God was so wise to invent the family. Next to knowing Him through Jesus Christ, family is the best. This summer as our family goes off in a million different directions all at once ('tis the season for such habits of growing children), I realize afresh how much they mean to me.

On Tuesday night one of our Elders led the prayer at our meeting and we focused on praying for dad's at Southgate. It was a sweet time together led by a guy who has never recovered from his father's love and mentoring. He'd give anything to talk to him again, but what is left are good memories and enacting disciplines that he would approve and that honor him. It was a prayer meeting about family. He read a neat poem about fatherhood and its privilege to end.

We have a bad habit of getting it backwards and wrong. We display the important things and exalt the passing of items of no consequence. Yes, big money does not matter, nor can it buy what is most important. The love of family. A faithful wife has value far above rubies. Kids going forward in maturity and godly aspiration are the joy of life (3 John 4).

There is nothing like saying good bye as the family team disperses to the ends of the earth before reconstitution in a few weeks to bring you afresh to what God knows all along and wants to keep on the forefront of our thinking and living. Family is one of life's great treasures and great investments.

Faithful affection and persevering forgiving love all pave the way for accrued interest that comes home in windfalls as you get a little older. We've all heard of the power of positive interest financially. Well there is another inexorable benefit to the law of sowing and reaping related to the family. The more you put in, the more you get out. The more selfless you are with each other, the more you grow in the benefit of relating. You get a family all working to bring joy to each other in affection and you have a tsunami of a tide of blessing the rolls in and keeps coming.

It is worth it! Stay at it! Give yourself to God's way of life and let Him build the house (Psalm 127:1). He is so good at it. And as He builds, it makes those Home and Garden Channel homes seems like shacks, shells where the dead walk around but do not like each other. Oh the fat on the edges of family life which brings great joy!

We need to keep the first and second things first and second. Pursue Christ! Pursue our families! Enjoy the spoils. God's way is best.

Next to oil, joy may be the second scarcest commodity these days. Americans are not too much of a joyous lot. Recently a study noted that now medications for depression are the most prescribed medicines on the market. Collectively we hurt and are discouraged. We need new explorations for joy resources for the human family. We need to encourage drilling in the landscape of heretofore undeveloped human experience.

Jesus Christ made a connection between what He said and our experience of joy. The idea of our joy being made complete (John 15:11) is a notion universally embraced. We all want complete joy. Could the speech of God be the key to understanding and experiencing the joy for which we have always yearned?

In the temptation account Jesus noted that we do not find our subsistence from merely physical sustenance-a good meal. He argued that there is much more than "bread alone" (Matthew 4:4). In fact, He asserted that the Word revealed by God held the power to sustain our existence in a way that belittled the nourishment of food. There is a long history of all of us realizing that bread alone brings no enduring satisfaction. Jesus boldly claimed that fidelity to His Word held out the passage to the good and stable life-the joyous life (Matthew 7:24-27).

The reserves for joy most untapped and unexplored are the joys held out to anyone who will embrace the Living Word (Jesus Christ) and make it their glad discipline in life to live out (obey) His way of life. The autobahn to joy runs right through the pages of scripture and is marked out by the map of Jesus' way of living.

This, of course, is why I thrill at the privilege of sharing God's Word. Today I will soak in the substance of Psalm 34 in preparation for an upcoming Sunday. All day I will reflect and consider what this text means to our family at Southgate. I will probe just how these verses shape our approach to living and how in obeying their call they merge us into a stream of joy that is found in our obedience.

Last week I was reading 2 John. This little book only has thirteen verses. It is a tiny letter. John closes it notifying the readers of a pending visit. He is anxious for the visit to go down...for their sake. He suggests that it will be the occasion of a breakout of full joy, "...I hope to come to you and speak face to face, that your joy may be full". On the surface, a novice reader could conclude that John had a real ego problem. But that is misreading the text and misreading the joy. John was no egomaniac. John was eager to come and speak the Word of God to them because of what it held out for them in joy. John knew that in embracing what God has revealed about Himself, the people following Jesus could come into more joy. I know of the eagerness to which John speaks. What a privilege is mine to expose people to paths of joy in sharing the Word of God and inviting people to respond. Preachers are Johnny Appleseeders of the Word. We just go around and plant seed. When it is united with faith (fleshed out in obedience), joy breaks out in the life. Our highest joys are held out in our embrace of the Word of God.

