Memorized this verse a couple of months ago, which is an IHOP favorite (and part of the reason that I'm convinced Mike Bickle is still a Navigator at heart):

Proverbs 29:18
Where there is no revelation, the people cast off restraint;
But happy is he who keeps the law.

Mike Bickle, of course, preaches from the first part of the verse: if you have no life vision - no revelation from the Lord about the purpose of your life - you will cast off restraint in how you spend the resources the Lord has entrusted to you. Which is to say (in other translations), you will perish.

This is a vital point, and worthy of a lot of thought.

But the thing that struck me was the second half of the verse... "Happy is he who keeps the law."

When I've read verses like this, I've always tended to assume that this means something like "God will bless those that keep the law." or "Everything will be better for you in the long run if you keep the law."

But it occurred to me that that's not what it says. What it says is "Happy is he who keeps the law." Present tense.

I'm reminded of a quote from Dallas Willard's The Divine Conspiracy, in reference to Matthew 5:18-19. This is a paraphrase, since I don't have the book in front of me:

The law, as God intended it, will never cease to be vital for God's followers on the earth. This is because the law is simply the right way to live - it is what God made us for.


Much of the western Protestant church is stuck fighting the battle of the Reformation, hung up on the question of eternal salvation, stoutly preaching against "works righteousness", and leery of any suggestion that we should actually keep God's law. The theory in church seems to be that we shouldn't be hard on ourselves, and we should keep reminding ourselves that we're forgiven; even though we're not obeying the commands of Christ, even though we don't really intend to obey the commands of Christ, even though most of us don't even know the commands of Christ. Eventually, by the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit (who is active in us whether we seek Him or not), we will become like Christ. If it's not happening now, it will happen "in an moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet."

Well... maybe. It certainly would be a lot easier if it did work that way. But in the meantime, being stuck in sin is miserable.

Sin is misery - even in the here and now.

Those who keep the law are happy.

I would rather try to keep the law. Perhaps by the grace of God, the power of the Holy Spirit (in Whom I want to actively walk), and a little help from my friends, it's possible to make some progress.

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I've been spending a lot of time reading Psalm 119 for the last few months. Can't entirely explain why, but I absolutely love this psalm now. I've gotten one gem after another out of it. I guess it's grown out of thoughts about obedience to Christ and the purpose of the law; but there are actually some amazing promises buried in those 176 verses.

More on those some other time perhaps. For today, I wanted to point out this verse:

Psalm 119:128
Therefore, all Your precepts concerning all things
I consider to be right;
I hate every false way.


It's not a new idea, of course, that the word of God is absolutely accurate and trustworthy. But it struck me in a new way from this verse. Western civilization is currently based on the postulates that:

1. The truthfulness of all moral and religious ideas is dubious and they should be held somewhat tentatively.
2. Moral and religious ideas should be contained to very specific sets of issues.


In the midst of the mental and moral wandering that ensues from imbibing those assumptions, it is like a breath of fresh air when the psalmist writes, "All Your precepts concerning all things I consider to be right."

Life is a lot simpler when you allow God to define what's true and what a good life is.

There is an answer to "life, the universe, and everything," and it's a lot easier to understand than "42".*



* Reference to Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A humorous, somewhat insightful, but ultimately empty book.

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I wrote the following back in May, when I was just beginning to dig into the Sermon on the Mount. I haven't looked at it since then, but I think it's still pretty accurate to what I'm thinking.

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Trying to capture some thoughts about this concept of extravagant devotion to Jesus.

Mary of Bethany was extravagantly devoted to Christ. She set aside other legitimate ministries (exercising hospitality for Jesus Himself with Martha) in order to simpy sit at the Lord's feet. And when she had the opportunity to give a gift to Jesus when she understood that He was determined to go to the Cross, she gave extravagantly - like the widow's mite, she gave all that she had, except that she had a flask of "very costly oil of spikenard" worth 300 denarii (Mike Bickle referred to that as the equivalent of $40,000). She chose to "waste" her life and possessions on Jesus instead of wasting them on a more "acceptable" worldly life.

What does it look like to have this kind of extravagant devotion to Jesus?

I think it's fairly easy to define when it's measured financially - giving a huge gift like Mary, especially when that gift does not have the effect of causing you to "receive your reward in full" in the present life in the form of approval from people.

But is it possible to be extravagant in obedience? Does that concept even make any sense? Extravagant obedience seems like an oxymoron.

Mike Bickle said that Jesus never required or demanded the kind of extravagance that Mary or John the Baptist or Paul wanted to give to Him in their lives.

And yet... there are these commands of Jesus:

Mark 12:30 "AND YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND, AND WITH ALL YOUR STRENGTH.'"

It's pretty hard to be more extravagant than "all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, all your strength."

Mark 10:21 Looking at him, Jesus felt a love for him and said to him, "One thing you lack: go and sell all you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me."

How do you get more extravagant than "sell all you possess and give to the poor?"

The real point of this teaching on extravagance is to shake us out of the really silly sort of thing that we Christians always seem to get hung up on - "What are the rules?" "How much do I have to do?" "What's the minimum requirement?"

There seems to be some sort of an answer to those questions - certainly in an eternal sense, the Lord is the judge of everyone, and even in time, we have been told that there are lots of things that are outside the scope of "acceptable Christian behavior" (adultery, for example - I Corinthians 5:1-5). But the point is that the question is silly and ridiculous. Why are we interested in doing the minimum? Why do we want to "just barely make it into heaven?"

At some points it seems like Paul gets exasperated with this mindset and simply says - "Look, you can do anything you want, but why would you want to?"

I Corinthians 6:12-13

12All things are lawful for me, but not all things are profitable. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be mastered by anything.

13Food is for the stomach and the stomach is for food, but God will do away with both of them Yet the body is not for immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord is for the body.

The goal we should be striving for is something like what Misty Edwards said in her song Always on His Mind:

How far will You let me go?
How abandoned will You let me be?

I'm in it for love
I'm in it all the way

I'm in love with God, and God's in love with me,
And that settles it. Completely.


So taking all of this together - turning us away from the "minimum standards" approach; the commands of Jesus to something that sounds a lot like "demanded extravagance"; the question of "extravagant obedience", leads me to a question - is it possible that this is how we should understand the Sermon on the Mount?

As a set of "minimum standards", the Sermon on the Mount doesn't make a lot of sense:

Matthew 5:48

"Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."

Or else? Of course not. That's the whole point of grace.

But see what happens when we try to interpret the Sermon on the Mount as Law - we end up changing it from Law into an "unattainable ideal", and then we conclude that the whole point of it is to "drive us to grace" - meaning that grace is the real point, and holiness isn't possible, or really worth pursuing.

But what if, instead of Law, the Sermon on the Mount is a standard for extravagance? An invitation to extravagant devotion to Jesus? A commanded extravagance?

And on top of that, it's a command that must be possible to obey. Not in our own strength, certainly, but there are all the incredible promises of the power of God at work in our lives: "And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." (John 8:32) "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control." (Galatians 5:22-23) "Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh." (Galatians 5:16) And so on.

It's not a law; it's a life. And apparently, it's a life that is actually accessible to us in the real world by the power of the Spirit. That's what I'm going after.

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