The priority of love over possessions was brought home to me deeply and poignantly some ten years ago. My wife of twenty-five years was dying of cancer. We had been on the staff of a Christian organization all our married lives, and our income had usually hovered around barely adequate. If we went out to eat, it was to Burger King or the local cafeteria. We seldom had discretionary income.

Two things we did have lots of, though, were love and fun. My wife had elected to be a full-time, stay-at-home mom. She spent hours with the children when they were small, and after they were in school she never missed a game or scholastic event in which they participated. When I left for the office each morning, she always stood at the door to wave a loving good-bye. Our standard of living could have been described as “a meal of vegetables.” But we had lots of love, and we enjoyed life.

With this history of twenty-five years of love and the realization that my wife was probably dying, I came across Proverbs 15:16-17 one day in my Bible reading. As I read, I wept for joy. I wrote in the margin of my Bible, “Thank you, Father, for a home with love.”

My wife has now been with the Lord for ten years, but still today “her children arise and call her blessed” (Proverbs 31:28). There is joy in fearing God and in the wisdom that comes from it.

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Psalm 128

How blessed is everyone who fears the LORD,
Who walks in His ways.
When you shall eat of the fruit of your hands,
You will be happy and it will be well with you.
Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine
Within your house,
Your children like olive plants
Around your table.
Behold, for thus shall the man be blessed
Who fears the LORD.
The LORD bless you from Zion,
And may you see the prosperity of Jerusalem all the days of your life.
Indeed, may you see your children’s children.
Peace be upon Israel!

In August of this past year, I spent my last day as the Associate Pastor of a church and a flock that I had done my best to love and help lead for 3 years. The decision to make such a move was mutual between myself and the elders of the church – elders who I still respect and care for – and my leaving was not owing to any moral failure or sin issue, but what we summed up best as “philosophy of ministry differences.” The decision, in some ways, was the result of discussions that had happened for over a year and a half, and yet it was also a decision that my wife and I came to see in a single afternoon. It was difficult for everyone, and I struggled with whether or not it was the right decision for weeks and months after it was made. Yet God has brought us peace, and I know now that it was a choice he led us into.

After that decision was made, we did our best to leave well, and were helped immensely in that task by the transparency and support of the church and its leadership. I had seen and heard of people leaving poorly, as many of us have, and Andrea and I wanted more than anything to leave with grace and love, doing no damage to the church or the name of Christ, but rather modeling the truth of the gospel. We were far from perfect in the process, but, by God’s grace, we believe Jesus was glorified in it.

Since our last Sunday there, Andrea and I have been seeking God’s direction for our lives. We have wrestled hard with how God would have us serve his church next. We spoke with many friends and a few strangers, seeking wisdom from anyone God brought across our path. I sent resumes out, made phone calls, and ate many breakfasts and lunches with some amazing men of God, all of which God used to reveal my heart for the next ministry he was going to take us into. I talked with churches filled with beautiful, God-fearing men and women seeking a pastor to lead them. I was blessed by the opportunity to visit and preach at many churches in the area I currently live, and it was a joy to serve the people and pastors of these places. My family also grew to love a church down the road from us, where my kids participated in their inaugural Christmas program and I sat under caring, Bible-centered elders when we were not serving somewhere else. I even took a seasonal job that lasted 2 days – 2 humbling, educational days.

In all of this, we have learned much – some of which we are aware of and much of which we are not. These months have been filled with many happy times, as our family was able to be together often, and yet this time has been harder than we ever thought it would be. Our uncertainty and wrestling have shaken every aspect of our lives – our marriage, our parenting, our understanding of the church, and more – and we have been graciously forced to become more and more dependent on Christ.

And now, in what is our loving Father’s perfect timing, we are being ushered out of this season of uncertainty into the next stretch of our journey.

Despite all of the resumes sent and phone calls made, God used our Christmas letter to reconnect us with the church we attended during my time in seminary. My friend Mark, who is a member and elder at the church, called in January after reading of what God was doing in our lives and asked if I was interested in pastoring in Louisville, Kentucky. We all prayed, and after a trip to speak with the elders about possibilities and to preach on a Sunday morning, we all came to agree that God was leading us to pursue the possibility of me (re)joining Grace Fellowship Church, this time as their Senior Pastor. After a few more visits and conversations, it become clear that this was the direction God was leading. On March 27^th the church voted to extend a call to me as their next senior pastor, and I humbly and joyfully accepted.