Faith and joy come by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God. Romans 10:17

Hear the Word of the Lord! Find joy in responding to what He says!

"And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice, and yielded up His spirit. And behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom, and the earth shook; and the rocks were split, and the tombs were opened; and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; and coming out of the tombs after His resurrection they entered the holy city and appeared to many." Matthew 27:50-53

One extraordinary event that surrounds the crucifixion of Christ is the raising of a few believing dead at the time of His death. All of the cosmos stood up to notice and participate in this singular most important event in the history of Adam's race. "Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures." 1 Corinthians 15:3 From noon to three in the middle of the day, the sky fell dark (Matthew 27:45). Earthquakes happen from time to time, but as the icing on the cake of the finished work at Calvary, well, that was just way over the top in the coincidence category. All of creation celebrated the accomplishment of His death. The veil ripped...from top to bottom. The rocks split open and with them several tombs in the cemetery. Who could deny that something big was going down? Who could understand how eternal what was being accomplished actually was...or isn't "is"?

My personal favorite spoil from the Calvary event is the believing folks whose graves were opened. Isn't it interesting that although several cemetery graves were opened no unbelievers were party to this particular spoil of the death and resurrection of Jesus? Creation seems to anticipate the implications of what would be (Christ's resurrection) by opening these graves. These graves were opened on Good Friday as Jesus gave up His spirit to the Father. The text records that they came out of their tombs "after the resurrection". Now inquiring minds want to know, or so we are told. What did they do between Friday and Sunday?

That question made for fascinating banter at the table, as our college sons were home to share a rare meal with the rest of the family. What did they do? They hung out in their graves until Christ's resurrection. What were they doing? Maybe it was just a seasonal reflection but our Caleb suggested that maybe they were watching March madness. It was good for a great round of laughter, but probably not. On Sunday morning they came out. It was the morning of the living dead. What could more accent the promise of Jesus who gives life out of death?

Can you imagine the response when they walked into Jerusalem and visited home? What would have been the response when it was yelled in the house that Aunt Suzie was at the front door? "Say what? Who?" These believing families would all have concluded that something never seen before and never experienced yet was going down. The death and resurrection of Jesus was changing everything. It certainly signaled to us that the spoils of the resurrection of Jesus were going to be shared with his own. This was not an individual victory in overcoming sin, death, the grave and hell; but this was a victory for the whole team. He was only the first-fruit. There were going to be others. For all who have savingly believed, it anticipates what is to come-life after death. Reunion with the believing dead. A share in the life, the eternal life of Jesus Christ. While they may not have been watching March Madness, it was indeed madness that astonished others as God's power pulsated through the cemetery and woke up a few believing dead. That was only a foretaste, just a localized manifestation of what will take place on the great day when "the dead in Christ will rise first" (1 Thessalonians 4:16). Even so Lord Jesus come!

Currently I am preaching a series on the Psalms. We are not going through them in order nor are we taking just the epic Psalms so familiar. We are trying to cover a range of the kinds of Psalms we find in the Psalter (praise and lament and everything). In reading in the midst of the series I ran across something last week that I found very provoking.

Walter Brueggeman is a neo-orthodox Old Testament Scholar. I read his stuff carefully and do not agree with everything he writes. But he has a keen mind and an insightful pen. In his little book Praying the Psalms he describes God's actions to move us onto growth and through the experiences of the broken world. Under a heading of "Beyond Our Time of Equilibrium" in a chapter on "Letting Experience Touch the Psalter" Brueggemann says this: "I suggest, in a simple schematic fashion, that our life of faith consists in moving with God in terms of: a.) being securely oriented; b.) being painfully disoriented; and c.) being surprisingly reoriented." He notes that being securely oriented is a situation of equilibrium. We love to be there. It is when we have that sense that all is well. We can even believe that God is "blessing us", his favor resting upon us. I must confess to a gravitation to this station of moving with God. Life seems well and at peace and settled. Isn't this God's design? Isn't this the tangible expression of His blessing? His sentence in the middle of a paragraph stabbed me: "This is the mood of much of the middle-class Church" (page 3). Ouch! Is that us? Is that who we are at Southgate? It sent me thinking and reading the Psalms differently.

I find that "painfully disoriented" category to fit and to help with understanding the cries from many of the Psalms. The passion in the cries is full and even raw. How many of us know folks who in the midst of life's brokenness experience painful disorientation of the soul? "Where is God? Why? Where is this going? This doesn't feel right! I am feeling like I stepped outside of the circumference of God's care." Some Psalms are snapshots of such disorientation, painfully scribed out in words. Most do not end there (although Psalm 88 would certainly be an exception).

