Author: expositionalvision

The night, the air, were filled with joy

As angels sang among the heav’ns;

I stood before a newborn boy:

Who was this wondrous child there giv’n?

We’d left our flocks out in the fields,

And answered heralds’ sounding call;

They cried, “Emmanuel has come!”

He lay in lowly cattle stall.

We crept into the manger cold;

But for straw his bed was bare.

Is this the One they wrote of old;

Could this be our Messiah – there?

To Bethlehem he was to come,

And it is here he rests his head;

Near you, O great Jerusalem,

In Ephrathah the prophet said.

It is fulfilled! He’s come to us:

God with us now, O Israel!

The shepherd here beholds his birth,

With ox, and ass, and Gabriel!

What mystery this that I might see

The passing of this holy hour;

A child, the Savior come for me:

O Lord, be mine, for I am yours.

Merry Christmas!

Michael Denham

We just had a lovely and long overdue out of town visit with our precious 4 ½ year old granddaughter and her “handlers.”A wonderful time was had by all. Particularly memorable was our first evening meal together. Someone customarily said grace but, when we all looked up from praying, she clearly was not pleased, arms folded in dismay across her chest. When asked what was wrong, she emphatically replied, “I’m supposed to say the blessing…I’M THE BLESSER!”

This annoying cuteness has since had me wondering about just what might be percolating in her young heart, and how her childlike (over)exuberance for mealtime grace might root, grow, and ripen into deep love for and dependence on God. That potential of course is deeply embedded in her. Our Lord himself, after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, chided Israel’s religious leaders angered by children crying out to him in the temple, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” Quoting Psalm 8, Jesus instantly and eternally legitimized their words of worship, “Have you never read, ‘From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise’?”

But what about the BLESSER in our family? What might her grandparents hope and pray that she will one day understand more fully and embrace wholeheartedly? In the Bible “blessing” is a key worship word. The psalmist says, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless his holy name” (103:1). The Hebrew verb, barak, essentially means, “kneel.” When we speak of us blessing God, “bless” points to our kneeling before him. Given God’s identity and activity, it’s an appropriate gesture. When the Lord blesses us, the gesture is the opposite posture: God bends to us. We bow to bless the Lord even as the Lord bends to bless us. We act in obedience and obeisance. God acts in grace, mercy, and love.

I think we can be grateful that our 4 ½ year old recognizes the appropriateness of saying grace before meals, that such a pattern and practice have been lovingly exhibited to her, and that she wants to be thankful and say thank you for the blessings she sees and enjoys. It’s the same impulse that led Moses to write to Israel in Deuteronomy 8 as they were preparing to receive God’s blessing of the Promised Land: “You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land he has given you.” Even this is an echo of God’s covenant promise to Abraham in Genesis 12: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make you great, so that you will be a blessing.”

We continue in the midst of challenging times of uncertainty, hardship, turmoil, and among some no small amount of suffering. Despair and fear can lead us to fall away or turn away from what we know or hope of God, and the identity, security, and destiny that are integral to God’s gracious plans for us.

In the meantime, as our granddaughter helped remind us, God continues to bless in ways we often fail to notice, but are still invited to see. As George Herbert writes:

Thou hast given so much to me. Give me one thing more:

A grateful heart,

Not thankful when it pleaseth me, as if thy blessings had spare days,

but such a heart whose pulse may be thy praise.

                                                                                                                   Michael Denham

Harold Best was for many years dean of Wheaton College’s Conservatory of Music. He is by training an organist, a composer, an educator, and a theologian. He helped guide and mold students there, not so much into “Christian musicians,” but into musicians who are Christians. It’s an important distinction.

He exported his convictions and his deep faith across the nation and around the world in part in his role as president of the National Association of Schools of Music. Not many days go by that I don’t recall something he taught us.

He is a gifted writer. One of his earlier books bears the title: Music through the Eyes of Faith. In this unsettling season of pandemic and anguished racial tension, and on this second day after Pentecost, a short passage from his work seems germane. Dr. Best writes,

            Pentecost is Babbel turned right side up: All speech is unified

            because it is God, no longer people, who is building toward the heavens.

            Pentecost goes farther than its historical reality. It is also a story

            that urges us into the knowledge that the gospel is comfortable in

            any culture, and its message finds easy residence in the languages,

            cultural ways and thought styles of countless societies. In other words,

            whoever seeks to move a culture towards transformation by Christ must

            join it, participating in the transformation from within.

            God is not western. God is not eastern. God is not exclusively the God of

            classical culture or primitive culture. God is Lord of the plethora, God of

            the diverse, redeemer of the plural. Likewise, God calls for response in

            different languages, dialects, and idioms, accepting them through the Son.

