Author: Tim Ehrhardt

I'm just a common ordinary pastor, chaplain, father, grandfather, and dog owner who loves the smell of a genuine leather Bible and the aroma of its message. I'm on a quest to track down the best Bibles, how to best read and use them, and to discover the encouragement inside.

Beginning Again

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Christian Spirituality BlogLeave a comment

20171128_065632_001

“The Lord has promised that he will not leave us or desert us.” –Hebrews 13:5

In thirty-two years of marriage, my wife and I have moved twenty-five times.  Yes, you read that right.  Some of our moves were unspectacular ventures across town.  But others were major moves from one state to another, starting a new job and finding new friends.  By far, the hardest moves have been the ones that we didn’t see coming.  It’s one thing to plan far in advance; it’s quite another thing when you need to quickly uproot.

It’s likely you have neither moved as much as us, nor been in the position of having so many new beginnings.  Yet, it is quite likely that you have had a major change of life, either wanted or unwanted.  Whether it is divorce, death, leaving a church or neighborhood, or any number of significant changes, there is one reality that will never ever change:  God has given the promise that wherever we go, he is with us; the Lord will not abandon us.

Life never stays the same.  Even if a person were to make a conscious decision that nothing would ever change in his/her life, that person would still inexorably grow older day after day, year after year.  Even if a mother wants her little one to stay a child forever, it will not happen.  Eventually, we all must come to grips with the great truth that change is a very important part of life.  We all need to, at some point, begin again.

In this time of year, the Advent season and the approach of Christmas, we can gain great comfort from a God who feels what we feel and has experienced what we have experienced.  Sometimes we might get the notion that God doesn’t really know what we are going through because he is so much different than us.  But the incarnation of Jesus Christ says different.  If you think about it, the largest and most significant move of all time was God moving from heaven to earth.  There is nothing more radical than the Son of God becoming a human.  There is no greater movement.

“The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood,” says Eugene Peterson’s translation of John 1:14 concerning Christ’s movement from heaven to earth.  Because Jesus made his big divine move, it brings hope and meaning to our little movements here on this earth.  God is not so otherworldly that he has no understanding of what we go through every day.  The Lord Himself began again with a move like no other.

The promise given to us that God will not abandon us comes in the context of being afraid of what will happen to us because of a lack of money and power.  Surrounding the promise are these words: “Don’t fall in love with money.  Be satisfied with what you have.  The Lord has promised that he will not leave us or desert us.  That should make you feel like saying, ‘The Lord helps me! Why should I be afraid of what people can do to me?’”

God is not some white-bearded old dude who is clueless to our concerns and needs.  God isn’t sitting in his heavenly recliner asleep and snoring.  Instead, God is attentive and engaged in our happenings.  And he has done it through the Lord Jesus, in his incarnation.  “Jesus understands every weakness of ours… so whenever we are in need, we should come bravely before the throne of our merciful God.  There we will be treated with undeserved kindness, and we will find help.” (Hebrews 4:15-16).

Perhaps this holiday season you are lonely.  Maybe you are grieving a loss.  It could be that you, like me, have made a move and find yourself beginning yet again.  Your frame of mind right now might be that you can barely see beyond today and cannot even imagine what will happen tomorrow.  No matter the circumstance, regardless of who you are, where you have been, or where you are going, there is a God who exists on heaven and earth who completely knows and understands your situation.  And he stands ready to help you begin again and start something new.

Awakening to Love

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Christian Spirituality BlogLeave a comment

20171126_063209_001

Quite frankly, love is something that everyone on planet needs.  We all require to both receive and to give love.  But not everyone has a heart open to accepting love, and, so, find it nearly impossible to dispense love.  However, the good news is that love is near to each one of us.  We only need to reach and touch it because it is so close.

We have all likely heard the dictum “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.”  Even if we have not used the phrase, the concept is common throughout the world.  Perhaps the chief hindrance to receiving and giving love is this reciprocal notion.

For example, much of Western society turns on the wheels of transactions.  This is seen in the many words we have for money and financial exchanges:  bills; coins; cash; credit and debit cards; stocks and bonds; bank accounts; 401k; paychecks, etc.  You get the idea.  We can scarcely imagine a culture without putting something into an account so that we can engage in commerce and consumerism.

None of this is neither inherently bad or good; it just is.  A problem arises when people allow the idea of transactions to seep into relationships.  When a person chooses to view the world primarily through the financial lenses of a transaction, we set ourselves up for a deficit of love.