Most end with a surprising reorientation, a "nevertheless, I am continually with you" (Psalm 73:23) style. The reoriented state moves us forward in our trust in God. We are more weathered, leaning at a greater angle from thereafter into the wind of providence. We are more apt to delight in the anticipation of reorientation, notwithstanding the anguish of the disturbed peace (or the change from the secure orientation). Trouble free lives are the envy, but a boring sense of self indulgence can be the price one pays for staying in the security of a serenity not desiring to be bothered by providence that would press our spirit and drive us forward, albeit through anguish at times. Before he died Francis Schaeffer said that the central driving force behind the church in America was a drive for "personal peace and happiness and just to be left alone".

God is a genius in His dealings with us. Where are you today? In the midst of a death grip on your hold of this present moment of "secure orientation"? Or are you in the midst of the fearful experience of having the bottom drop out and the pain of disorientation crash in? The old gospel hymn "God Is Still on the Throne" comes to mind. After the resurrection we who follow Jesus carry in our spirits that notion that a surprising reorientation must be just around the corner. Some resolutions are even sorted out in time, while others await that Great Day of the Lord. In the meantime we sing our Psalms and exercise that long obedience in the same direction.

We must crucify our insatiable desire to live happily ever after in a secure orientation that is devoid of pressing struggle while we live this side of God's great resolution at that the end of the age. We embrace the providence that He brings with a focus on the heart He has always manifested toward us in Christ. Calvary declares that "He spared not His own Son" (Romans 8:32). So keep going pilgrim. Come on now, chin up, knees down! Let's sing another Psalm!

Day by day and with each passing moment Strength I find to meet my trials here Trusting in my Father's wise bestowment I've no cause for worry or for fear He whose heart is kind beyond all measure Gives unto each day what He deems best Lovingly it's part of pain and pleasure Mingling toil with peace and rest (Carolina Sandell Berg)

A few weeks back Barry Bonds was indicted on charges of lying to a Grand Jury about alleged steroid use. It is an old story now with Bonds being one of the last they have gone after in the Victor Conte Bay Area Lab Co-Operative (BALCO) scandal that has rocked the sports world. It brought Olympic Track great, Marion Jones, to a tearful apology after she finally fessed up herself (after being sentenced) for lying to Federal Investigators back on October 5th. Bonds pleaded not guilty to the charges, as he was arraigned last week and will fight the government's case against him. They are actually charges (perjury to a Grand Jury) that are hard to prove. We'll see where this goes with baseball's all time home run leader*. Of course, this all comes weeks before the George Mitchell report is due. He is the former senator from Maine who is investigating steroid use in baseball and has a report due any day. Baseball is in a bit of a dilemma with one facet of their game, the home run, being tarnished with "roid" use.

On November 15th, the same week Bonds was indicted, Joe Nuxhall died. Joe was the beloved "ol' lefthander" who played for the Reds and then broadcast for them on radio from 1967 to 2007. During World War II when pro-players were leaving the ranks for America's greatest generation who fought in Europe and Asia, the scouts for the Reds went to Hamilton to watch one Orville Nuxhall (Joe's father) pitch in a semi-pro league he played in with son Joe. Joe was pitching that night. He was in the ninth grade at fifteen years old and was six two and weighed a hundred and ninety pounds. Forget about Dad, when the scout saw Joe throw, the Reds were after the "ol' lefthander". They signed him to a contract as the youngest player ever to sign and play in the pro's. June 10th, 1944 the youngest pitcher in the modern era went from throwing to eighth and ninth graders in Hamilton, Ohio to facing Hall of Famer, Stan Musial of the Saint Louis Cards. He was fifteen years, ten months and eleven days old.

In 1967 after 135 wins and 1372 strikeouts and fourteen years, Joe gave up the field for the press box and broadcast Cincinnati Reds baseball until he died. The last three years he was more sporadic than daily. He called some great teams. He was a staple through the Big Red Machine years of the early and middle seventies. He had a style all of his own. My personal favorite was his patient quiet style some innings that would simply allow the stadium ambiance to fill his mic as he watched the game. Oh sure, he would come in and out, between the beer vender who could be heard and the hot dog man and the general hub-bub that filled the air in the midst of a flat inning. Then of course, he was famous for his trade mark sign off: "This is the ol' lefthander rounding third and headed for home". He would use it after he finished his post game interview and finished his work for the evening. That quip made the Great American Ball Park facade as it is illumined right next to Reds stadium on the side that runs along the interstate. Of course, there is also the "ol' lefthander" in bronze with that characteristic follow through that is on the pavilion grounds of the stadium. All Cincinnati grieved when he died. The Reds nation mourned his passing. Joe is gone. A piece of ol' baseball was buried with Joe.

