Basic outline:
- v. 10--"Demas has deserted me"--The Danger of Defection: We need to be willing to come back to the Lord if we have deserted Him.
- v. 11--"Luke is with me"--The Value of Christian Friendship: We need to be willing to be friends and enter into fellowship--true, deep, searching fellowship--with brothers and sisters in Christ.
- v. 11--"Mark is helpful to me"--The Necessity of Forgiveness (based on reference to how upset Paul had been at John Mark in the past that Paul actually split with Barnabas, his long-time ministry partner, over the man [see Acts 15:36-41]): We need to forgive.
- v. 14--"Alexander did me a great deal of harm"--Beware of Bitterness: --Kind of a follow-on to the former point about forgiveness.
- v. 17--"the Lord stood at my side"--The Constancy of Christ: Jesus is always faithful.
From the Fourth Point (about Bitterness):
- "The Devil has no happy old men or women. He keeps feeding them poison. [The poison of bitterness.]"
- The story of Robert Robinson, author of "Come, Thou Fount of every blessing":
Come, Thou Fount of every blessing,
Our pastor told a story about Robinson--about how, long after he wrote this hymn, he himself wandered far from God. And then one day, while riding in a coach, a woman across from him, reading in a book, asked Robinson to read a passage.
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise. . . .
O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee. . . .
It turned out the words she asked him to read were his very own. . . from that very hymn!
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Cut to the quick, Robinson repented of his wandering and turned back to the Lord.
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.
I determined to find out more about Robinson.
The first biography I happened to read, written in rather stilted, old-fashioned English, mentioned nothing of the incident, nor even hinted that such an incident could have occurred. Absolutely nothing about Robinson wandering at any point in his life after he gave his life to Jesus.
The second one referenced the incident, but rather differently than did our pastor:
Prone to wander Robert was. He left the Methodists and became a Baptist. Later on, having become a close friend of Joseph Priestly, he was accused of becoming a Unitarian. Priestly and other Unitarians denied the full divinity of Christ. However, in a sermon he preached after he supposedly became a Unitarian, Robinson clearly declared that Jesus was God, and added, "Christ in Himself is a person infinitely lovely as both God and man."Hmmmm.
Robert died on. . . June 9, 1790. Had he left the God he loved? A widely-told, but unverifiable, story says that one day as he was riding in a stagecoach a lady asked him what he thought of the hymn she was humming. He responded, "Madam, I am the poor unhappy man who wrote that hymn many years ago, and I would give a thousand worlds, if I had them, to enjoy the feelings I had then."
So, nice story as it is, it may be nothing more than a Parson Weems'-style "George Washington cut down the cherry tree" kind of historically false, but morally encouraging tale.
Well, strange as all of that was, for some reason--I can't think why--yesterday afternoon, many hours before I got around to looking up Robinson's biography (this morning), I got thinking about stories in the Old Testament, and I began wondering: in essence, could many of the stories in the Old Testament be morally encouraging, but historically false tales?
I know, this isn't a new question. I've vaguely thought about it before. But it seems to be knocking with increasing insistence upon my brain.
What if? What are the ramifications? Can a morally encouraging story teach true Truth while itself not being, at root, a true story? Can stories of heroes--the legends of King Arthur, for example, or the stories of Sir Lancelot: Can they teach true Truth while themselves not being true--at least, not true beyond some very surface level?
Is it possible that our Jewish forebears in the faith, men (and, I expect, women) who interfaced with the real, true God: Is it possible that they conveyed true Truth about God and about how God operates in the world while telling morally compelling tales that aren't "really" true in detail?
There. I said it. I at least formulated the question and got it "out of my mouth" or "out of my fingertips."
I intend to return to this question--or the related group of questions, in subsequent posts.
By its very (current) nature, the Internet lacks grace and mercy, and promotes pride. We assume that having digital "facts" means we know more, or better, or something.
ReplyDeleteThe first question at the end of our Webinar last month provided a nice example of why more humility is needed. A "metric" designed 20 years ago, and followed religiously by many, is no longer understood by many. We have the numbers, but we don't know what they mean.
Meanwhile, in other cultures, stories are passed on from generation to generation. The words may change a bit. The list of genealogies might even be adjusted to ensure the important names are retained and kept memorable, while lesser names are dropped. Yet the message remains clear and pure.
Still other cultures literally tell a story of a thousand words in a single photograph.
So tell me, which ones are "really true" in detail?
Even the true story of Galileo is largely lost today. As is true of many who came before, and since.
I bumped into something like this yesterday when I looked up a quote I'd heard before: "Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire." It seems, however, that . I like this comment: "I have the distinct impression that people's lives were easier when we didn't have this mountain of data at our fingertips. We could just tag such things as 'proverbs' and be done with it." This feels like, perhaps, a similar thing could be said about "true Truths;" our lives are simply easier this way.
ReplyDelete~Luke