Irreproachable Honourableness

Fallen as low as autobiography

As Lewis was composing Screwtape, he was also writing a book about John Milton's Paradise Lost, which retells the fall of humankind in the Garden of Eden. In many ways, this passage from Lewis' A Preface to Paradise Lost, profiles Screwtape:

To admire Satan, then, is to give one's vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography. Yet the choice is possible. Hardly a day passes without some slight movement towards it in each one of us. (Oxford UP, 1942, 102)

There is nothing appealing about hell in Screwtape—it is not the promised realm of infinite freedom and profound achievement, but rather an ugly bureaucracy, overcome by utter grayness, since there is nothing more uninteresting than a smug sea of fallen humanity sinking deeper into themselves forever and ever, lacking the transformative glory and uniqueness that redemption and the company of heaven provide.

C. S. Lewis Blog: The Devil and Mr. Lewis

"Incessant autobiography"...?  Is this an anticipation of blogging?

The widest and deepest tree

Sibboleth

As his successor Flannery O’Connor would later say, the Cross is the only tree having limbs wide enough to embrace all the living and roots deep enough to enclose all the dead.

Joy in Pastoring

Pure Church: Surprising Sources of Joy in Pastoral Ministry, 7

Is there any joy comparable to the joy of noticing heaven in your people before your people are in heaven?

On playing second fiddle well

Thabiti Anyabwile interviews pastor Anthony Carter.

In response to Anyabwile's question, “How would you counsel other associate pastors who might be laboring alongside a man/men who are not reform minded?” Carter wisely responds

The first thing to understand is that God already gave the church Martin Luther. If He wants another one, He’ll raise him up. Don’t spend your time presuming you are him.

An excellent lesson for all of us. Do read the whole interview, please.

I cannot escape who I am made to be

M R Lauterback writes on our being created in the image of God, and that we cannot escape that image in us. (Emphasis mine.)

A few years ago we made friends with some very secular folks. They were into spirituality, but disliked anything that was defined. They were also living with each other. Then they decided to marry—and included us on their joyful celebration. A month later we saw them and asked how it was going. They said they were puzzled. Ever since getting married things were different—they had more arguments, their relationship had changed. They could not understand since marriage, in their thinking, was only the acceptable way of society and only a piece of paper. They married to conform. But they were running into the reality that the two had been made one by God. They could not escape.

Keller on Idolatry

Tim Keller writes on idolatry:

Whatever we worship we will serve, for worship and service are always inextricably bound together. We are "covenantal" beings. We enter into covenant service with whatever most captures our imagination and heart. It ensnares us. So every human personality, community, thought-form, and culture will be based on some ultimate concern or some ultimate allegiance—either to God or to some God-substitute.

UPDATE:

An even better quotation from the article, which has churned in my mind for a few days:

I ordinarily begin speaking about sin to a young, urban, non-Christian like this:

Sin isn’t only doing bad things, it is more fundamentally making good things into ultimate things. Sin is building your life and meaning on anything, even a very good thing, more than on God. Whatever we build our life on will drive us and enslave us. Sin is primarily idolatry.

Why is this a good path to take?

First, this definition of sin includes a group of people that postmodern people are acutely aware of. Postmodern people rightly believe that much harm has been done by self-righteous religious people. If we say “sin is breaking God’s law” without a great deal of further explanation, it appears that the Pharisaical people they have known are ‘in’ and most other people are ‘out.’ Pharisees, of course, are quite fastidious in their keeping of the moral law, and therefore (to the hearer) they seem to be the very essence of what a Christian should be. An emphasis on idolatry avoids this problem. As Luther points out, Pharisees, while not bowing to literal idols, were looking to themselves and their moral goodness for their justification, and therefore they were actually breaking the first commandment. Their morality was self-justifying motivation and therefore spiritually pathological. At the bottom of all their law-keeping they were actually breaking the most fundamental law of all. When we give definitions and descriptions of sin to postmodern people, we must do so in a way that not only challenges prostitutes to change but also Pharisees.

Christian Counseling and Forgiveness

Phil has a good summary of points about forgiveness at Musings of a Christian Psychologist

1. Accepting, tolerating, forgetting, and excusing are all different from forgiving.
2. Forgiving presupposes an attitude of mercy towards the offender.
3. Forgiveness is not arbitrary or unilateral.
4. Forgiveness requires a clear commitment to seek, speak, and be the truth.
5. It is not a moral victory for the offended that judges, controls or obligates the other
6. True reconciliation occurs when violence is renounced, justice sought, victims heard, innocence honored, guilt and responsibility admitted, repentance expressed, rapproachment risked, and relationship opened.
7. Religion is on the side of reconciliation, healing, and peace.