Throughout this entire process, God has encouraged my heart with Psalm 115:3 – “Our God is in heaven; he does whatever he pleases.” Coupled with that, I have been encouraged by the truth that, in light of the cross, whatever God does, however he does it, and whenever he does it, he can be fully trusted as a good, loving, and gracious Father – “He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?” (Romans 8:32) And so we have walked this part of our journey, trusting God’s hand, though often crying out, “Lord I believe, but please help my unbelief!”

So we are moving to Louisville, Kentucky! We went down there last week, and God provided us with a wonderful house to rent, complete with some built-in bookshelves and a beautiful backyard. Our plan is to pack up a truck the week after Easter and head south to join a group of believers that we already dearly love, and, by God’s grace and through his strength, I’ll join in leading Grace Fellowship Church in continuing to glorify God by shining forth the truth of the gospel to our area. We still need to find someone to rent our condo in Mokena*, and it seems like there are a thousand steps between now and us finally moving, but we know it will all happen very quickly. It’s all very surreal and hard to believe, but such is the way God works.

Many of you have prayed for us and supported us throughout the past months, and we are extremely thankful to God for each of you. God’s grace has been evident in our lives, very often through our friends and family, and we know that his goodness is pursuing us as we follow him into this new endeavor. If you think of it, please continue to pray for us – yes, for the renting of our condo and the move, but even more for God to be glorified as we serve him at Grace Fellowship Church.

O taste and see that the LORD is good;
How blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him!
O fear the LORD, you His saints;
For to those who fear Him there is no want.
The young lions do lack and suffer hunger;
But they who seek the LORD shall not be in want of any good thing.

Psalm 34:8-10

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* If you or someone you know might be interested in renting a 2 bedroom, 2 bath condo in Mokena, please get a hold of Andrea or me. It really is a great home – only about 5 years old, refrigerator, oven, dishwasher, washer/dryer hookups, and lots of windows. We have two parking spaces in the heated garage, and the building has an elevator and is within walking distance of the Metra. There’s even a new candy/ice cream shop in one of the commercial spots on the first floor! If you’re interested, you can email me at andy.sabaka AT gmail DOT com.

I still love the ending, but I have a new favorite scene. The quick background is that Mr. Miyagi had agreed to teach Daniel karate, but up to this point in the film, all we have seen Mr. Miyagi do is burden Daniel with home improvement tasks: wax the cars, sand the floor, and paint the fence. After having spent his day painting Mr. Miyagi’s house, Daniel is fed up, and angrily demands that Miyagi begin teaching him karate or he’s walking. That’s when Mr. Miyagi connects the dots for young Daniel-san:

Again, cinematic genius. And what a teacher! Daniel, without ever knowing it, had been trained to be a lean, mean, crane-kicking machine… and Miyagi had spruced up his house for free!

I’ve thought about that scene a lot, which is somewhat strange, but I think we have all felt like Daniel and angrily wondered what all of the everyday, mundane, frustrating, and difficult times in life are for. When is the real training going start? When am I going to learn how to fight? I often long for times of great growth – concentrated times of training and learning and growing. And those times certainly come and are certainly helpful. But it would seem that God, in his great wisdom as a master teacher, has chosen to train us through the everyday tasks of life that we often grow to hate – wax the cars, paint the fence, sand the floor, paint the house, go to work, watch the kids, clean the house, visit family, unclog the drain, get the oil changed, make dinner, do the dishes, and so on. If these things are superfluous and simply fodder for frustration, than 95% of life is fruitless activity!

But they are not fruitless. In them God is training us and shaping us and molding us into his image, not just in the times we are blessed to spend with him in his word or even in formal study, but in all the stuff of life that we wish we could be done with. Where else could we walk with him and learn patience, love, mercy, and so many other fruits of the Spirit? And it is as we learn these every moment lessons, as we train our spiritual muscles in the midst of life, that God prepares us for the greatest fights of life. Unless we fully engage in the everyday, mundane, frustrating, and difficult times God gives us, we will never be prepared for the moments of great trial and triumph that God places before us.

