Poverty Of Soul

From Billy Graham's Devotional, Day By Day

No man is more pathetic than he who is in great need and is not aware of it. Remember Samson? Standing there in the valley of Sorek, surrounded by the lords of the Philistines, “ . . . he wist not that the Lord was departed from him.” It has been truly said, “No man is so ignorant as he who knows nothing and knows not that he knows nothing. No man is so sick as he who has a fatal disease and is not aware of it. No man is so poor as he who is destitute, and yet thinks he is rich.” The pitiable thing about the Pharisees was not so much their hypocrisy as it was their utter lack of knowledge of how poor they actually were in the sight of God. There is always something pathetic about a man who thinks he is rich when he is actually poor, who thinks he is good when he is actually vile, who thinks he is educated when he is actually illiterate.

[Their chastisement will continue until it has accomplished its purpose] for My people are stupid, says the Lord [replying to Jeremiah]; they do not know and understand Me. They are thickheaded children, and they have no understanding. They are wise to do evil, but to do good they have no knowledge [and know not how]. Jeremiah 4:22

C.S. Lewis once wrote succinctly, "Of late, my moral history is depraved". Despair of my condition overwhelms my spirit at times. I'm well aware of it, yet I feel so hopeless in defeating it on my own. Continued prayers seem fruitless at times. "Lord, where are you, in the midst of this, fighting for me?"

Fly, you fool!

Harbaugh, The Master Coach

I'm so impressed by Coach Harbaugh's ability to turn off the negatives and be relentless in affirmation/positives. He doesn't dwell in negative or adversity. 

It's a great lesson. 

In reading the transcript of his presser from week 1, I was struck by it again and I share some tidbits below. 

Wilton talked about how your reassurance after that first play—what it meant to him. You’ve been through that a lot of times, that kind of thing. Talk about your approach there.

“Well, really my approach was I wanted to see what he did on the next series. It’s very difficult for a quarterback to throw an interception on a series and then come back and lead a touchdown drive the following series. It’s something I’ve always been fascinated in watching quarterbacks, and the really good ones can do that. They don’t think about, ‘I’m not gonna make another bad mistake.’ I mean, that’s what some do, but good ones don’t. I was just excited for that opportunity, to see what he was going to do on the next drive.

“And then to see him start the next drive on the two-yard line. I mean, that’s as much adversity as you can have for a quarterback starting a series, starting a drive: having thrown an interception on the previous drive—and the very first throw of the game—and then to find yourself on the two-yard line. But he responded in tremendous fashion to lead a touchdown drive, make big third-down conversion throws, to make as good a corner throw to Grant Perry as can be made. It can’t be thrown any better. The slant he threw coming off the goal line cannot be thrown any better. 

“Had total command and I think it speaks volumes and bodes really well for our team and bodes really well for his career as a quarterback to have done that, to have come back off an interception and then very next drive go on a 98-yard touchdown drive. Now he knows he can do it, and now we’ll expect him to do it. So, it was good for our team. Good for his career.”

The stats will probably show just how many freshmen played at the end, but you played freshmen early and often. Can you talk about your decision on adding freshmen onto the field so early?

“Sure. It’s been coming for weeks now. Really I’d say the last two to three weeks, last three weeks you could say—three weeks ago there were eight, seven or eight that earned it and knew that they were going to be tracking to be in the two-deep. Then it was less than a week later that it was probably up to 10. Then another week it was up again and up again and finally, I think I told Jim Brandstatter the other night, it’ll be 17-20 when it’s all said and done the way it’s going. They’ve earned it."

Overall effort on that side of the ball was outstanding. You know, it was dominating there really at the beginning for sure and throughout the game. Don Brown has a great, great saying—I love it—which is ‘solve problems with aggression.’ Our team played that way today.”

Does it boost them up when you stop them after that interception?

“Definitely. It definitely does. The encouraging thing—I’ll say it again—our coaches worked our players as much as can possibly be done, and I thought it really showed out there, and it really showed in the mental part of the game. Watching our defense go through the first half and even into the third quarter where there wasn’t a mistake made—I mean, there wasn’t an alignment mistake made, a stance-alignment mistake in the first half or the first part of the third quarter. It was very impressive. Everybody knew exactly what they were doing. It really showed. It just showed. The meeting time and the practice time really showed in our guys.