Internal Conversation and Quiet Moments

Phil Monroe asks about how we deal with the internal convesation that goes on in our minds, especially in quiet moments.

I'll respond with a few thoughts borrowed from John Owen's Grace and Duty of Being Spiritually Minded. This is a wonderful work on what the believer's internal conversation should be aimed toward, but I warn you—I must have started reading it 20 times over the last 30 years, and never “was allowed” to get more than 20 pages into it—I surely would have wasted it.

• Owen asks what our thoughts are, do spiritual thoughts spontaneously arise in us? Yes, there may be some from habit (we hear a sermon, go to a Bible study) or need (“I'm teaching the study tonight?”) or occasion (9/11/2001, for example). But do they ever, do they often come from within? I wrote a post on guests and children when this first hit me.
• Owen specifically asks about the quiet times in our lives, but not the shower. In the late 1600's, those times were when you could not deal with business and occasions of the day: walking and journeying (driving in your car, for example).

  I found it disturbing that with the iPod and the satellite radio (not to mention the car DVD player, CD, 8-track, or whatever), we've wiped that time off the map: it is no longer quiet. Someone mentioned an author's reference to that quiet time as the "margins" of our lives, giving space and shape to the rest of our time. For many, it's gone, and gladly.

Fire and gunpowder

I've searched for the source of this anecdote for a long time:

A beloved Puritan pastor was on his deathbed, and one of his students came to him to say how much he valued his pastor's life and love. "Take away the flame!" cried the dying saint, "There is yet powder here."

Perhaps I have found the source, or a close enough for now. In Pure Church: Quotes for Monday, FellowElder quotes some passages from Bridges' Christian Ministry, and among them:

"They are not our best friends, that stir the pride of our hearts by the flattery of their lips. The graces of God in others (I confess) are thankfully to be owned, and under discouragements and temptations to be wisely and modestly spoken of; but the strongest Christians do scarcely show their own weakness in any one thing more than they do in hearing their own praises. Christian! thou knowest thou carriest gunpowder about thee.—Desire those that carry fire, to keep at a distance from thee. It is a dangerous crisis, when a proud heart meets with flattering lips. Faithful, seasonable, and discreet reproofs are much more safe for us, and advantageous to the mortification of sin in our souls" (p. 153, footnote 1).

Are your thoughts like guests or children?

In John Owen's Grace and Duty of Being Spiritually Minded, Owen expounds the idea that “to be spiritually-minded is life and peace.” (Romans 8:6, KJV; the ESV reads, “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.”) Since this is the case, Owen argues, it is important to see if the mind is acting like a regenerate mind, if thoughts of spiritual things upwell from it spontaneously, or if spiritual thoughts only arise on the occasion of some outward stimulus: a sermon, a song, a conversation with someone else.

He then uses a beautiful metaphor to drive this home, fully serious, deeply convicting, leading to solemn self-examination; yet with a touch of humor (or “humour”, I suppose) nonetheless:

From these causes it is that the thoughts of spiritual things are with many as guests that come into an inn, and not like children that dwell in the house. They enter occasionally, and then there is a great stir about them, to provide meet entertainment for them. Within a while they are disposed of, and so depart unto their own occasions, being neither looked nor inquired after any more. Things of another nature are attended unto; new occasions bring in new guests for a season. Children are owned in the house, are missed if they are out of the way, and have their daily provision constantly made for them. So is it with these occasional thoughts about spiritual things. By one means or other they enter into the mind, and there are entertained for a season; on a sudden they depart, and men hear of them no more. But those that are natural and genuine, arising from a living spring of grace in the heart, disposing the mind unto them, are as the children of the house. They are expected in their places and at their seasons. If they are missing, they are inquired after. The heart calls itself unto an account whence it is that it hath been so long without them, and calls them over into its wonted converse with them.

“If they are missing, they are inquired after.” How often do I inquire after the absence of my own thoughts of God? “Hey, they aren't here! Where did they go?”

