One Great Question to Ask a Friend

When I was a child my family owned a cottage—a beautiful cottage where I spent every summer of my childhood. On those long, warm, summer evenings, we would sometimes have friends and neighbors from up and down the road converge on our property for giant games of capture the flag. Those were grand nights—the kind of nights that form indelible memories.

One of the things I loved to do when we played capture the flag was to set trip lines. I would string a rope between two trees and wait in the dusk for some unsuspecting person to stumble across it and go down. Looking at it through adult eyes it sounds like a recipe for a cracked skull or broken ankle, but it seemed like good, clean fun back then.

The memory of stringing trip lines flashed into my mind recently, because something I read in a book took me out at the knees, so to speak. And down I went.

Vaughan Robert’s little book True Friendship has a lot to commend it, but there is one thing that stood out more than any other. Before I get to it, though, allow me a brief aside. I’ve thought often about this old blog post from Bob Kauflin:

But even if I don’t read as many books as others, I read. If I’m not reading, I’m relying on my memory. Which seems to be decreasing daily. So I read. I once heard someone say that books don’t change people - sentences do. If I glean two or three sentences from a book that affect the way I think and the way I live, that’s time well invested. So I read. Books give me the opportunity to learn from and about godly, bright, insightful people I’ll never meet. So I read. What I know will always be dwarfed by what I don’t know. So I read. Books help me become more effective at what I do. So I read.

I read for the same reasons. Like Bob, I forget almost everything I read. But I don’t mind, because I don’t want or need to remember everything, so long as I find those two or three sentences that will be resounding in my heart and mind a week or month or year from now.

In Roberts’ book I came across one of those lines, one of those sentences, that has stuck with me and, I think, will continue to do so. It was a question, a simple question aimed at doing what every Christian wants to do: Destroy sin and pursue holiness. Roberts was talking about the kind of friendship men ought to have with one another and the kinds of questions they should be asking each another as they go through life together. Here is what he wants his friends to ask him: If you were the devil, where would you attack yourself?

Yes, that simple question was the trip line. And it leveled me. It’s an obvious question, I suppose. I feel like the guy who discovers that great television show when it’s in its final season and everyone else has been talking about it for years. Yet I don’t think I have ever asked the question of myself and I’m certain I have never asked it of a friend. I’m equally certain a friend has never asked it of me (and I’ve got some pretty good friends who ask me some pretty good questions).

Here’s the thing: We know that Satan and his demons have made a long and scrutinizing study of humanity. They have had millennia to study us, to get to know us, to learn how to tempt us. They have had thirty-seven years to study me, to get to know me, to learn how to tempt me. They have studied us as humanity since the Garden of Eden and I presume they have studied me as an individual since the day I was born. And they must always be asking themselves, “Where can we attack him? Where is he weak? Where is he prone to sin? Where is he lax? Where is he undisciplined? Where is he giving up?”

What I find so helpful about Roberts’ question is that it anticipates an attack in my areas of weakness and calls me not only to identify those vulnerabilities, but to involve a brother in strengthening me right there.

Why don’t you consider asking the question next time you’re with a friend. If you were the devil, where would you attack yourself? The answer will show you exactly where you can help, strengthen, and pray for your friend.

Suffer or Compromise? The Great Collision — John MacArthur

This is from a sermon John MacArthur preached in 2000. Aside from the dated reference to Michael Jordan, who actually retired for the second time in 1999, this message is always relevant:

We know that God uses that suffering to perfect us and to shape us and to humble us and to help us be more prayerful and more trusting in Him, and to also demonstrate His grace to us. But what it’s really saying, folks, is don’t compromise. Because the way you can mitigate your suffering is by compromising, right? It’s hard to live your Christian life in your family, so you compromise. It’s hard to live your Christian life in your school, so you shut your mouth and you compromise. Hard to live your Christian life with your friends, so you compromise, or at the job or wherever it is, and so you compromise. The will of God is that, if you suffer, you suffer for doing what is right. Just keep doing what is right, believing what is right, proclaiming what is right. And if you have to suffer, you suffer.

It’s a hard message to get across today, because the church has bailed on this. We’re in an avalanche of decline in the evangelical church today. There are three steps in that decline. I was preaching this week, all week, to the students, every day of the week at the college or the seminary. And I was telling the seminary students there are three kinds of preaching that show the disintegration of the church. And we’re…we’re in the process now.

Number one, there is Biblical preaching which is, listen, Biblical doctrine in Biblical dress. What that means is you preach the truth of Scripture by the Scripture. You understand that? That’s Bible exposition. In other words, you give divine truth in its Bible dress. And God gave us divine truth, and He dressed it in the Scripture, didn’t He? He put it in the prophets and in the law and in the holy writings of the Old Testament. He put it in the Gospels, and He put in the history of Acts, and He put it in the epistles, and He put it in the Revelation. But he dressed it in Scripture. So Bible dress covers divine truth. And when the church is strong, and when it’s healthy, you will hear Bible doctrine preached in Bible dress, because that’s how God gave it. You will hear the Bible exposited.

