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Week 48 1 Thessalonians

The church was in the city of Thessalonica. I remember the back-story of how Paul & Silas landed in a Philippian jail. When they got out they headed for Thessalonica.
I check my bible atlas. Thessalonica was probably a port town, tucked right up at the end of a big gulf on the north-western shoulder of the Aegean Sea. Looking east I see Apollonia, then Amphipolis, and then Philippi (maybe about two hundred crow-flying kilometres east of Thessalonica). The Thessalonica story in Acts says that Paul spoke to people in one of the synagogues. Some Jewish people believed in the Lord, and so did: a large group of godly Greek men and also many important women of the city. A mixed congregation.
The Acts story adds a sequel about an angry mob accusing Paul & Silas of insurrection. But in his letter Paul doesn’t make a big deal about getting run out of town. He focuses on what happened to the people who believed: you turned away from idols to serve the true and living God. And…you are looking forward to the coming of God’s Son from heaven.
It’s a condensed version, a synopsis of a believing person’s life. I realize my favourite idols aren’t any good to me; I turn away from them so that I’m facing the true and living God; and now I’m looking in the right direction for the Lord when he comes back from heaven.

Note: quotes from Acts 17:4, 1 Thessalonians 1:9-10 (NLT)

Week 48 Colossians

One benefit of reading through is that if I’m thinking about a topic and want to get a better idea of what-all the bible says about it then I get to track that idea all the way through…beginning to end.
I’ve been trying to keep a list of what the bible says about God. When I get to Colossians I see this: Christ is the visible image of the invisible God. So I record that God is invisible. I can’t see him.
In the material world we put quite a bit of weight on what we can see. Something I can see is way up on my believability scale. Invisible things? Way down. The demand for visibility is pretty strong. If I can’t see something then I’m asking: does it even exist? Seeing is believing.
Which means that God not being visible puts some downward pressure on the Believability Quotient.
But that’s all beside the point. I’m tracking what the bible does say about God, not what I think it should. And it says here that he’s invisible.

Note: quote from Colossians 1:15 (NLT). Because my What-is-God-Like list focuses on God and not Christ I’m most interested in the God-is-invisible part of this verse. But to tell you the truth I think I’m cheating a bit there. I think Paul’s big idea is that the invisible God – after a long stint of invisibility – is visible-ized starting in Matthew. The main point? The Lord Christ imagizes the invisible God.

Week 47 Philippians

One of my reading-through rules is: don’t look back!
But yesterday Paul said: don’t worry about anything . And since I was worried about something today I broke the rule and looked back.
I looked back at not worrying about anything.
On the surface Don’t Worry About Anything is a kind of nice sentiment. It even sounds like it has substance. But as a free-standing, independent slogan it’s not really too helpful or useful. It tells me not to feel what I’m feeling. Not be what I’m being. And not much else.
Today I notice that verse six isn’t just four words long after all. Paul started with the four words: Don’t Worry About Anything. But then he went right on to add:
instead pray about everything
tell God what you need
thank him for all he has done.
So Paul is offering me an Anxiety Alternative.
He’s not saying don’t worry and just try to be happy.
He’s saying an if and a then – if you’re worried then you should pray to the Lord. According to Paul prayer is an actionable alternative to anxiety.
He seems to be saying that once I recognize I’m anxious I can take the step of telling the Lord, and even thanking him.
Speaking to the Lord is an Anxiety Management Tool.

Note: quote from Philippians 4:6 (NLT). And verse seven goes on to promise an alternative outcome, an anxiety replacement.