Orwell and Romania

In Orwell's “Catalonia” revisited, there's a surprising bit of history and affection for Orwell:

Perhaps the most genuine and moving encomia to him I ever heard were in Romania in the dark days just before the downfall of Ceausescu. Nineteen Eighty-Four circulated clandestinely, and several Romanians told me that they found it astonishing how an Englishman, who had never so much as set foot in a communist country, seemed to understand their own experience from the inside, as it were, and sometimes better than they understood it themselves, so that the meaning of their own experience became clearer to them as a result of reading him. And this they found immensely consoling, the very opposite of Primo Levi's terrible nightmare that after he was released from Auschwitz no one would listen to him or believe him because what he had to say was so utterly at variance with all previous human experience. Orwell's book reassured the Romanians to whom I spoke that, the Iron Curtain notwithstanding, they were not alone, and also that the political conditions under which they were living were highly abnormal and therefore, however apparently durable, historically temporary. Dismal and pessimistic as the book may have seemed to a reader in the west, it was read with immense joy in the east. Few authors have ever been loved and venerated as Orwell was loved and venerated by the people to whom I spoke in Romania.

As long as suffering is seen to be temporary in some way, perhaps it becomes the more bearable.

Faithful are the wounds of a friend

From Faithful are the wounds of a friend:

I don't know what the deal is, but any time a friend or acquaintance asks me if they can talk to me for 5 minutes I immediately think, "Oh great, what did I do? How am I going to be corrected?" I start feeling like the high schooler going to the principal's office. And believe me, I know how that feels. I went to the principal's office a lot…

Martin Luther on Changing Diapers

Justin Taylor quotes Martin Luther on Sanctifying the Ordinary, where Luther gets down to a father's real work in life.

One of Luther's great contributions to our view of the family involved the sanctification of the ordinary. Many sadly neglect their family and their friends because they are pouring all of their time into “ministry”—neglecting to see that all of life should be ministry and every sphere should be sanctified.

Dealing with guilt

Piper on How to Deal with the Guilt of Sexual Failure for the Glory of Christ and His Global Cause

Here is what you say. My summary of these words is to call them gutsy guilt. I call it that because the believer admits that he has done wrong and that God is dealing roughly with him. But even in a condition of darkness and discipline, he will not surrender his hold on the truth that God is on his side. Listen to these amazing words. Mark them. Memorize them. Use them whenever Satan tempts you to throw away your life on trifles because that’s all you’re good for.

Rejoice not over me, O my enemy; when I fall, I shall rise; when I sit in darkness, the Lord will be a light to me. I will bear the indignation of the Lord because I have sinned against him, until he pleads my cause and executes judgment for me. He will bring me out to the light; I shall look upon his vindication. (Micah 7:8-9)

This is what victory looks like the morning after failure. Meditate on it long and hard when I am gone. Learn to take your theology and speak like this to the devil or anyone else who tells you that Christ is not capable of using you mightily for his global cause. Here is what you say:…

Go read the rest, and rejoice at your salvation, and rejoice in your savior!

How to argue

Francis Schaeffer (quoted in Schaeffer Man and Message, said

Always leave someone with a corner to retire gracefully into. You are not trying to win an argument, or to knock someone down. You are seeking to win a person, a person made in the image of God. This is not about your winning; it is not about your ego. If that is your approach all you will do is arouse their pride and make it more difficult for them to hear what you have to say.

Big Babies

We're all big babies:

I imagine myself to be a grown-up, as, presumably, do you. You think that because you negotiated puberty and developed secondary sexual characteristics, and got qualifications and opened a bank account and subjected yourself to the scrutiny of anti-terrorism laws and anti-money-laundering laws and learned to drive and got a job and perhaps a spouse and maybe children, and quite possibly even pay your taxes, you are a grown-up.

Sometimes, things strike you as a bit odd. It strikes you, for example, as out of kilter that between getting off the plane and reaching the outside world at London Heathrow there were, at last count, 93 notices telling you off for things you hadn't done or which it hadn't even occurred to you to do.

The plain fact is that you are being treated like a baby. You, I, all of us are on the receiving end of a sustained campaign to infantilise us: our tastes, our responses, our behaviour, our private thoughts, our decisions, our buying habits, our philosophies, our political sensibilities.

(Thanks to Albert Mohler).

