Monthly Archives: January 2017

"I am the vine, you are the branches…Apart from Me you can do nothing." John 15:5

One of the most common agreements among people of widely differing backgrounds is they don't feel very satisfied in life. This cuts across all the usual demographics. The gnawing sense that "something" is missing afflicts most everyone, either chronically or at least on occasion.

One of the great themes of Scripture is how we might find a life of meaning. In fact, this is THE theme of scripture. The Bible really doesn't present us with a well-ordered or systematic theology in spite of our efforts to impose one on it. It's a story whose three main points are: Creation, The Breaking, and Redemption. The first two points happen in the earliest chapters of Genesis and reverberate throughout the rest of the Bible. The third point is the entire purpose of God. He is in the business of bring us back to the life He originally created us to have. He wants to make all things right, and Jesus Christ is His ultimate effort to do so.

The Gospel of John, of all the four gospels, seems especially focused on showing us how we can gain this life. Life, the very word, is a major theme of the gospel. Most interestingly for our purposes here is the fact that in John we find Jesus' words "I came that they might have life and have it abundantly" (10:10). He was not speaking of the quantity of life (i.e. we live forever), but the quality of life. God really wants us to LIVE! He wants us to experience joy (another theme in John).

The first few verses of John 15 present most clearly the means of attaining this joy. Jesus is the vine. He is the source, rooted in the eternal soil of God, that supplies every need we have. Our proper place is to be a branch that draws life from the vine. Thus, we abide in Him.

The problem arises when we try to be the vine itself, or abide in ourselves. I've often been in the position of trusting more in the gifts God gave me than in the God who gave them. I lived in my own strength, and the result was inevitably a hollowness which allowed me to have the appearance of life but inside I was spiritually exhausted.

The temptation is subtle. I never set out with fist shaking toward heaven, bent on being the master of my own destiny. No, the emptiness began slowly when I forgot that utter dependence on God is the way He created me to live. Little by little, and then suddenly, I pushed God to the periphery. I felt empty and unsure why. I had all of the theology, all the training, but I did not have the practice of dependence. I was not abiding in Christ.

It's not an unusual progression, or, should I say, decline. The fact is most of us live, or try to live, in our own strength. It is the ego's great deceit that we can make it on our own.

At some point, if we are fortunate, we come to the end of ourselves and recognize it. This is a necessary step in becoming the person God wants us to be. Almost always we arrive at this crisis through what Richard Rohr calls "necessary suffering." The self-willed life always leads to a self-defeated life. I wish there was another way, and perhaps there is, but I don't think so. Our humanity has a gravity to it that seems to always result in trusting ourselves before we come to a total trust in God. Though we could learn the lessons of Eden by reading the story carefully, we seem inevitably to reenact it. Only on scraped knees are we ready to say "Thy will, not mine, be done."

My "necessary suffering" was the rather intense period of alcoholism I went through, but the suffering actually predates the time I picked up that first glass of wine. I had lived in my own strength, trusted in my own abilities. I both gloried in and took the blame for the successes and failures around me. The glory and the blame, I can now see, are both expressions of disabling pride, but I could not see it at the time.

I was a twitching branch lying on the ground, separated from the life-giving vine. Still trying to recover the life I had seen previously, I soldiered on, preached on, and did some things with a measure of effeciveness. Then the sense of failure came on me, the darkness descended, and I drank to forget. Necessary suffering.

Early in recovery a friend gave me a book, and in the front he inscribed the words, "Be thankful to God for the gift of your alcoholism." Being early in recovery and still living with the very fresh memories of the damage I endured and inflicted, these words sounded truly ludicrous. Over the years, though, I see their truth. Only through my brokenness could I learn the absolute necessity of dependence on God, of abiding in Christ.

Now I certainly wouldn't recommend my path! I do, however, want you to look at your present unhappiness and see if it's the necessary suffering that brings you to the end of yourself and deposits you in a grateful heap at God's feet.

This surrender is not the obliteration of self. That fear is simply the howling complaints of a desperate ego. God can't take our hands until we unclench our fists. We can then trust Him to guide us and give us insight. We resist the urge to control and reject the roiling emotions when things don't go our way. Truly it is a much simpler, easier, and more powerful way to live.

A regular prayer of mine is "God give me grace." Whether I'm facing a challenge or blessing, I need God's grace to either endure and persevere or to see and enjoy fully a gift He has brought to me. In this way, I've discovered that being a branch is a wonderful way to live as long as I stay connected to the vine.

Grace,

Dr. Terry Ellis

January 29, 2017

"If you (who by comparison are evil!) know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask Him?" Matthew 7:11

Everyone wants to be happy, and that is certainly not a bad thing. I want to be happy. Happiness means my surrounding circumstances are agreeable. Things are going my way. So I'm happy when my health is good, the bills are paid, the Kentucky Wildcats win, etc. I could make a long list of things that make me happy.