And even if we never experience a “crane-kick-for-the-win” moment in our lives, we can take comfort in looking to the glory to come:

Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day. For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal. (2 Cor. 4:16-18)

May God grant us grace to not despise the things of life that are so easy to despise, but to embrace them as gifts from the sovereign hand of the Master Teacher, who is always training us and purifying us for the sake of his glory.

So I invited Nate to join me, and we decided to talk about what Scripture has to say about friendship. Our hope was to not only talk about friendship, but to model, through past stories and our interactions during the week, what a true, deep, God-honoring friendship looks like. Of course, our friendship is far from perfect, and I was encouraged in my personal study of God’s Word and in our discussions before, during and after, to be more diligent about being a good friend to my wife and to others in my life. But I would also say that God has been amazingly gracious to us, and I believe that much of our friendship is something to be emulated. When it was all said and done Sunday morning, I was excited to see that we not only communicated God’s heart for friendship, but that the students saw a “flesh and blood” example of the gift that good friends can be.

Yet whatever kind of example the friendship Nate and I have may be, throughout the weekend, in all four sessions that we taught, our hope was to always point the students back to the fact that the gospel is where true friendship is revealed and that the gospel is the only thing that can empower a person to be a true friend. As I studied John 15:12- 17 for our third session, where Jesus reveals that He has chosen us to be His friends, I began to ask the question, “Why? Why has God in Jesus chosen us to be His friends?” From the testimony of Scripture we know that it wasn’t because He was lonely or because there was anything desirable or good in us. We as humans may choose friends because we desire companionship and because we see something likable or attractive in someone else, but neither of those can be reasons why God has chosen us to be His friends.

John’s gospel began to both confuse and enlightening me as to answering the question of why God has chosen us to be His friends. Confusion arose from John 15:14, where Jesus appears to lay out a condition for his friendship, namely the keeping of his commands: “You are my friends, if you do what I command.” So is obedience to the law a requirement for being Jesus’ friends? And what about the verse prior that says there is no greater love seen in the world than when a person lays down his or her life for a friend? Has Jesus only died for those who will keep his commands, given that obedience seems to be a condition for friendship?

Romans 5:6-8 began to bring some loose ends together:  ”For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

The answer to the “why” question begins to emerge, and it is this: God has chosen us to be his friends through the means of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross in order to display to the world a kind of love and grace that we know nothing of. We are in awe of our fellow humans when they die for the sake of a friend – Jesus tells us in John 15:13 that apart from the miracle of redemption, this is the greatest love we can have or see in our fellow humans. But Romans 5 then shows us that there is a kind of love that drives a man to die a horrendous death for the sake of his enemies, and it is that kind of love that shatters all the categories of love that we can fathom. Such love is on display in the cross, and we see then that God has chosen us to be his friends for the sake of his glory.

The amazing overflow of that display of love is that God then makes that kind of a love possible in his chosen friends – he makes us another means of revealing this other-worldly love. John 15:14 then must mean that obedience to his commands is an overflow of friendship with Jesus, not a condition for it. If it was a condition, we would all remain his enemies, but Jesus is saying, “Those whom I have chosen as my friends show evidence of that reality by doing as I command.” And what has he commanded? He has commanded love – love for God and for others. Specifically in this context, Jesus proclaims, “This is my commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you” (15:12; see also 15:17).

Jesus in the gospel empowers us to be a unique people who love as he has loved. We are called to not only love those we like, but to love our enemies. We love them even to the point of death, as Jesus has loved us. It is in loving others in such a radical, self-sacrificing, unselfish way, that we continue to display for the world the unfathomable love of Jesus – a love that led him to die for those who were his enemies so he could make them, not only friends, buts sons and daughters of God. When we love empowered by the gospel and spurred on by the example of Jesus, we shatter the world’s categories for love as Jesus did. We take friendship to a level that those who do not know of the sacrifice of Christ can hardly fathom. And in so doing, we exalt God as the greatest Friend and Father imaginable. As we rely on the strength God supplies, may our friendships, coupled with our love for our enemies, be living examples of the gospel.