The New Pluralism and the Church

While reading The New Pluralism—Peter F. Drucker, which had been linked from a presentation on wikis and knowledge-sharing in enterprises, I encountered this perspective on church growth:

A striking social phenomenon of the last thirty years in the United States, the explosive growth of the new "mega-churches" (now beginning to be emulated in Europe), rests on these institutions' dedication to a single purpose: the spiritual development of the parishioners. The decline of their predecessors, the liberal Protestant churches of the early years of the twentieth century, can largely be traced to their trying to accomplish too many things at the same time -- above all, in their trying to be organs of social reform as well as spiritual leaders.

Work like a dog

In The Power of the Marginal, Paul Graham gives a new sense to the idiom to work like a dog:

As an outsider, you're just one step away from getting things done. A huge step, admittedly, and one that most people never seem to make, but only one step. If you can summon up the energy to get started, you can work on projects with an intensity (in both senses) that few insiders can match. For insiders work turns into a duty, laden with responsibilities and expectations. It's never so pure as it was when they were young.

Work like a dog being taken for a walk, instead of an ox being yoked to the plow. That's what they miss.

Angry friends, bad company

Proverbs 22:24 says,

Make no friendship with a man given to anger, nor go with a wrathful man. (English Standard Version)

Kathy Sierra writes that angry/negative people can be bad for your brain as well as your soul (but, really, the two are so closely knit that distinguishing them may be impossible at times).

Community of Talent

In another article, Paul Graham writes

Nothing is more powerful than a community of talented people working on related problems.

Keeping bad company

In an article on software patents, Paul Graham writes

Fortunately for startups, big companies are extremely good at denial. If you take the trouble to attack them from an oblique angle, they'll meet you half-way and maneuver to keep you in their blind spot. To sue a startup would mean admitting it was dangerous, and that often means seeing something the big company doesn't want to see.

What intrigued me was the advice in the second sentence: “If you take the trouble to attack them from an oblique angle, they'll meet you half-way and maneuver to keep you in their blind spot.” It reads frighteningly (not for companies: for Christians) like something from The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, the advice of a senior tempter to a junior one on how to tempt a human soul to destruction.

Was your job picked for you by a high-school kid?

From the much-longer How to Do What You Love by Paul Graham:

Don't decide [on what you love to do] too soon. Kids who know early what they want to do seem impressive, as if they got the answer to some math question before the other kids. They have an answer, certainly, but odds are it's wrong.

A friend of mine who is a quite successful doctor complains constantly about her job. When people applying to medical school ask her for advice, she wants to shake them and yell "Don't do it!" (But she never does.) How did she get into this fix? In high school she already wanted to be a doctor. And she is so ambitious and determined that she overcame every obstacle along the way—including, unfortunately, not liking it.

Now she has a life chosen for her by a high-school kid.

Dreams?

United Bible Societies -- Latest News

History has it that King Somhlolo, the founder of the nation, who ruled over Swaziland in 1844, had a vision in which he saw people of a different colour, coming to him bearing two objects. One was a book (umculu), the other a circular object (indilinga). The king was advised in his dream to spurn the circular object (interpreted as money), but to take the book (the Bible), so he sent four messengers to find the men with the Book. They went down to the Methodist Mission at Thaba Nchu in the Free State and their visit resulted in two missionaries going to Swaziland in 1844.

A Man I Should Have Liked to Know...

[The] Pope in private

The following is by George Weigel, author of Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II, and may have appeared in Newsweek magazine.

During the three and a half years I was in regular conversation with John Paul II while writing his biography, I was struck by the intensity of his friendships and by their endurance. Once you were Wojtyla's friend, you were his friend for life, and he worked hard to keep his friendships green. He also shared his friends with others, encouraging me, for example, to dig into the relationships with young laymen and women that he had formed in the 1950s and that had decisively shaped his vision of the priesthood. Other popes, asked about their earliest priestly experiences, would have talked about their first days teaching in a seminary or their years at the Accademia, the exclusive Roman school for the Vatican's diplomats. John Paul II talked about his lay friends in Cracow, their treks into the mountains south of the city or their kayaking trips along Poland's rivers. It was a telling difference.

Also, from the same article, sent to me (without attribution—shame, shame— by a friend):

By the conventions of his time, the intensity of his Christian conviction should have made him a sectarian, even a dangerous man. To his mind, however, it was precisely his Christian faith and his discipleship that required him to be in dialogue with everyone. Everyone was of inestimable value, and everything was of interest, because God had entered history in Jesus of Nazareth, supercharging the world and humanity with a grandeur beyond imagining.