Joe was a relic of an age gone by which had much less money and much more hard work at the forefront of competition. The Babe and Ty Cobb may have drunk, but no one considered their hard living "performance enhancing". Joe was from the "leave it to Beaver" days of pro-baseball. We're sure beyond those days. It is a new day and a new game. Money wins. The American pastime is not so much like the past times. But in that sense baseball is a metaphor for life.

The world has changed. Things are not like they used to be. We may look romantically to the ol' world and envy its return. But Doogie, Lucy and Beaver and Andy and Opie are not coming back...even if we whistle the Mayberry song and carry our poles to the fishing hole and skip rocks. Those days are gone. And remember while Opie and Andy skipped rocks adultery was pretty heartily enjoyed, alcoholism was accepted, they smoked on tv and the fear of God did not seem too much more absent than today. Post World War II was just giving us the first chances after the depression to ensconce the dollar as our central idol. We were way too self righteous also...we just kept going to church. We must now learn to live in our age. More importantly for the follower of Jesus, we must learn how to navigate in our age and raise our children, be faithful to our spouse (if we are married), live a chaste life (if we are single) and penetrate our community. Faithfulness to Christ at work and at play has to fit in there somewhere. We are called to get next to the rampant brokenness and engage the world on its turf, which is unfamiliar and can even be obnoxious. We may like the retro world of Beaver and his neighborhood, but that world had its own issues. But there sure seemed to have been simpler days that were less devious and more straight-forward.

The way forward in our time is not to go backwards. Randolph Hurst was told once that his paper was not as good as it was before. His quip has always intrigued me, "It never was." I still don't know entirely what he meant, but he was looking forward, not impressed by any accomplishment of the past.

We have come into the twenty first century and find ourselves ministering at a tough moment. A bright friend and observer startled me in a conversation earlier in the year when he commented, "Eric, our culture is dying." I wanted to say no, but found little strong evidence to push back. But God has placed us in our times. He has chosen us to be right here right now. While the assumptions that we could make about people's knowledge of the gospel in years gone by gave us a platform to talk to them about Jesus, sin is now a foreign concept to most. Since estrangement (because of sin) is the starting point for gospel understanding, where are we to go with people who start by rejecting "first base"? What are we to do? Do we give up in our days? (By the way, the key is to attractively bring them to the text. The Holy Spirit is the persuader!)

No, at Southgate we are galvanized by the challenge of our times. We are not naïve. We will not influence our culture by cute initiatives, although creative thinking honors our Creator. The day has long passed for small dreaming coupled with little effort. Nothing short of bold winsome effort that attracts people to Jesus is in order. We have to get Him in the middle of what we are trying to do. He is the dynamic that draws people in ("if I be lifted up..."). And our ace in the hole, though times change and culture's die and people grow away from Christ haunted Grandma's and auntie's who reminded them all about Jesus, is Jesus Christ himself. He is the same yesterday, today and forever. Hebrews 13:8. We can do all things through Christ who strengthens us when the whole world turns upside down and goes crazy with living outside of God's boundaries. Who knows, maybe in our day God will chose to use us, not unlike century one (which our new century is beginning to bear a striking resemblance to), to start a movement that will turn the whole world upside down...or is that then, right side up (Acts 17:6)?

I ran across a story last week that stopped me in my tracks. It is really a parable for our day. The story is really the story about our time. It is about an aspiration for enough that could never be satisfied. While this story is wrenching and tragic and very arresting, it is repeated in similar form all the time. As the Bobsled coach said in Cool Runnings, "If you are not enough without it, you'll never be enough with it." Let me explain. And remember, it was Jesus Christ who came to satisfy our deepest longings and bring us to a contentment tied exclusively to relating to Him. "I have come that you might really live." John 10:10. Seeking first the kingdom of God and Jesus' righteousness has its own reward. All those other things are just "added unto us-es" (Matthew 6:33).