 

Week 47 Philippians

In the final chapter there’s a phrase I’d underlined sometime before: be anxious for nothing. It caught my attention.
I wondered what it said in a different version. A guy I know left a beat-up old bible at my place quite awhile ago and never asked for it back. So I got it and looked up the verse: do not be anxious about anything. (The guy had highlighted different sentences here-and-there in his bible – blocks of text in blue, yellow, pink, green, orange. He’d used a blue marker on verse six.)
I looked at another version: don’t worry about anything. (Someone who used that bible at some point had circled verse six.)
I remember that the Lord said something like this back in August so I checked: don’t worry about everyday life.
The Lord then, and Paul now seem to be saying that when I come to belief in the Lord anxiety is not really supposed to be part of the mix – I don’t just convert my pre-religious anxieties to new religious ones. Anxiety is one of things I’m dragging along from my former life, my life before-the-Lord.
Still, for me it’s a nearly impossible thing not to feel, nearly impossible not to be anxious, and I finish chapter four with the same uneasy feeling I had back in Matthew in August, a bit anxious about how I hang onto anxiety.

Note: quotes from Philippians 4:6 (NASB, NIV, NLT) and Matthew 6:25 (NLT)

Week 47 Philippians

In chapter three Paul is thinking back to some of the benefits he’d had – good family, social class, education, status, employment. Things like that.
Under normal circumstances we chalk those up as advantageous.
But now Paul’s rethinking the traditional advantage-disadvantage calculus. He’s expanding its scope; adding another factor. He says: I once thought all these things were so very important, but now I consider them worthless because of what Christ has done. Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the priceless gain of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.
I get a sheet of paper and draw a table with two columns. The left-hand column is headed: Low Value, and the right column says: High Value. In Paul’s Comparative Value Table the right-hand column only has room for one item: knowing the Lord. Everything else goes on the left.
No matter how many really good things – all the under-normal-circumstances High Value things – that I’ve got going for me…all of them go under Low Value.
Of course it’s not an absolute scale (fortunately). It’s a comparative one. And the key thing for me to keep in perspective is that knowing the Lord is so stupendously, astronomically, titanically, gigantesquely more valuable than all my other advantages, skills, efforts and benefits combined that, by comparison everything else is more-or-less valueless.

Note: quote from Philippians 3:7-8 (NLT)

Week 47 Philippians

There was conflict in the church in Philippi and so Paul offered some conflict-reduction advice. Three verses – seven quick-hitters – on unity-in-the-community. The one that slowed me down a bit was: be humble, thinking of others as better than yourself.
Humble is easier to read and say than be.
Anyway Paul went on to use an example of someone being humble. The Lord!
I thought back to the four gospels and remembered stories about the Lord teaching, advising, helping, healing. But now Paul is telling me a kind of preface, a back story:
Though he was God, he did not…cling to his rights as God
He made himself nothing
He took the humble position of a slave and appeared in human form
And in human form he obediently humbled himself even further by dying.
The humbling of the Lord. The Great Reduction.
So this is a bit of a Supplement to the Gospels, something to add to the gospel-story mix. In all his teaching, advising, helping, healing, in all his fame and notoriety the Lord was operating as a slave. A giant step-down from majesty.
And getting back to his original point Paul wonders why I should be surprised at having to be humble-as-a-slave.
By comparison to the Lord it’s only a Little Reduction for me. Still, it’s a very hard thing to do.

Note: quotes from Philippians 2:3, 6-8 (NLT)

Week 46 Ephesians

I read the last two chapters of Ephesians today.
One of the verses said: let no one deceive you with empty words. It was underlined, so it had made some kind of impression on me before.
Empty words.
When I see a clear glass bottle with nothing inside I say it’s empty. If I tip it over nothing comes out. What value can it offer me? None. So I tend to think that the empty bottle’s contents are just neutral nothingness, value = zero.
But Paul seems to be saying that even though an empty word has nothing it can actually give me, it can take something away. Because an empty word can deceive.
You’d figure that if an empty word’s value is not +100, not +10, not even +1 then its value is zero. But from the sound of it empty words keep heading south past zero into negative country: -1, -10, -100.
It sounds like an empty word can be positively nothing, and negatively something. Floating around in its apparently Neutral Xero-ness it isn’t value-neutral – it’s more like value-negative.
I wonder how many words I hear in a day. Ten thousand? I wonder about estimating their value.
I thought about the serpent sliding into paradise with his empty words. In my bible there are only forty-five of them in Genesis three. Positively empty words, but super-potent in deceptual-izing negative power.