It works something like this:   A parent invests time, money, and resources into a child’s life.  Mom and Dad do everything they can to set up little Johnny for success in this life (which, by the way, is often defined as getting a good paying job someday and being financially independent).  But when little Johnny decides to go all avant garde and does not live up to his parents’ expectations, their reaction betrays the transactional: “Look at all we did for you, and you repay us by not going to college and running off to do only God knows what!?”

Put in the context of a workplace, some bosses are only happy when the employee is producing and making money.  Management doesn’t understand why workers are upset.  Paying them more money doesn’t seem to do it.  They only see the transactional view of the world.  In the realm of personal relationships, we sent a Christmas card to that family and they never sent one back, and that makes us mad.  When it comes to God, we went to church, kept our nose clean and were ethical, and now something terrible happens in our lives.  We think God did not make good.  We invested in this God thing and He didn’t follow through with the transaction to give us the good life.

But God operates in a different economy.  Grace trumps transaction.  Grace is the gears and the grease of God’s love toward us.  The good news of Christianity is that God loves us, even when we have nothing to give, and even when we are far from the words and ways of Jesus.

“Christ died for us at a time when we were helpless and sinful.  No one is really willing to die for an honest person, though someone might be willing to die for a truly good person.  But God showed how much he loved us by having Christ die for us, even though we were sinners.” (Romans 5:6-8, CEV).

It is likely that all of us, at some time or another, have felt the sting of someone else’s disappointment with us.  They “invested” in us in some way.  We “repaid” them with a decision or a different direction than what they expected.  Or, it went the other way.  We put time and effort into someone or a group of people, and they didn’t come through for us (e.g. and ironically, pastors and church volunteers often feel this way).

The first step to awakening to love is to forsake a transactional view of relationships and adopt a gracious approach to people and to God.  God is gracious, merciful, and kind.  It isn’t just what He does; it is who He is.  He gives love because He is love.  Until we get that basic understanding, we will flounder in our human relationships because true love will forever be elusive due to the transactional view.

Grace is the most effective way to the world of love, and the best way to the good life.  Yet, surprisingly, this is at no cost to us.  What are we to do?  Give yourselves to God, as people who have been raised from death to life.  Make every part of your life an offering to God.  Don’t let sin keep ruling your lives because you are ruled by God’s kindness and not by the law of the transaction.  Awaken to love because God is love. (Romans 6:12-14; 1 John 4:8-11)

Letting Go

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Christian Spirituality BlogLeave a comment

20171207_091111

Across the street from where I live is a small old cemetery.  Each morning, after arising, I go to the large patio window facing the old tombstones and I am reminded of the brevity of life.  Yes, we all shall die.  From dust we came, and to dust we shall return.  But the daily look at the graveyard is much more than a future reminder of what awaits us all; it is also a very present call for me to die to myself.

One way of looking at our lives is to discern that it is a pilgrimage into the inner depths of our souls.  As we move within, there is a great need to put away selfishness, arrogance, and the hubris of settled certainty about everything.  When I became an adult, I discovered that life was not all about doing whatever I wanted (as I so naively thought as a kid).  Instead, life was also full of responsibilities, stewarding my work, school, and relationships.  I found that if I was to do anything well, it involved a significant degree of death to self.  When I married my lovely wife, I quickly discovered that marriage was a whole lot more than sex and being fed grapes from a beautiful woman while lounging on the couch.  Instead, it was a new journey of dying to my expectations and learning to meet the needs of this other person.  And, just when I thought I might be getting a handle on this new way of life, I became a father.  Now my whole life seemed upside-down caring for this helpless little baby girl that only screamed and pooped if she was not sleeping and eating.  My goodness, more death to self so that I may care for another.

I could go on and on with this motif of death (the Apostle Paul certainly did! i.e. Romans 6).  Caring for others as a pastor; becoming a grandfather; being attentive to the great needs of society and the world; it all involves being reminded each day that the cemetery awaits me.  As I write, the Christian Church is well into the season of Advent.  The coming of Christ is quite the fascinating and gracious reality.  If you think about it, Jesus could have just appeared on earth.  He could have shown up as a fully developed adult ready for his ministry.  Jesus could have circumvented the whole thing about experiencing the pain of growing and learning.  But, instead, he came to earth through a woman.  The King of the universe gestated in the womb of Mary and was born in humble circumstances.  He was a baby, a child, a young man, and a teacher and Savior.  Jesus learned obedience through what he suffered (Hebrews 2:10-18).  And then he died.  But death could not hold him in the grave.