You won’t hear that much today. You’ll look long and hard to hear that. The new wave says, “People don’t like the Bible. They don’t relate to the Bible. They can’t connect to the Bible. It’s an antiquainted paradigm. They can’t think that way.” So we believe in…we’re still evangelical, and we believe in the truth of the Bible, but we gotta get it out of that Bible dress. So we preach on…on the Chicago Bulls, and we infuse into some message on Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, something about divine truth. Or we preach on…on some parable that we have invented, some narrative story that we have invented, or whatever it might be. Or we preach on the theological implications of Harry Potter, or whatever it is. You just grab whatever is coming out of the air in the culture. You say you’re an evangelical. You hold to the evangelical truth. But you strip it of its Bible dress, and you redress it in the culture. And you say, “That’s how we’re gonna win the culture.” Truth is, you have just moved away from the Word of God. God gave us Bible truth in Bible dress, because that’s the way He wanted it taught.

The Great Story and the Single Verse

In my neck of the Christian woods, words like narrative, meta-narrative, story, storyline, biblical theology, and big picture abound. I would like to sound a note that may encourage some who, like me, may wonder how this language works to build faith in the human heart.

First, I affirm the common-sense hermeneutical principle that in any message, or essay or poem or novel or scene from a movie or conversation or psalm or gospel or epistle or chapter or verse, it is the parts that give existence to the whole, and the whole that gives meaning to the parts. 

The word “boy,” does not have much meaning. “The boy in the corner,” has more meaning. “Feed the boy in the corner,” has even more. “Feed the boy in the corner with the word of God,” makes the meaning clearer. Without this “whole” (sentence) the meaning of the “part” (feed) would not be clear. And yet it is parts that create the whole. Both parts and whole are crucial for meaning to be transferred from one mind to another.

So I rejoice at every effort to see the big picture of the Bible. The whole story. The narrative from creation to consummation. The clearer the whole, the clearer the parts. And the more clearly we see the parts, the more accurately we will construe the whole.

But here’s the note I want to sound. Not only should the particulars of the Bible be seen in relation to the larger storyline of the Bible, but we should also realize that the story exists to reveal the particulars of God and his ways. And those particular glories of God are seen and enjoyed not mainly by gazing over the whole dazzling landscape of redemptive history, but by focusing on some particular thing God did or said inside the story.

For example, Isaiah 41:10 is a particular promise that has sustained me hundreds of times. (“Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”) I would argue that the whole of Isaiah exists so that I might have that kind of faith-sustaining personal encounter with its particular parts.

Yes, Isaiah is a magnificent whole, and, yes, it fits magnificently into redemptive history for the sake of Christ and his kingdom. But if its particulars do not stun us and gladden us and strengthen our faith and increase our hope and intensify our worship, the big picture will have been in vain. I think, in God’s design, the prophecy of Isaiah exists as a whole, and in its relation to the history of redemption so that its particular promises might be known and loved and trusted by me a Gentile, because of the mystery of Christ.

In profound ways, the whole Bible — the whole of redemptive history — exists to create a place and time and meaning where particular, individual, finite humans can encounter its stunning parts. The parts make up the whole, and so serve the whole. They would have no meaning and no beauty without the whole. But it is just as important to say that the whole exists to give place and time and meaning to the parts so that the parts can be known and experienced and enjoyed.

Most of us simply cannot hold the “whole” — the whole Bible, the whole book, or even the whole chapter — in our minds fully enough or steadily enough to feel our joy rising from its fullness. We read it. We gaze on the grand landscape. But it is this particular promise, this particular act of God, this particular warning, this particular turn of providence, that penetrates most deeply and awakens faith and joy and hope.

A beatitude, a line from Romans 12, a promise in Psalm 23, a warning in Hebrews 3, a miracle in Mark 1 — these are the places where our hearts are broken with contrition or leap with joy.

I recognize that people differ in which aspects of God’s glory move them. Some can hold in their minds a large, sweeping terrain of wonder. I don’t have that gift. Jesus manifests himself to me in the particulars. Granted, these particulars would have no wonder or glory if they were not part of something vastly greater. But it is this particular promise at this particular point in history, this particular time in this particular place that does its Christ-exalting work.

One implication of this for pastors would be that we love both. The big picture and the small brushstrokes. And as we open the whole counsel of God, and the whole story of redemption, let us glory in the brightness of the whole, and make the parts glow like a white-hot filament in a light bulb.