works; instead, we obey the law and do good works because He is letting us into Heaven. He already did it all.

Nothing we do after confessing with our mouths that Jesus is LORD and believing in our hearts that God raised Him from the dead can get us into or out of Heaven. He died for all of your sins once, knowing all the while that you would sin again and again. If you truly believe, you will have good works. That’s what Paul says in Galatians 5 and what James says in James 2. The result of true faith in Christ is service done to God out of thankfulness and love. If you don’t really believe, you’ll prove your disbelief either by going back to sin (the prodigal son before he came home) or by going back to doing good works to ensure your salvation (the good son). He did not die for those who loved Him first. He died for those who made it necessary for Him to die.

Everyone Worships Someone

I read a poem at a poetry slam once. The slam was held every other Thursday at a coffee shop that called itself the Magic Bean. Everyone else called it the Tragic Bean. Their coffee was awful. The magic was allegedly in their brownies, if you get my drift.

When it came time for the slam, everyone went outside, walked around to the back of the building, climbed up a flight of stairs, and stooped into a poorly lit attic where tiny desks--purloined from a university dumpster--were set up in front of a small stage. The rule of the slam was given by the event’s host: “The only rule is no props.”

When my turn came, I read my vivid and well-written poem about a butcher who killed and chopped up his own dog rather than punishing the pack. It was a metaphor. I hoped my poem was interesting enough to keep the judges’ attention; my presentation was boring.

One of the better slammers stomped around the stage in a circle with the rhythm of his poem. The audience was roaring with laughter while he huffed and puffed and stomped and tripped and tried not to burst out in laughter himself, all the while reading his poem, which I believe had several "Star Wars" references in it.

The last poet started his presentation by lighting a cigarette. Between lines of a poem about how great it is to smoke, he took long drags on his cigarette:

“It’s been a rough day.”

A long drag on the cigarette followed by a long, slow release of his indrawn breath.

“I need to relax.”

Another slow, deep puff on the cigarette.

“They say smokin’ ain’t good for you.”

Again with the cigarette.

“I don’t care.”

A final, longer drag on the cigarette and a longer, slower release of breath amid wild cheers from the crowd.

He was the only poet to break the only rule in the slam, and he won it.

I mentioned that my poem was a metaphor. It is probably obvious that it was a metaphor for Christ’s death on the cross. Writing that poem, and even reading it in that attic, were acts of worship. The other poets--and most of the audience at that slam--were worshiping, too. They cheered the smoking poem because it was about breaking the rules. It was about independence and self-idolization. That poem meant that they didn’t have to answer to anyone but themselves. As DA Carson would say, each of them had placed him or herself on God’s throne, which is the definition of idolatry.

Not every poem has to be about God in order for God to be happy with it, but every act--especially every creative act--worships something. Every poet, every musician, every painter, every athlete, is trying to please someone, whether that someone is a beautiful woman, a friend, a parent, or one’s self. If you act to please someone else, you have placed that person on God’s throne, and your creative acts are acts of worship toward someone that is not God. Everyone worships someone.

Worship

I was watching--against my will, because I am a manly man but also a servant to all--the movie "Soul Surfer" with my wife and three young children this weekend. It was my daughter's seventh birthday, so I had to join. It would have been much more enjoyable to me if the surfer girl had gotten her arm blown off by a grenade, or bitten off by a dinosaur, or if Kevin Sorbo, TV's Hercules, had dove into the water to get her arm back from the belly of the beast, but at least the shark added a few seconds of thrill. My son covered his eyes for most of the movie, by the way. He said he wasn't going to watch until she got another arm, and asked every couple of minutes if she had gotten another arm yet.

Meanwhile, my new 7-year-old was sobbing uncontrollably. You should have seen them when we watched "The Princess Bride" together. All three of them were screaming while Wesley and Buttercup were in the Forbidden Forest fighting the Rodents of Unusual Size. And then when Wesley was being tortured, all three of their little bodies were racked with sobs. It was hilarious.

At the beginning of "Soul Surfer," the main character (Bethany) runs up out of the water, throws a dress over her bikini, and sits down in church, where a crowd of blond women and Hawaiian men are sitting with giant smiles on their faces while they watch a similar group of people lead worship. Once or twice someone in the audience will mouth a word, but mostly, they're just basking in Carrie Underwoods' glow. While this was happening, my oldest daughter said to me, "Daddy, they aren't standing!" I responded, of course, that you don't have to stand up to worship God. But what do we have to do to worship Him?

As you read through the Psalms, you'll find that worship is commonly expressed through singing, dancing, lifting hands, kneeling, clapping and playing music. You'll notice that all of these forms of worship are physical forms. Our minds have to be focused on God, of course, but our bodies have to be focused on Him as well. The Hebrew word for worship (I learned this bit of Hebrew in Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline) literally means "to prostrate." The English word "bless" is from the word "to kneel." "Thanksgiving" comes from Hebrew for "an extension of the hand." Our bodies bow before Him as our minds humbly worship the Creator of the universe, who is so big and so powerful and so good that we cannot comprehend it. We raise our hands as we think about how He became a man and died on the cross that we might have life. We dance before Him as our minds understand that great salvation. No doubt there is a time to sit quietly in God's presence, praising God solely with the mind, but even if you are doing that while a worship service is going on around you, that isn't worship. It is spiritual. It is good. It is valuable. It is even necessary for a disciplined life, but it isn't worship.

My three little kids, while they were watching "Soul Surfer" and "The Princess Bride," experienced an emotion so great that it caused their minds to reel, their eyes to tear, their voices to howl, their hands to cover their faces, their bodies to cower. Mind and body, they were wholeheartedly reacting to these movies. As they get older, thankfully, they will gain control of themselves and allow themselves to react less and less. But when God comes, we will all worship. We will all bow down--some of us rejoicing, some of us wailing. We will all cover our eyes. All of our little bodies will be racked with sobs. It will be awesome.