When I look at that old cemetery I am also reminded of a bigger picture, and a larger portrait that God is painting.  I am daily learning, even now, to continually die to myself so that Christ might live in me.  He must grow and gestate within, overtaking me so that His life might be preeminent.  More of Him, less of me.  He must increase; I must decrease.  But out of that death to self, something extraordinary and supernatural occurs:  resurrection to a new life.  Someday, just as Christ came in his first Advent, He will come again in a second Advent.  The graves will open.  With the presence of Christ in me, I shall rise again, just as He did.

There cannot be a resurrection without a death.  All great spiritualities have in common the need to let go.  Christianity just puts it in the frame of dying to self and living for Jesus so that the world will be blessed by encountering the great truth that He is Immanuel, God with us.

The graveyard does not have the last word.  It is a daily reminder that I must die.  But it is also an abiding picture that new life is possible through death, both in this life and in the life to come.

The Gift of Tears

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Christian Spirituality BlogLeave a comment

the gift of tears

“Jesus began to cry.” (John 10:35, CEB)

I believe that one of the tragedies of our contemporary Western society is that far too many people cry alone.  Their tears go unnoticed by others.  They cry in secret.  The fact that people tend to apologize for their tears in public testifies that we are uncomfortable with weeping.  Maybe it’s awkward because we can’t explain the science of crying – it’s just so darned subjective and based in emotions and feelings.  Maybe it’s ignored and denigrated because crying is viewed as some sign of weakness.  After all, real men don’t cry; and, women who cry are just irrational (so says much of the culture).  But I think there is a more sinister reason for such a paucity of tears in our society:  We are more and more lacking the ability to empathize with others.

We see natural disasters destroy people’s lives, and we don’t cry.  We see terrible human carnage in mass shootings, and we don’t cry.  We see statistics on the staggering numbers of sexual abuse and assault, and we don’t cry.  We see war across the planet with both soldiers and innocents killed, and we don’t cry.  Instead, we use these very real human calamities and catastrophes to advance our own political agenda.  We opine and drone on about how things should be, all the while adding to the carnage with unfeeling words and calloused hearts.

I submit to you that a significant reason a person like Jesus was not racially bigoted, constantly grumpy, blindingly selfish, and aloof toward the needs of others is that he had the ability to cry on behalf of others.  Perhaps we have a crisis of virtue, bravery, truth, and concern for the common good today because we are not in touch with the need to cry on behalf of others.  Jesus said, “Blessed are those mourn” (Matthew 5:4) because he knew the power of tears.  Crying not only cleanses our own souls but also the griefs of others. It connects us with people’s pain, and does not let us remain detached to the brokenness of the world.  God’s stamp of approval is on those who are able to cry, to weep, to mourn for others.  Godliness is not found among the opinionated arm-chair politician.  Instead, heartfelt weeping and wailing over the hurts of humanity is next to godliness.

Prayer, then, becomes not a means of presenting my wish list to God but the vehicle whereby I mourn the sins of the nation; intercede for my enemies; offer petitions for those who mistreat and persecute me; and, flat-out cry for the many people who are now experiencing the pain of living in a broken and fallen world (Matthew 5:44).  A lack of civility and gracious discourse betrays a terribly sad lack of prayer for others.  One of the greatest gifts we can give to other people, whether we like them or not, is to cry for them, especially if they cannot cry for themselves.

We are told in Holy Scripture that the Spirit himself intercedes in prayer for us with groans that words cannot express (Romans 8:26-27).  If the Blessed Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit cry over the world and its inhabitants, then we have all the theological reason necessary to be about the business of weeping.  It is tears, and not so much words or social action that will cleanse, purge, and wash away the ills and evils of our current moral dilemmas.  One of the beautiful things about this is that without exception every single person has the biological equipment and the image of God within to cry.

If we find ourselves unable to do this important activity of crying, then this is where we need to allow another person to cry on our behalf.  And that takes sharing your story with another person.  Is there a trusted person for whom you can share your story?  Have you ever shared your story with God?  Can you imagine God crying over you and groaning over the wrongs done to you by others?  Are you willing to listen without judgment to another’s story?  Will you allow yourself to stop biting your lower lip and let the tears flow?  Will you see tears as a gift from God?