He was an ace lefty pitcher that was outstanding. He was a D-1 powerhouse's first recruit one year. And boy did he deliver. He brought it pitch after pitch into this storied program's record book. There was that college World Series championship as well. They whisked through the series on his arm. Wasn't that a "perfect game" from the mound at the series that helped bring home the championship? He was at the top of his game and the aspiration of his heart was the bigs.

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There we were together on the sidewalk this past Saturday at Southgate. I went to the west end to catch a glimpse of the bus returning. It was carrying the 30 members of the HHD 237th FSB Forward 2 from the Ohio Army National Guard who deployed fifteen months ago in July of 2006 being mustered out from Springfield. They were home and just about to meet their families. I wanted to go over and see them come up the boulevard with the escort of a cadre of Vietnam veterans who picked them up on motorcycles when they came into Ohio from Indiana. As they rolled in I found myself standing next to him.

He was a little man whose Dad had been gone...for a long time. When you are ten years old, fourteen months is equivalent to five and a half years of your life at fifty. Now he could no longer contain the wait. It was when he started to whimper that he pulled me in. I noticed him. He could not hold it in. He began to jump up and down holding up his sign ("Welcome Home Dad!"). He was crying and jumping, trying to yell and chop-crying at the same time. He was exploding right next to me. As the crowd of one hundred and fifty plus received the men and women returning from their service in Mosul, Iraq, the little man disappeared in a sea of people coming near the throng mustering around the bus door. The wait was over. Dad was home. What a happy day!

It was such a privilege for our church to host the event. The guard had contacted us about receiving the men and women as they met their families. It was a rather elaborate ceremony in several phases. After thirty minutes of hugs and kisses, they marched in with some good Scottish fare with bagpipes a blaring. Then the VIP's spoke. Congressman David Hobson made his way forward to welcome them along with the upper tier of officers in the Ohio Army Guard. Mayor Copeland was here, Governor Strickland's emissary as well as Senator Voinivich's dispatch. Then a break was followed by a range of cool gifts given to each soldier. Among the gifts from the United States Army was also a package we added from our church for each soldier. We gave them a new Bible, a DVD called "Hope" which winsomely explains the gospel and a $25 gift card from Cracker Barrel. I am grateful to serve at a place that is willing to extend our ministry and has the latitude to do that because faithful givers sustain this work yearning for Christ to be known.

What a happy event! Not all my events are happy...that one sure was. Hugs and kisses and tears and smiles and pats on the back and awards and ceremony and dignitaries and families...happy to be back together. I'll most remember that little boy's joy.

I also thought about our pending reception in heaven when "our bus rolls in". Vance Havner (an old North Carolina Mountain preacher now gone) used to tell the story of traveling in ministry as young man and returning home by rail to be received at the station by his father with his standard query. "Well, how'd you get along?" Some day our labors will be over. The anxiety and stress of life in this broken world will abate. For everyone who has savingly believed in Christ, that last bit of consciousness here will give way to the ushering that will land us in the very presence of the One who loved us and gave Himself for us. The journey will be over. Our deeds here all completed.

I thought about how those returning soldiers must have felt on the bus. Finally home! The deeds called upon to be accomplished all finished. The 237th vetted Iraqis for employment and services taking finger prints and doing interviews and taking pictures and issuing ID's. They ran some forty eight hundred through the process mill in their stint and issued nearly eight-thousand badges. Among their sixty nine referrals for counter-intelligence leads was a hit on a finger print from an IED on a person they were vetting. That dude did not hang around long. The State department gobbled him right up. But now, their work was done. It was over. It was time to get off of the bus. Our time will come too. There will be a reception on that day...a day that my aunt and uncle used to rehearse with an old gospel song called "Glad Reunion Day". How proud those soldiers were of their service! They were done and walked off the bus...at home. For followers of Jesus, our bus will pull in someday...into the grandest of central stations. Yes, and we'll step off...home forever.

When a hard day comes along and I have to hack my way machete-like through it, I think of that song, "It will be worth it all, when we see Jesus". If we can just push through the hard days, the bus will pull in all too soon enough and we'll lament that we have no further opportunities to invest in the work before we had been received at home.

"One glimpse of his dear face,
All sorrow will erase
So bravely run the race
Till we see God!"

Let's all keep going! As Spurgeon used to say, "A few more stormy days at most, shall land me on fair Canaan's coast." "It will be worth it all, when we see Christ!"