I will sing of loyalty and of justice;
to thee, O LORD, I will sing.

When you play country music backwards, do you know what you get?  You get your lover back, your dog back, your pickup truck back…  The same could be said for most pop music because most pop music is about: a) falling in love (which in most current music is about falling in bed); or b) about breaking up.  The subcategory of b) is: y) happy songs about how good it is to fall in love again and move on; or z) sad songs about how it hurts to be betrayed.  Bottom line: the modern world doesn’t sing of loyalty and justice much.  It’s much more expert at impulse shopping, faithlessness and the notion that our personal feelings of the moment trump all.  And it is because there is a real alternative to this barren, wind-driven, soulless flux of hormones, impulse, mood, and whim that the psalmist sings.  For the revelation of Christ is that it is really possible (not easy, not comfortable, not warm and fuzzy, but possible and deeply fulfilling) to live a life of real love, loyalty and justice.  That life is given us in the one who endured the ultimate in betrayal and injustice himself and yet declared, “Forgive them.”  It is given to us in the Holy Spirit, who enables us to be forgiven our own betrayals of others and who empowers us to start again in newness of life and to be steadfast in our love for those whom He has given us, be they family, friend, or enemy.  Today, sing of the loyalty and justice of God.

And let us not grow weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap, if we do not lose heart.

In The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis’ senior demon, Screwtape, explains to a junior demon, Wormwood, why God sends us “dry times:”

He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs — to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual temptation, because we design them for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot “tempt” them to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there, He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

As in water face answers to face, so the mind of man reflects the man.

This image of our ability for self-knowledge is beautifully accurate.  Note that the inspired writer does not say, “As in a mirror face answers to face,” but “as in water.”  Water reflects (to a degree), but water also distorts.  Disturb water just a little and the reflection vanishes.  Disturb the mind just a little and our ability to measure ourselves is gone as well.  This is part of why community and confession are so important in the life of the Christian.  We simply don’t know our own minds nearly as well as we think we do.  Today, take a step toward community and accountability and get away from the rugged individualism our culture preaches.  The Body of Christ has many members.  Draw near to them in love and ask God to give you wisdom through his Church.

He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.

“Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Of course, they were not really inconsistent; but they were such that it was hard to hold simultaneously. Let us follow for a moment the clue of the martyr and the suicide, and take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. ‘He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,’ is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice.

“He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying.” - G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives to all men generously and without reproaching, and it will be given him.

In most stories, the path to Wisdom lies through the performance of Seven Herculean Feats or by climbing the Nine Mystic Mountains of Zug and finding the Hidden Fleece of the Ram of All Knowledge. The idea is always that wisdom is only attainable through tremendous struggle. In contrast, the way to wisdom in Scripture is almost anticlimactic. Want wisdom? Ask God for it. Period. To be sure, there are a couple of minor caveats such as “Don’t ask out of selfish motives,” but that’s about it. What stands out is the amazing ease and lavish generosity with which wisdom is given by God. Today, ask God for the riches of wisdom and insight that are ours through Christ Jesus.

No man shall be able to stand before you all the days of your life; as I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will not fail you or forsake you.

Having to subdue seven nations and conquer a strange land in bloody warfare, all while trying to manage the life of a nation of ex-slaves who are only in the rudimentary stages of civilization, can make a fella jittery. Joshua, like Moses, did not feel up to the task. But Joshua, like Moses, found he wasn’t being asked to be up to the task. Instead, he found that God was up to the task and that he only had to do the next practical thing as God assigned it. We are in Joshua’s shoes. For the task of the Church is to conquer the world and we can’t do it either. Still less can we face the fact that the blood that is to be shed is ours, if it is anybody’s. But we still have this advantage: God will be with us and will not fail us or forsake us. Those are good odds.

For the LORD God is a sun and shield;
He bestows favor and honor.
No good thing does the LORD withhold
From those who walk uprightly.

Today’s Scripture is the simple truth. It is not, however, the announcement of a Divine Vending Machine. God withholds no good thing from those who walk uprightly. But we do not know what “good things” are. As Oscar Wilde remarked long ago, the gods answer the prayers of those they wish to destroy. Many things we pray for as “good” are things that would destroy us if we got them. Precisely because God is a “shield” we are protected from the folly of our own wishes. But because God is a sun, we receive light from him on how to pray aright. Today, ask your Father, “Lord, teach us to pray.”

Keep your heart with all vigilance;
for from it flow the springs of life.

Years after our culture has absorbed the elementary lessons of hygiene in the physical and environmental realms, we remain perfect babes in the wood when it comes to mental and spiritual common sense. Every fool knows that you don’t drink from wells built next to toxic waste dumps. Not even a moron would say “My belching smokestack is my personal smokestack and has no effect on anybody else.” Nobody says, “I’m strong. So it’s okay for me to jog behind insecticide spewing trucks or eat this mad cow infected meat.” But fools say things like this everyday when it comes to moral and spiritual pollution. They say you can fill your mind with slime from the tube and it won’t affect them because they’re “strong in their hearts.” They say media can belch airwave pollution 24/7/365 and it won’t affect the culture (though 30 second ad cost a million dollars and manufacturers gladly pay this to have “no effect”). They say that we can feed our souls on the toxic waste of sleaze TV, violent and misogynistic music, ugly art, and loveless, soul-dead stories and it will not affect “my personal truth of the moment.” Scripture says differently. “Keep your heart.” Feed it on what is true, good, noble and beautiful and you will become that way. Feed it on junk and the effects on your heart will be as predictable as the effects of a diet of radioactive waste and potato chips on an Olympic athlete: No matter how healthy he was to start with, he’ll die.

What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each.

One common form of idolatry is hero worship. There’s nothing wrong with having heroes, of course. The human soul is made to honor greatness, whether in things like great art or in people like great men and women. The Church acknowledges this reality every time she canonizes a saint. But the greatest hero is what he or she is because of Jesus Christ. All the greatness of the saints is just “treasures in jars of clay” as Paul pointed out. Today thank God for the greatness he has placed in his great heroes and strive to imitate it.

Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

One of the recurring themes in Scripture is the call to be “steadfast” and “immovable.”  This is very counter-cultural.  We tend to praise people these days for being flexible, progressive and willing to change.  A call to be “immovable” sounds like a call to be “neanderthal.”  But immovability is essential if you are in the right place. If your place is faith and you move from it, you are moving toward betrayal. If your place is hope and you move from it, you are moving toward despair or presumption. If your place is love and you move from it, you are moving toward hate.  That is why Paul tells us to stay put.  If you stick with God, you make real progress without wasting time.  If you move away from God, you waste time without making any real progress.