Note: quote from Ephesians 5:6 (NASB)

Week 46 Ephesians

I noticed it today because of what I read yesterday.
On Wednesday Paul wrote a description of what a guy’s condition is before he believes in the Lord (the account is pretty hard to swallow; my guess is that many people won’t because of its unappealing taste).
Then today I get to chapter four and Paul is telling his audience not to be like people who don’t believe. He says: they are hopelessly confused. Their closed minds are full of darkness; they are far away from the life of God because they have shut their minds and hardened their hearts against him. They don’t care anymore about right and wrong, and they have given themselves over to immoral ways. Their lives are filled with all kinds of impurity and greed.
Reading Wednesday-Thursday back-to-back is doubly depressing.
Anyway…two things:
I’m reading through and trying to put things together as I go. What the bible says about ground-level human being is pretty important, and I’ve landed on some good material about it two consecutive days.
Second thing I notice is this. Paul is writing to believers. He’s talking here about how people who believe live; should live. And he starts by telling them how not to: live no longer as the ungodly. Which sounds to me like people who believe in the Lord could be living – maybe are living – like the ungodly.
Which sounds like life-after-belief has potential to be kind of muddy.

Note: quote from Ephesians 4:17-19 (NLT)

Week 46 Ephesians

There’s a sort-of concept in bible reading that I call the Don’t-Really-Get-It-Until-Later Principle. It goes like this:
I read something;
I don’t get it;
I keep reading;
Then I read something later that throws light on the something I didn’t get.
I thought about that today when I read chapter two. Paul’s talking about what life is like for people before they believe the Lord. The way he described it was:
Once you were dead
Doomed forever because of your many sins…
Obeying Satan, the mighty prince of the power of the air
He is the spirit at work in the hearts of those who refuse to believe God
All of us used to live that way, following the passions and desires of our evil nature.
So how does that relate to the Don’t-Really-Get-It-Until-Later Principle? When I read chapter two I thought back more than ten months to Adam and Eve. Genesis says they disobeyed, were expelled from Eden, and had to make their way in a fallen world. The story is pretty thin gruel. But Ephesians supplements it with extra information: suddenly A&E were internally dead, naturally evil, staring doom in the face, completely whammied by the smooth demonic spirit who’d crawled into their souls and poisoned their systems.
Not very happy reading. But it made chapter two a value-added text for me.

Note: quote from Ephesians 2:1-3 (NLT)

Week 46 Ephesians

Halfway through the first chapter I realize I’ve been dropped into the deep end of the pool.
That first long paragraph – verses three-to-fourteen – is content heavy to say the least.
I was wondering what I could do with it. Thought it might be an idea to copy out each phrase one-under-the-other like an ingredient list. See if re-formatting it might help open up anything for me.
But I didn’t have time.
What I did do was write the verse numbers – 3, 4, 5…14 – in a column down the page. Then I re-read each verse, counted up how many distinct-information-phrases (DIPs) I could find and wrote the number beside each verse. There were about 21 DIPs in the twelve verses.
That exercise didn’t help much. I still had the feeling that Paul was kind of piling-on with a lot of DIPs (some of them pretty complicated). Wondering why.
It occurred to me that something else might be going on. I’d just finished reading Galatians and in Galatians Paul reduced the gospel to a pretty basic formula: if I believe that the Lord lived, died as my substitute, and came back to life, then I’ll be born into spiritual life. That’s it.
So was Paul changing his tune for the Ephesians? Adding-on a bunch of extras? I really doubt it. He’d already said what he thought of different gospels. I think it’s the same gospel but here in Ephesians drawn up in quite a bit more detail.