            Pentecost tells us that one artistic tongue is only a start, and a thousand

            will never suffice. There is no single chosen language, or artistic or

            musical style that, better than the others, can capture and repeat back

            the fullness of the glory of God. This truism cannot be avoided: Cultures

            are not infinite. No single one can hold the wholeness of praise and

            worship, or the fullness of the counsel of God.[1]

“O for a thousand tongues to sing,” may indeed express Charles Wesley’s poetic and hyperbolic call for praise, but it also surely points to how it truly is and ever will be in the Kingdom of God.

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[1] Harold M. Best, Music through the Eyes of Faith (New York: Harper Collins, 1993, 66.

Biblical worship is not speculative.

It reflects a specific message that is historical and knowable,

and which invites our consideration and response.

Holy Scripture offers us glimpses of God’s person, character, and work.

These glimpses in worship move us to bow before the Lord,

even as God bends to us in mercy and grace.

The reverberating word of God moves by the power of God’s Spirit from

inspired text, to illumined text, to transforming text, to commissioning text

in our worship and every facet of Christian living.

A transforming vision of God is what worship seeks.

We begin with the Bible’s own categories,

neither less nor more than what it says, in touch with its own concerns.

If worship is to convey the message of the biblical text,

it is Scripture that calls and captivates us.

we must first learn what it says and means.

Through preaching that stays in Scripture’s story,

and worship that tells the same story,

God’s provision and purpose for us become all the more clear.

The impact of all biblical worship follows solely

the Holy Spirit’s power to mediate, illuminate, and inculcate in us

the life of God’s Son through the message of God’s written word.

Beloved preacher Earl F. Palmer says that “worship always has two aspects: a downward, revelatory one, and an upward, experiential, and responsive one. Revelation always informs experience, and not the other way around. We must trust the Bible’s power to validate itself. We don’t have to do that for it. Over time, the text will do that for itself, as will the Lord of the text, God’s living word. We don’t need to tamper with the freedom of the listener. We need to offer the Scriptures a chance to make their mark.”

Michael Denham

from Reverberating Word: Powerful Worship (Wipf & Stock, 2018)

A recent story on National Public Radio completely fascinated me. It began in the famed Hagia Sophia, the 6^th century Byzantine “Cathedral of Holy Wisdom,” magnificently situated in what is now Istanbul. Later a mosque of the Ottoman Empire, now a museum for the Turkish government, it was for a thousand years the largest church in Christendom. By design, serendipity, or providence its interior acoustic wonder soars on matchless architectural wings!

The NPR story points to two scholars at Stanford University who had been musing about whether the way things sound in specific spaces could be captured and controlled by various digital measurements, then applied to sounds produced elsewhere. The impetus was, not to digitally simulate a sound, but to create one as we would hear it in the space in question—because that space’s precise acoustical properties could digitally come to bear upon it.

Their thesis was demonstrated first by the simple sound of a popping balloon. It was a benign enough sonic event that dissipated nearly as quickly as it had occurred. Another balloon was then popped inside the Hagia Sophia. It sounded like an explosion, as the burst emanated from its point of departure and expanded in resonant and reverberating waves through the vast reaches of the great cathedral.

With all their carefully calibrated and archived acoustical measurements in hand, the two scholars then recorded somewhere in a studio an otherwise accomplished men’s choir, who suffered in that moment from the room’s intentionally dry, bland, innocuous effects. The recording was then digitally filtered to astonishing effect through the acoustical properties gathered in Istanbul. The men sounded like they were singing in the very midst of the Hagia Sophia, and acoustically they were! The ancient, a cappella chants that had just sounded so inert in studio suddenly sounded as they were meant to sound, as they had been composed to sound, as the space where they first were heard had been designed to help them sound. The music suddenly seemed profound—something far greater than the sum of its parts.

In planning or implementing worship, we do not make God’s word “suddenly profound” through any effort of our own. Rather the Holy Spirit who inspired God’s written word illuminates and transforms us by its truth and power as it resonates and reverberates through the whole milieu of worship to our individual hearts and minds, then through the community we are formed by Christ himself to be—even when we are for a time at a distance from each other.

The Bible says that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” As we place ourselves in praise, prayer and proclamation before Scripture’s witness to God’s holy wisdom, worship can bring explosive change in us and through us to a world starved for God’s beauty and grace.

Michael Denham

Here in the United States we typically think of “Now Thank We All Our God” as a hymn of our November national day of Thanksgiving, and that is certainly an appropriate association. But it has a longer and broader history no less meaningful today as it was when it was written in the early 17^th century.

Martin Rinkart (1586-1649) was a Lutheran pastor in Eilenburg, Germany during the upheaval of the Thirty Years War. His town became a refuge for political and military refugees, who crowded more and more into the confines of the city walls.