1. It has reminded me of the many men and women who are away from home this Christmas, and even those who have met the same situation in times past, serving in the armed forces. I am thankful for them and their families and the sacrifices they make on my behalf, and I pray for their safe return.
2. Christmas is truly about God sending Jesus to bring peace on earth by crushing the power of sin and death, which he has. And yet that peace will be fully realized when Jesus returns a second time to set all things right and rid the world of sin once and for all. May we long for the glorious second coming of Jesus as we remember his humble first coming.

¹Then a shoot will spring from the stem of Jesse,
And a branch from his roots will bear fruit.
²The Spirit of the LORD will rest on Him,
The spirit of wisdom and understanding,
The spirit of counsel and strength,
The spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD.
³And He will delight in the fear of the LORD,
And He will not judge by what His eyes see,
Nor make a decision by what His ears hear;
⁴But with righteousness He will judge the poor,
And decide with fairness for the afflicted of the earth;
And He will strike the earth with the rod of His mouth,
And with the breath of His lips He will slay the wicked.
⁵Also righteousness will be the belt about His loins,
And faithfulness the belt about His waist.
⁶And the wolf will dwell with the lamb,
And the leopard will lie down with the young goat,
And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
And a little boy will lead them.
⁷Also the cow and the bear will graze,
Their young will lie down together,
And the lion will eat straw like the ox.
⁸The nursing child will play by the hole of the cobra,
And the weaned child will put his hand on the viper’s den.
⁹They will not hurt or destroy in all My holy mountain,
For the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD
As the waters cover the sea.

Isaiah 11:1-9

Kelli Sherry and Mel!

It sounds like you already have the CD, Mel, so have fun giving it away, and, Kelli, we hope you and your family enjoy the silliness and seriousness as much as we do. If you didn’t win, just follow the links in the original post to purchase any of the CDs mentioned.

And thanks to everyone for the music suggestions. I have heard good bit of Seeds Family Worship, and our girls enjoy their music a lot too. I’ll have to check out the other ones, though – I’m sure they’re great.

1. Music is something you share. Our kids are too young to have personal music players, so when we listen to music, we listen as a family. It brings us together as we all sing along in the van, dance around in our home, or simply hum along to the songs we love.
2. Music teaches. Whether it’s the truth of the gospel or simply the beauty of the art of music, kids learn when they listen to music.
3. Music creates memories. I have many memories from my childhood that are tied to music. Whether it’s the CD we listened to every vacation or the record we played every Christmas while decorating the tree, listening to those musical collections bring back sweet memories.
4. CDs are small. Not everyone has a space problem in their home, but I love giving my kids CDs because they don’t take up too much physical space. And if I could make the jump from CDs to MP3s, I’d save even more space!

I’m sure I could give more reasons that I enjoy giving my kids the gift of music CDs, but let me instead tell you some of my favorite kids CDs. Our entire family enjoys these selections because they aren’t annoying, they are musically well done, they are fun to listen to, and I like what they communicate to my children. I though this might be a timely post as Christmas approaches, and I also thought it would be fun to do the first giveaway I’ve ever done on this blog. So if you leave a comment here on the blog, maybe listing your favorite kids CD or just saying you want the free one, you’ll be eligible to win (Facebook readers, just click through to the original post). Next Friday (12/10), I will randomly choose a winner to receive a copy of Randall Goodgame and Andrew Peterson’s Slugs and Bugs and Lullabies CD. I’ll get it to you before Christmas so you can choose keep the CD for yourself or give it away. Good luck!

Sovereign Grace Ministries produces some of the best in modern worship music. Their songs are biblically based, theologically rich, and musically enjoyable. This CD, intended for children, is a worship experience for adults and children alike. The entire CD is about the fruit of the Spirit found in Galatians 5, and while there are great applicational points in the lyrics, what I most appreciate about the CD is its focus on the fact that God in Christ is the ultimate embodiment of the fruit of the Spirit. I am constantly led to worship Christ more through the truths in these songs, and the lyrics have even helped me in teaching my children about kindness, self-control, and more. You can listen to samples and purchase the CD by clicking here.