“And then, again, the players are willing to do it. The ones that love football, they love doing it every day. It was something very interesting Michael Jordan said to the team Friday night. I think it resonated with everybody. He got good at basketball because he practiced. There’s such great carryover to football because you get good at football by playing football. And he said, ‘If you love it, then you want to do it every day. Then you want to do it as much as you can every day.’ He said, ‘It’s like eating ice cream. If you love ice cream, then you’re going to eat it every single day.’ That’s what resonates with me. That’s what our football team has been doing for the past month, and it was just good that they went out and showed that today.”

Does O’Korn and Morris and Malzone all getting a drive mean that the competition for the backup quarterback spot is still ongoing or have you settled on a backup?

“We’re just going to keep going. Just keep going and—it’s a very good positive. Very good positive. Some of those clichés you hear about if you have three quarterbacks you don’t have any good quarterbacks, that’s never resonated with me either, so…just continue to keep going, keep having at it.

“They’ve all commented how good it’s been, how helpful it’s been [that] there’s so many people in the mix. There’s people pushing Wilton. There’s people pushing John. There’s people pushing Shane, and they’re pushing each other. It’s like, I mean, it’s pushing each other higher. They’ve all commented on how good that’s been and, again, I think that showed today.”

On Michael Jordan being with the team:

First of all, Michael Jordan was fantastic with the team. He spent 45 minutes and really connected with them. I mean, really toldthem things that they could take away and apply to their own game, advice, tips. It was real. About playing your first game, about playing your first college game. 

“Chris Evans asked the very first question of Michael Jordan: ‘What was it like playing in your first college game?’ And Michael talked about it, how he wanted to do everything right, he didn’t want to make mistakes, he didn’t want to screw anything up. That’s how he approached his very first college game, and he said ‘Trust your training. Trust the practice that you’ve had and that will carry for you, and continue to get better every day.’ 

“That warmed my heart when he talked about every single day trying to be better than the day before. A lot of things. Talking about pressure. Talking about the pressure moment, what he leaned on, what he thought made him effective in those moments. Talked about being a great teammate. Can’t do anything without your teammates. And pushing each other in practice to make each other better. Same things I think our team has been seeing for the last month and the last year. Same things they’ve been hearing. 

“They were listening a lot better to Michael Jordan than they were to me. It was good. He was loose, he was funny with them. They couldn’t get enough. It was great. It was a real honor to have him sharing our sideline. 

The Remnants

Nehemiah was a cup bearer. Among the duties of the cup bearer was to taste food and drink before the king did, to see if it was poisoned. If it was poisoned, the king's life would be spared. If it was not poisoned, the cup bearer enjoyed a sample of the good life. But, the cup bearer was also a trusted confidant, dependable, and insignificant enough to be present for important conversations and meetings.

Cupbearers held important positions within political organizations of the ancient Near East. The position was one of high trust: the king could easily be poisoned through wine, and the cupbearer could overhear private conversations during a meal, including those with other heads of state.

Nehemiah and King Artaxerxes knew each other well enough to catch moods, body language, and tone. So when Nehemiah's body language indicated trouble, the king called Nehemiah on it and wanted to know more:

And the king said to me, “Why is your face sad, seeing you are not sick? This is nothing but sadness of the heart.”

Although this was no manipulation on Nehemiah's part, it opened a fearful door for Nehemiah. The conversations with the King most likely never roamed to personal issues. So, when the king asked Nehemiah about the troubling body language, it made Nehemiah "very much afraid" (Nehemiah 2:2).
Making it no less leg-shaking was the Queen's presence. As she looks upon Nehemiah with a probing eye, he feels that, too.

Nehemiah responds in the classic manner of praise and affirmation, then citing the issue or problem, to the request or solution offered. One thing Nehemiah does, separating most of our pleas, requests, and hopes, is he prayed first.

So I prayed to the God of heaven. And I said to the king, “If it pleases the king, and if your servant has found favor in your sight, that you send me to Judah, to the city of my fathers’ graves, that I may rebuild it.”

The King doesn't hesitate by granting the request, Rather, he asks, "How long will you be gone and when will you return?" Nehemiah asks for protection as he travels across provinces

On Skeptics

"I do not imagine, or expect, that I can win over, at once, to Christianity, the minds of sceptical workingmen, who may be listening to me.