Ugly Calvinism

blogma: The Dangerous Pursuit of Reformed Theology

Why is it that, with all to many of us, the more familiar we are with sound Christian teaching the less Christ-like we become in our daily lives?

I remember being surprised the first time I heard that "maturing in the faith" was dangerous. Must run now, maybe more another time.

Christmas Story in Gullah

The Christmas Story as told in Gullah

I've read this around Christmas each year since about 1995 or so. The story sounds familiar at the beginning, and yet foreign: foreign enough to make the words fresh, so they don't hit the I've heard this before, ho-hum filter on the way into the mind.

Een dat time, Caesar Augustus been de big leada ob de Roman people dem. E mek a law een all de town een de wol weh e hab tority, say, “Ebrybody haffa go ta town fa count by de hed an write down dey nyame.” Dis been de fus time dey count by de hed, same time Cyrenius de gobna ob Syria country. So den, ebrybody gone fa count by de hed, ta dey own town weh dey ole people been bon.

Soon, apparently, the whole New Testament will be available. This quotation is from the (out of print) Good Nyews bout Jedus Christ wa Luke Write (the Gospel According to Luke).

[Sigh]. I just noticed that this version, updated on 12/23/03, has some subtle changes since the version I (mostly) memorized. I'll have to learn the new version, I suppose, for next year.

Hands

I find this post at tooGreen's Xanga Site stunningly beautiful:

There was a time I still remember (somewhere in the 60's) when I was driving in the back of a Ford mustang to O'Hare airport and held my girlfriend's hand (now she is my wife - for thirty three years). I can still remember what it felt like, strange.

Read the poem…

An article by Tim Keller

From Boar's Head Tavern: A BHT Must Read, lest I forget it:

A BHT Must Read

This is why Tim Keller is rapidly becoming one of my favorite preachers. His explanation of a Gospel witness that mixes a variety of approaches mirrors what I am trying to do in the diverse kinds of ministry that I am doing at OBI. Making the Gospel attractive (because so much of the baggage isn't.) Answering objections. Dealing with the cultural substitutes. Emphasizing community. Finding the place for a more thorough, Biblical explanation of the Gospel.

This is just superb and well worth keeping and studying. (Thanks to Mr. Monergism for the link.)

Posted by Michael Spencer at October 25, 2004 03:54 PM | Comments (0)

[Boar's Head Tavern: A BHT Must Read]

Credit where credit is due.

Vagus » 2004 » October » 05 cites Sacred Journey: Measuring up quoting David Powlison:

Tonight during our Dynamics of Biblical Change class, Dr. Powlison shared a quotation with us from one of his teachers. It went something like this: The amount of glory you bring to God is not measured by the amount you accomplish, but rather by the difference between what you are in yourself and what you become by grace.

I figured I'd bring this a step further and point out that that quotation (as I understand it) is from Jack Miller, whose life and teaching affected so many people from the US to Uganda, Ireland to India.

The virtual school cafeteria

I'm auditing a course on how the Gospel changes people. It's a counseling course at a nearby seminary where I took classes 15 years ago. My wife and I are both auditors, in fact: Monday night I zip home from work, we gobble a simple dinner, and we're off to class for three hours.

The problem with an arrangement like this is that contact with other students is lost (except for time time waiting in line for a cup of coffee at the break). Now, granted, I know a number of the auditors/students already from church, but we don't often have a chance to talk (not about class and counseling issues, at least).

But here is a fellow student, moved by the same things I am. He's sitting here in the virtual school lunchroom (at Sacred Journey » Prayer Requests and the Litany of Despair), and I can find out what moved him, and who he is. (And, I can meet him at the Indelible Grace Concert next week. We're cutting class, too.)

Shoveling Mint

Notes From Dresher: Shoveling Mint

Now, underneath the snowpack,
I shovel-cut into the spreading shoots
Releasing a pungency - the long forgotten scent of summer
Into the cold, crisp winter air.

Sweet, and a treat for all the senses.

Technology, Anthropology, and Secular Lifestyles

From a FutureBrief message I was sent: The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > For Technology, No Small World After All

Such insights challenged Intel's vision of a world of "smart homes" and a chip-driven lifestyle, Dr. Bell said, which assumes that users are secular. In those visions, there's no point at which residents stop to pray, visit a church, or have a moment of internal reflection. All this prompted her to ask David Tanenhaus, Intel's vice president of research: "What if our vision of ubiquitous computing is so secular, so profoundly embedded in a set of Western discourses, that we've created a vision of the world that shuts out a percentage of people in a way we can't really even begin to articulate?"