I first heard about this CD over at The Rabbit Room and finally purchased it this past August for Lena’s birthday. I think it is just plain fun to listen to, mixing amusing, true to life lyrics with top-notch music. Seriously, the musicianship on this CD is great. While I am still learning about the nuances of jazz music, each track embodies a different “brand” of jazz music. So if you like jazz music and songs about naps, bellybuttons, and juice, you’ll like this CD. Head over here and you’ll see links for buying the CD (only $10) and even for getting 2 free songs!

I first received Slugs and Bugs and Lullabies for Christmas for myself – I let the girls listen to it though. I’ve always been a fan of Andrew Peterson, and I really enjoy what he and Randall Goodgame have done on this CD – it’s a great mixture of silliness and seriousness and everything in between. As a dad, it is encouraging to hear two dads sing about how much fun they have with their kids, how much they love their kids, and how much they want their children to embrace the truth of the gospel as they have. The new Slugs and Bugs Christmas CD, which was primarily done by Randall and just released last week, has that same great mix, making you laugh out loud on one track and having you contemplating the miracle of Christmas on the next. And just so you won’t say I didn’t warn you – “The Camel Song” has a tremendous knack for getting stuck in your head. Check out the full Slugs and Bugs website here, where you can listen to music samples in the player at the top right. You can buy the CDs from this site or from The Rabbit Room store. Or maybe you’ll win the first one!

Well, those are my current favorite kids CDs, all guaranteed to be completely devoid of all the annoying features you might associate with kids music.

What I dislike about apologetics, then, is not its existence but the way we as Christians often use the truth we learn from it. Maybe an example will help: Imagine I am having a conversation with a non-believing friend – a skeptic. I begin to talk about what I have recently been reading in the book of Exodus, and my friend begins to discount the facts of the deliverance of the children of Israel and their desert wanderings. I’m not sure what to say at that point, so the subject changes, but I determine to find some facts to bring to the table the next time we meet.

So, over our next cup of coffee, I begin to share some new-found information: records from the annals of Egyptian history that hint at Moses, artifacts found in the Sinai dessert, quotations from respectable historians who affirm the events of the Exodus. I lay them all out, complete with photographs and a little reading for my friend to do at home.

At this point, I have appealed solely to the facts of history and the evidence I have found that supports them. I have presented these facts to my friend, who is a reasonable person, and I expect him to admit that my research has convinced him of the reliability of the Exodus account. But what if he doesn’t? What if looks at all of my pictures and quotations and says, “I still don’t believe it’s true”? At that point, having made a case for the truth of Exodus based on history and artifacts, my conclusion may simply be that my friend is closed minded, irrational, or even dumb.

Herein lies my issue: while there are certainly intellectual roadblocks to a person accepting the truth of Christianity that apologetics helps to break down, the real issue is one of faith. And if all I do is appeal to a person’s intellect through means of apologetics, I am winning them more to cognitive agreement than to faith in God through Christ. Understanding the truth of the gospel is certainly a part of true faith – if a person denies the resurrection but claims to be a Christian, they do not have true, saving faith. But if I emphasize apologetics so much so that I miss the necessity of repentance or the fact that faith involves the heart and the will as well as the head, then I am winning someone to something other than true conversion.

So maybe I’ve overstated my case – hate is such a strong word, and it is probably beginning to sound like I am throwing out the baby with the bathwater. But I have often viewed the presentation of the gospel as an argument to be won rather than a miraculous work of the Holy Spirit, whereby God opens the eyes of the blind to see the truth of the gospel. I can polish my presentation and get my facts straight, having an answer to every objection known to man, all of which are right and good. But I cannot argue someone into the faith. I think of Acts 2 and Acts 5:27-33, where in both passages Peter preaches a clear gospel message and calls his hearers to repent and believe, and in both passages it says that they were “pierced in their hearts” or “cut to the quick”. But in Acts 2:37-42 they respond in faith, while in Acts 5:33 they want to kill Peter and the apostles. Same message. Same facts. Same appeal. Completely opposite responses.