The Bible actually has quite a bit to say about happiness. God blesses us in many ways, and some of those ways include health, possessions, circumstances of all sorts. "He causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust" Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount. So God is concerned about our happiness and seems to delight in giving us good things.

This doesn't change the fact that God's major concern is our eternity. So if we spend too much time on trying to be happy, or trying to persuade God to arrange everything to suit us, then we've missed the point entirely. But God enjoys giving us good gifts and encourages us to ask for them. Our happiness is important to God.

So how do we draw the line? What can we rightly expect with regard to happiness?

A phrase in the Serenity Prayer (long version) sums up my expectations of happiness. The next to last line reads, "that we may be reasonably happy in this life." That's it. I want to be reasonably happy.

Here are three keys that have helped me.

First, stop trying to be more than reasonably happy. Sure it would be a beautiful morning (and day) if everything's going my way, but is that reasonable? In fact, my expectation that I should have unblemished happiness is one of the impediments to being happy. In some ways, this expectation is vintage American theology. We've come to expect that all discomfort should be eliminated. Fact is, we'd be a lot happier if we settled for being reasonably happy.

An illustration: A few years ago I noticed how many men adamantly said they wouldn't want their children going into the same career they had. I decided to conduct my own survey and began to ask men this very question. Rarely would someone say yes. This was true no matter the occupation. Blue collar, white collar, it didn't matter. Now why? Part of the answer surely is that we all believe that something else would make us happier. But trust me, the other guy that you might be envying is saying the same thing.

I decided then that I would aim for 80%. I try to genuinely enjoy 80% of what I do. Every job I've ever had had about 20% of things that were not very fun, irritating, or even infuriating. But 80% is a B on just about any grading scale. I can be reasonably happy with 80% of things going my way. So can you.

Second, accept hardships as the pathway to peace. This is another of my favorite phrases from the Serenity Prayer. The great transformation in the Bible is that suffering actually becomes a means for spiritual growth. So this makes it possible for us to shift from trying to change everything to suit us, to looking for spiritual growth that comes with difficulty. Additionally, when viewed in this way, challenge is not something only to be endured. Amazingly, we find meaning in suffering.

Too many times, at some level, I fear that my life would be nothing but drenching unhappiness if _____ happened. That blank may be a serious health problem personally, or with a member of my family. I look at someone else in that feared situation and wonder how they make it. But when I look closer, I often find that they not only are making it but they seem to be filled with deep meaning and purpose. In fact, they appear genuinely happy.

I think here of the countless men and women who've been gravely injured serving our country. So often, I see in their lives moving testimonies of how they've met their challenges with greater resolve and thereby found a deeper meaning than they've ever had before.

I've never been a fan of the idea that "everything happens for a reason." I do believe we can construct reason, meaning, and purpose out of any situation. God doesn't bring upon us the storms of life, but neither does He waste them. He gets us through and helps us to find peace, and, yes, happiness when we accept hardships as the pathway.

Third, stop thinking of happiness and unhappiness as binary. You're never either one or the other. Every life has a bit of both (remember my 80% rule). The line between unhappiness and happiness cuts through us all. When people ask me how I'm doing I often say "I'm reasonably happy." This sometimes provokes puzzled looks, but it's accurate because at any given moment I'm a mixture of happiness and unhappiness. Now here is the challenge: I must watch more for the presence of happiness than for its absence. That's not easy!

Unhappiness is like stubbing my little toe. When it happens it's all I can think about. I ignore completely the fact that I don't have heart disease or cancer, for example. I'm outraged at the unfairness of the universe for putting that table leg right where my little toe was traveling. Any happy life depends on the proper focus. If I look for unhappiness I can find it in the next stubbed toe. But if I look for happiness, I'm surely overwhelmed by it. You always find what you look for in life.

Happiness/unhappiness is very much like the weather. It changes. That's good news because it means that the events leading to my unhappiness almost always dissipate like the storm. Of course, and this is good to remember, it also means that the sunshine is not permanent. I'm learning more and more to simply observe the clouds and the sunshine, accepting their inevitable presence in my life, without attaching any permanent self-evaluation to them. Also, my faith reminds me of the blue skies, or the starry skies, above the clouds. The troubled things of earth will one day give way to the permanence of heaven and that is a good thought. But until then, I'll look for the daily dose of heaven all around me.

I can embrace some fairly simple strategies that will increase my happiness, at least a bit, here and now. Of course, there's so much more to be said on this matter of happiness (such as helping others), but hopefully this will help. May you be reasonably happy this week.

Grace,

Dr. Terry Ellis

January 22, 2017