Not only were resources of food and fresh water severely stressed, plagues of deadly disease soon followed. Rinkart was the sole pastor in the community, and faithfully faced some of the most fundamental demands of ministry, caring for and burying a multitude. It is said that in 1637 he performed 4,000 funerals, including his wife’s.

It was into this crucible that he spoke the words “Nun danket alle Gott” – “Now thank we all our God” – indeed not for celebration around a family holiday table, but as a statement of bedrock theology under girding personal and potentially national trust. We only affirm what we believe until it becomes a matter of mortal danger. That is when we live and die according to what we really believe.

Jesus said in Matthew 7, “Those who hear my words and do them will be like one who builds his house upon rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock.” There is no way to know whether Pastor Rinkart had somewhere in mind these words of our Lord when he wrote his most enduring hymn. But I can well imagine when life seemed to be crashing down around him and those he loved that he clung to the strongest and surest foundation he knew.

Within a decade “Nun danket alle Gott” had been embraced as something of a German “Te Deum,” particularly as it was sung at the time to Johann Crüger’s new and fitting tune of the same name. That melody eventually found its way into music of J. S. Bach and Felix Mendelssohn, and has become a ubiquitous musical component of thankful and grateful personal and national celebrations the world round.

From the depths of pestilence and plague emerged words and music of faith and trust, and the kind of sure and certain hope to be found only in the strength of their object. In the face of plague or pandemic, the quality of our faith means little. The object of our faith means all.

Now Thank We All Our God

Martin Rinkart (c. 1636), translated by Catherine Winkworth (1858)

Now thank we all our God with heart and hands and voices,

Who wondrous things hath done, in whom this world rejoices;

Who, from our mothers’ arms, hath blessed us on our way

With countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.

O may this bounteous God through all our life be near us,

With ever joyful hearts and blessed peace to cheer us;

And keep us in God’s grace, and guide us when perplexed,

And free us from all ills in this world and the next.

All praise and thanks to God, who reigns in highest heaven,

To Father and to Son and Spirit now be given.

The one eternal God, whom heav’n and earth adore,

The God who was, and is, and shall be evermore.

Michael Denham

That God is our abundance is rooted in the essential and relational character of the Holy One we worship. Jesus himself said, “If you who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”

We clearly understand abundance in terms of plentiful or overly-sufficient supply. We all might need to learn how to live during lean times, but we surely appreciate a surplus!

Scripture seems clear enough that God will supply our needs, but he does so, not through a miserly calculus too often assumed, but with a Father’s wise, loving, and abundant generosity.

We remind ourselves of God’s abundance because we are prone to forget it. I remember as a child leveraging requests of my parents or grandmother with something like, “I’ll never ask you for anything else…ever again!” I was focused on my circumstances and my lack of whatever it was I wanted rather than on their essential and relationally loving character.

Sometimes the answer was yes. Sometimes it was no. When it was no I sometimes pouted for a while or, worse, wallowed in discontentment over not getting my way.

Discontentment has all too frequently plagued God’s people. The Old Testament book of Exodus sometimes says, “So the whole congregation of the children of Israel grumbled.” They grumbled that there wasn’t enough to eat, so God sent them “Manna.” Then they grumbled that there was only Manna. Later when Moses was sequestered before the Lord on Mt. Sinai, they grumbled that he had left them alone. So while God was delivering the very Ten Commandments, the people asked for an idol to worship. Later the prophet Samuel tells us that God’s children were discontent without an earthly king “like other nations.” God told Samuel that it was not the old prophet’s leadership being rejected, but God’s own sovereign role as king. The balance of the Old Testament sadly records Israel’s discontentment and disobedience over one matter or another, and the many opportunities they lost along the way to know – to really know – God’s loyal, steadfast, abundant ways.

Lest we judge them harshly, we too can remember God’s plea to his children in Psalm 81:

O that my people would listen to me, that Israel would walk in my ways!

I would quickly subdue their enemies, and turn my hand against their adversaries.

Those who hate the Lord would cringe before him;

and their time of judgement will be forever.

But I would feed you with the finest of wheat,

and with honey from the rock would I satisfy you.

A blessed Lent to each of you as together we reflect upon the abundant gift of God’s Son our Savior!

                                                                                                                        Michael Denham

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love.

Ephesians 1:3-4

St. Paul’s New Testament letters are full of hope and life, gratitude and grace, maturity and truth. Profound change—total transformation really—characterized his life. He consistently calls us to that same perspective and practice.

One might think that if we live accordingly, life will be happier, safer, and more fulfilling. Yet Paul himself spent a good portion of his influential life in prison, unjustly shackled for the sake of Jesus. Lest we forget, this apostle whom we dare to believe and emulate did not live to a ripe old age with his children at his knee. He was martyred. What a dead end!