 I know too well, by personal experience, how hard it is to part with sceptical convictions—how difficult it is to bring a mind, which has become strongly warped in the direction of unbelief, to enter upon a determined, steady, and persevering consideration of the Christian Evidences. And without this—without an earnest and devoted study of Christian Evidences—no thinking skeptic (for I am not addressing vulgar scoffers) can ever become a real Christian.

"I seek no flighty converts from your ranks—no sudden passing over to our side from yours, of some hot, excitable partisan, who is incapable of thinking. I seek to lead you to accept what I believe to be Truth, by inducing you to practise the daily reflection, the steady conning over and over again of each item of the Christian Evidences, which effectually cured my doubts, and rendered me a settled and grateful believer. I would not lift up my finger, or stir a straw, to make a sudden and spasmodic conversion of any one of you, which would leave you helpless in your new belief, and incapable of giving a reason of the hope within you. Such a convert would be a very useless one. I want to enlist real soldiers for my Master."

—Thomas Cooper

The Verity of Christ’s Resurrection from the Dead (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1875), pp. 131-32.

On Pleasure and "The Enemy"

On pleasure

[The demon Screwtape writes:] [God, the “Enemy,” is] a hedonist at heart. All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a facade. Or only like foam on the sea shore. Out at sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure. He makes no secret of it; at His right hand are “pleasures for evermore.” Ugh! Don’t think He has the least inkling of that high and austere mystery to which we rise in the Miserific Vision. He’s vulgar, Wormwood. He has a bourgeois mind. He has filled His world full of pleasures. There are things for humans to do all day long without His minding in the least—sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying, working. Everything has to be twisted before it’s any use to us. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side.

From The Screwtape Letters

This Isn't How It's Suppose To Be

Prayer, in this sense, is rebelling against the status quo of a world going awry. It is refusing to come to terms with an unjust, dark and evil world, as if it were all we were meant to have, as if there was no one or nothing that could change it; prayer is standing in the light of a God who comes in flesh to say otherwise. But in so doing, prayer remembers not only that the world as we find it can be changed and that it should be changed. The significant piece for the abolitionist to remember is that while I am not going to be the one who brings an end to the world’s suffering, there is indeed one who is. It is at his feet, even in our weariness, where we want to sit.

Jesus instructed his followers to pray, “Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:9,10). In prayer we stand in rebellion against a world that is not hallowing the name of God, a world not looking for signs of the kingdom, a world wholly uninterested in doing the will of anyone but self. The nature of prayer as Christ taught us is a persistent posture toward God as sovereign, an undeterred vision of what the kingdom is, can, and ought to be, a vision of what God intended for all of creation.

As the psalmist has prayed:
Hear my voice when I call, O LORD;
be merciful to me and answer me.
My heart says of you, ‘Seek his face!’
Your face, LORD, I will seek.

The Christian seeks the face of God not to escape reality but to find it, to stand before the sovereign in his kingdom with all that is here and now—with pain and sickness, with goodness and mercy, with all that is unjust and corrupt, and all that is right and beautiful. In prayer, the Christian stands with the one who so loved creation that he joined us within it—in every painful sense of what that would mean for him. The rebellious vision of human flourishing was the very prayer he fought to embody for us—even unto the last rebellion of death itself. Here and now and also coming, on earth as it is in heaven, his is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.

On Love and Feelings

What we call ‘being in love’ is a glorious state, and, in several ways, good for us. It helps to make us generous and courageous, it opens our eyes not only to the beauty of the beloved but to all beauty, and it sub- ordinates (especially at first) our merely animal sexuality; in that sense, love is the great conqueror of lust. No one in his senses would deny that being in love is far better than either common sensuality or cold self-centredness. But, as I said before, ‘the most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of our own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs’. Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling. Now no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all. Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go. And in fact, whatever people say, the state called ‘being in love’ usually does not last.

If the old fairy-tale ending ‘They lived happily ever after’ is taken to mean ‘They felt for the next fifty years exactly as they felt the day before they were married’, then it says what probably never was nor ever would be true, and would be highly undesirable if it were. Who could bear to live in that excitement for even five years? What would become of your work, your appetite, your sleep, your friendships? But, of course, ceasing to be ‘in love’ need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense—love as distinct from ‘being in love’—is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be ‘in love’ with someone else. ‘Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.

From Mere Christianity