...

For instance, the Korean electronics company LGE has introduced a mobile phone with an embedded compass to allow Muslim users to locate the direction of Mecca using Global Positioning System technology. Myung Whoon Lee, a senior LGE designer, said the company sought to design something "whose concept is reflected in the situation or culture of its actual place."

Sharing the Gospel and the Internet

Coffeehouse at the End-Of-Days: The Gospel Online

Is the Internet hospitable to the preaching of the gospel? To Christian fellowship? Or, is virtuality hostile by its nature to authentic human interaction? [Coffeehouse at the End-Of-Days: The Gospel Online]

Capon on the Prodigal

In Announcing the Party, I touched on Robert Farrar Capon's treatment of the parable of the Prodigal Son. I've found on-line one of his articles on the topic.

Great were the company of the…bloggers?

If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less

—General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff, U. S. Army

[cited in Movable Theoblogical: Change and Irrelevance]

We the church have often stood at the dividing of the ways, the signposts Change and Irrelevance offering us our choices. We rightly say, “We dare not change our message!” and, “Our message is forever relevant!” and then march down the road to apparent or effective irrelevance.

We sense dimly that we are like Tolkien's “Elven-wise, Lords of the Eldar from beyond the furthest seas.” We “who [dwell] in the Blessed Realm live at once in both worlds, and against Seen and Unseen [we] have great power.” But we forget that we must speak the language of men (and women), and that language is in flux. Our message is unchanging and ever-relevant: but we must translate it into the language (and culture) of our times, or appear to be irrelevant.

Movable Theoblogical: Change and Irrelevance goes on to say

When Churches and , worse, agencies of the Church charged with providing resources for those churches, flat out fail to acknowledge the need and desire of people to connect on issues and share rants and all manner of "passionate involvements", then irrelevance rules their approach.

Old Saint George has recognized the "time" ; the "kairos" represented in the possibilities for online community, and that it is undoubtedly TIME now to engage in projects that respond to this. To be a "Great Good Place" requires of us that we become an "easy place" to be heard. And there is no easier response than to jump in and build applications which emanate "exploration" and "invitation" and "affirmation". This is much of what it means to be Church. To be a place in which passions which emanate from a sense of CALL are explored and are the source of dialogue about what can be done, and how our God-given gifts equip us for it.

There may be no “easier response”, but we I'm not sure we're called to an easy response. We have to sweat, and pray, and ache, to become a “safe place” to enter: to remove every obstacle to our hearers' receiving the message except the scandal of the cross.

So, where does blogging come in? The web? We are called to be communicators, a picture book that leads people to the Living Book by way of the written book. If we can find a way to engage our contemporaries through a weblog, and it does not pull us away from caring for the poor and afflicted and enslaved (“But…my blog is my ministry!”)…then blog on!

Announcing the Party

Every Tomorrow: The Blog

Aren't these two sons representations of two different sorts of people? The younger son representing anyone who didn't know the Lord or strayed away and then ended up in His presenece and forgiven of their sins, and the older representing the folks who maybe never physically strayed away from the church, but are obsessed with following the rules and look at the folks who don't with contempt. Most folks tend to fall into one catagory or the other. Who are you? [Every Tomorrow: The Blog]

I think we all fall into both categories, with tendencies to be in one or the other. The longer we are in the Christian life, the more we are tempted to be like the older brother: judging, measuring, condemning.

I love Robert Farrar Capon's take on this: the goal of the Christian life is to dance down the street in a wild party with the Father and the Prodigal, calling the Elder Brothers out of the dark rooms they are sulking in to join us. (From memory: I don't even remember which book this is from.)

Paintbrushes

When you have spent fifteen minutes in front of a Monet, you are thankful that he had paintbrushes, but you are not in awe of them. You are in awe of Monet and his ability as a painter. The posture of brotherhood presents Christ as the great redemptive Artist. We are simply brushes in his hands. The glorious changes he paints into the hearts of people are not the result of good brushes, but of the skills of the Painter.

from Paul David Tripp, Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change, P&R Publishing Co., Phillipsburg, NJ. 2002. pp. 149–150.