Or was it? Haddon Robinson was known to say that today people name their dogs after Nero and their sons after Paul.

A person of deep conviction, energy, and perseverance, St. Paul literally changed the world because he was a grateful man, a thankful man, a joy-filled man, a grace-made man. F. F. Bruce called him an “apostle of the heart set free.” Free from the bondage of sin. Free from condemnation of the law. Free to be a servant of Christ.

Throughout the prologue to his letter to the church at Ephesus, Paul keeps reminding us that all of God’s decisions and actions on our behalf are to “the praise of his glorious grace” that we “might live to the praise of his glory…as God’s own people to the praise of his glory.” This apostle to the Gentiles knew at his core that for all God’s children grace invites gratitude in our worship and in our service in Christ’s name.

Michael Denham

In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him...

Hebrews 5:7-9

In reading these verses from this New Testament sermon-letter, I was reminded of three separate comments from the Unspoken Sermons of George MacDonald, the 19th century British writer, theologian, and pastor who so deeply influenced the developing Christian thought of C. S. Lewis.

Lewis said that he knew of hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the spirit of Christ himself. Here let’s allow MacDonald’s words to act as unvarnished reflection and commentary.

Michael Denham

One is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of feelings and desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to him, “Thou art my refuge.”

When we no longer feel the truth, we shall not therefore die. We live because God is true. We know we live because we have understood the word that God is truth. We believe in the God of former vision, and we live by that word therefore, when all is dark, and there is no vision.

He could not see, could not feel him near; and yet it is “My God” that he cries. Thus the will of Jesus, in the very moment when his faith seems about to yield is finally triumphant. It has no feelings now to support it, no beatific vision to absorb it. It stands naked in his soul and tortured, as he stood naked and scourged before Pilate. Pure and simple and surrounded by fire, it declares for God.

            I meet most weeks very early on Friday morning with a covenant group of six other men. It’s a diverse gathering representing several professional backgrounds and church traditions. I’ve been with them 14 years, but they were meeting long before I was asked to join them.

            As you might expect, we’ve witnessed lots of change, and no small amount of challenges over the years: family issues, health issues, job issues, church issues, weddings, births of grandchildren, the moving away or the passing of friends.

            Through it all, there’s been a remarkable measure of faithfulness and the kind of personal concern and support likened to the “coming along side” ministry of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes, this has required active, intentional listening and, if sought, careful counsel. Other times, it has called for simple presence and quiet contemplation—when God’s Spirit conveys to the throne of grace deep, verbally-inexpressible yearning, confusion, or pain.

            Such has been our course since early last week, when one of us lost his son, a 31 year old man married just three years ago. He and his wife had traveled briefly to California for a friend’s wedding. She was going to stay there a few days longer to visit another friend. He flew back home for work.

            That night he had supper with his family and, because they had been dog sitting for him, he spent the night at his parents’ home.

            The next morning they were preparing breakfast when they realized his clock alarm was still ringing. His Dad went to awaken him, and discovered that he had died in his sleep.

            Through all the ensuing turmoil of the week, they discovered viscerally that, though life may eventually be good again, for them it will never be the same. Of course, every moment of the day and night around the world many people discover the same thing. We all recognize this. But this was OUR friend, and this was HIS son.

            OUR friend was the one who had to call his daughter-in-law in California to deliver what he told her would be the worst news she had ever heard. It was OUR friend who wondered aloud to us how God would eradicate from his mind the image of his lifeless son that morning. It was OUR friend whose older son would momentarily and in grief shake his fist and rage at heaven.

            We told OUR friend to let him rage; that God can take it. I told him that pouring out our heart to God is one of the relieving features of the Psalms:

Out of the depths I cry unto you, O Lord! Lord, hear my voice!

            Sometime after our friend asked, “How do we walk through this?” Psalm 16 came to mind.

            Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge.

                        I say to the Lord, “You are my Lord;

                                    I have no good apart from you…

                        I bless the Lord who gives me counsel;

                                    in the night also my heart instructs me.

            I have set the Lord always before me;

                        Because he is at my right hand,

                                    I shall not be shaken.

            Therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices;

                        my flesh also dwells secure.

            For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol,

                        or let your holy one see corruption.

            You make known to me the path of life;

                        in your presence there is fullness of joy;

                                    at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

                Psalm 16:1-2, 7-11

You make known to me the path of life;

at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

            Sometimes, there is only enough light on our path for the next step. Sometimes, pleasures forevermore come just in little increments. But these still are sustaining and guiding graces from God’s hand.

            Sometimes, we all need even unspoken reminders from those who love us and who come alongside us that the Lord is here, and that we never walk alone.