Tim Keller in The Reason for God has been helpful to me here. I appreciated the tone of his book and his consistent appeal to the fact that Christianity as revealed in the pages of the Bible is the most reasonable way to understand the world as we all see it. But that was never said to be enough. The ultimate response to the truth of Christianity cannot simply be, “Yeah, Christianity makes sense and all the facts I’ve read seem to show it to be true.” There must always be repentance of our sins, alongside an understanding of the truth of the gospel, a love for the Savior who died for our sins, and a willful submission to his rule in our lives. Apologetics can pave the way to such a life-change, but may we never forget in the midst of all of our reasoned responses to skeptical inquiry that, to borrow from Edwards, only “a divine and supernatural light immediately imparted to the soul” can change a heart of stone to a heart of flesh and cause an enemy of God to humbly bow in repentance and faith.

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¹ Apologetics refers simply to the defense of the Christian faith, and here I am thinking specifically of the use of reason, history, etc. in making that defense

If the observation be meant to imply that the hearing of sermons is not worshipping God, it is founded on a gross mistake indeed, for rightly to listen to the gospel is one of the noblest parts of the adoration of the Most High. It is a mental exercise, when rightly performed, in which all the faculties of the spiritual man are called into devotional action. Reverently hearing the word exercises our humility, instructs our faith, irradiates us with joy, inflames us with love, inspires us with zeal, and lifts us up towards heaven. Many a time a sermon has been a kind of Jacob’s ladder upon which we have seen the angels of God ascending and descending, and the covenant God himself at the top thereof. We have often felt when God has spoken through his servants into our souls, ‘This is none other than the house of God, and the very gate of heaven.’ We have magnified the name of the Lord and praised him with all our heart while he has spoken to us by his Spirit which he has given to men. Hence there is not the wide distinction to be drawn between preaching and prayer that some would have us admit; for the one part of the service softly blends into the other, and the sermon frequently inspires the prayer and the hymn. True preaching is an acceptable adoration of God by the manifestation of his gracious attributes: the testimony of his gospel, which pre-eminently glorifies him, and the obedient hearing of revealed truth, are an acceptable form of worship to the Most High, and perhaps one of the most spiritual in which the human mind can be engaged. (Lectures to My Students, “Our Public Prayer”, pg 53)

Andrea and I had some great discussions over the next 24 hours, so the movie was successful in my mind. And one of our discussions was around the theme of justice. I believe in justice, and I believe God is a God who rejoices in justice. Yet I also believe that He is a God who would have me forsake the pursuit of justice if it meant that I was sacrificing the health of my family and my own mental stability. At that point, Andrea made a very wise observation, namely that maybe we are primarily to seek justice for others but not always (or ever?) for ourselves. That we are to seek the welfare of widows and orphans and the oppressed and the wronged, that we are to call people to be justified by God through Christ, but that we are to most often leave our personal vindication to the hands of the One who does all things well (Rom. 12:19).

I thought of Jesus and the cross, where God, in love, became just and the justifier. Where sin was justly paid for, but where, in the process, an amazing injustice was done to Christ. Jesus, who had done nothing wrong, suffered an excruciating and unjust judgment. He did not seek his own justification, but ours, and modeled that we are to pursue justice for others above ourselves, and maybe at the expense of our own vindication. Such is the call of the Christ-like life:

Never act from motives of rivalry or personal vanity, but in humility think more of each other then you do of yourselves. None of you should think only of his own affairs, but should learn to see things from other people’s point of view. Let Christ himself be your example as to what your attitude should be. For he, who had always been God by nature, did not cling to his prerogatives as God’s equal, but stripped himself of all privilege by consenting to be a slave by nature and being born as mortal man. And, having become man, he humbled himself by living a life of utter obedience, even to the extent of dying, and the death he died was the death of a common criminal. That is why God has now lifted him so high, and has given him the name beyond all names, so that at the name of Jesus “every knee shall bow”, whether in Heaven or earth or under the earth. And that is why, in the end, “every tongue shall confess” that Jesus Christ” is the Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Philippians 2:3-11, Phillips Translation