I mentioned once before a certain fifth grade class I taught, and the lesson we had on 2 Peter 1:5-7.  In trying to explain these characteristics, the requirements of being a Christian as they preferred to call them, I did a lot of word study.  Three of those words, and the way the children chose to make applications of them, have especially stuck with me after all these years.

Look up “virtue” in a Greek dictionary or lexicon and you are likely to find the phrase “moral excellence,” but this does not do a thing for a ten-year-old or for many adults either.  I finally came up with “doing right because it is right, not because someone is watching or you are afraid of the consequences.”  Or as the children put it, “Virtue is when you want to be good.”  They easily came up with example after example.  Probably my favorite was, “It isn’t virtue when you slow down to the speed limit because you see a police car.”  Children can be brutal!

Another word we looked up was “knowledge.”  We all feel so lacking here.  It was such a relief to discover that this use of the word signifies an active searching and desire for the truth—something even the newest Christian can have—and very often has more of than the one who has been sitting on his pew for forty years.  The children understood right away that this word was not a measure of knowledge but of devotion, and came up with examples even more easily than they had for “virtue.”  Just how often do we sit down for some real study, not just a read-through?  Do we spend more time in front of the TV than we do with our Bibles?  Are our Bible class lessons done as faithfully as our “homework?”

Then there was godliness.  How many times have I heard this defined as “a short form of godlikeness?”  Children these days are so worldly wise that even they understood that you cannot make an argument based on the construction of an English word when the word was originally written in Greek!  Godliness means my entire life is focused toward God.  Everything I say, think, or do must put Him first.  If I make any decision in life without first asking how it will affect my service to God, I am not godly. 

The children’s example?  If deciding to buy a new car means I cannot give as I should to the Lord, then I should not buy a new car!  Simplistic, you say?  Too much “this world?”  Well, they were only children after all, but doesn’t their example clearly show how godliness should pervade our everyday lives?  And isn’t that exactly what we adults have the most trouble with—applying spiritual principles to specific circumstances in our everyday lives, even when it hurts? 

Virtue, knowledge, and godliness:  hard to define?  Not to a ten-year-old.  Hard to do?  That depends on us.

Virtue: Servants, be obedient unto them that according to the flesh are your masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; not in the way of eye-service, as men-pleasers, but as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, with goodwill, doing service as unto the Lord, and not unto men, knowing that whatever good thing each one does, the same shall he receive from the Lord… Eph 6:5-8.

Knowledge: Putting away therefore all wickedness, and all guile, and hypocrisies, and envies, and all evil speaking, as newborn babes long for mother’s milk, you long for the spiritual milk which is without guile, that you may grow thereby unto salvation.  1 Peter 2:1,2

Godliness:  For they that are after the flesh mind the things of the flesh, but they that are after the spirit, the things of the spirit.  For the mind of the flesh is death, but the mind of the spirit is life and peace.  Rom 8:5,6

Dene Ward

Living in the country has meant adapting.  In many ways it has been good for me.  The city girl found out she could learn and change, even though change is a thing I have never liked.  I love routine.  Now, after 32 years, it isn’t change, it’s just a new routine, and that helps when I have had many more changes in the past few years, and see more coming.

One of the things I learned quickly was to make sure I had everything I needed to get by for the week.  A sixty to eighty mile round trip, depending upon which side of town what I need is on and how many other places I have to stop as well, doesn’t happen more than once a week even if you did forget the bread or run out of milk.  You learn to do without. You don’t change your mind about the menu unless you already have on hand the things the preferred dish needs.  When an unexpected guest arrives and you want to offer a meal, you put another potato in the pot, double the biscuit recipe, and get out another package of frozen garden corn, and if you didn’t plan dessert that night, you put the home-canned jellies and jams on the table.  So far, no one has complained.

I have learned to be organized.  I do everything in one visit, and usually that coincides with a doctor appointment or a women’s Bible class.  I keep track of everything I run out of, or run low on, as the week progresses, and buy it all in the order that uses the least gas.  I keep staples well stocked.

I have also learned that I don’t have to have everything I think I do.  The only store close to us is a tire store, about three miles down the country highway.  The man has been in business for 40 years.  Our children went to school with his, and somehow he has made a good living selling tires in the smallest county in Florida just outside a village that might have a population of 100 if you count the dogs.   But as far as shopping, it doesn’t do much for me.  You can’t try tires on, they don’t do much for the home décor, and window shopping is the pits.  So I don’t “shop.”

Sometimes we become slaves to our culture.  We think we must wear certain things, go certain places and do things in a certain way because everyone else does.  We shop and buy because everyone does, not because we need it.  We go see the movies that “everyone” has seen.  We buy a cell phone because “everyone” has one nowadays—“it’s a necessity.”  We run down to the store every time we run out of something instead of carefully making a list of what we need and taking care of it in one, or at most two trips a week, wasting precious time and costing ourselves more money than we realize.  Everyone does, we say.  Maybe we should stop and think about that.

Why?  First, because it never crosses our minds to be different than everyone.  Is it sinful?  Maybe not, but then why does something have to be sinful before I am willing to look at it and decide whether it is best for me and my situation?  Why am I so afraid to be different?  A Christian should have a mindset that is always looking at things in different ways than the rest of the world.  If I decide this is the best way to live (and not sinful), then fine, but I should, at the least, think about it.  Christians who always act without thinking will eventually do something wrong some time in the future. 

Second, we are to be good stewards of everything God gives us, including time and money.  If we saved a little time, could we use it in service to God?  Could we offer help to someone in distress?  Would we have more time for visiting the sick and studying with neighbors?  If we saved those few dollars every week, could we give more to the Lord?  Could we help someone in need more often?  Could we be the ones who take a bag of groceries to a family in distress because that day we could buy for them instead of running to the store for yet something else we forgot?

But we aren’t really talking about running down to the store here.  We’re talking about attitude and priorities—about doing the best we can for our Master in more than a haphazard way.  Paul says we are to “purpose,” or plan, our giving.  I have no doubt that doing so ensures a larger donation than merely waiting till the last minute to see what’s left in the bank or the wallet.  The same thing will be true if we plan our prayer time, study time, and service time.  Instead of running out of time for any of it, we will find ourselves making a habit of the things God expects of us.

In a parable Jesus praised the steward who was “a faithful and wise manager,” who was always working, always serving, and able to get the appropriate things done at the appropriate time (Luke 12:42).  Those servants, he goes on to say, are always ready for the master’s return.  Are we ready, serving and working as many hours a day as possible as faithful stewards, or are we so disorganized that judgment day will find us at the checkout for the fifth time in a week, just to pick up a bottle of ketchup?

As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God's varied grace: whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies--in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. (1Pe 4:10-11)

Dene Ward

Because of health circumstances, my teaching has been limited lately, but I remembered the other day a certain fifth grade Bible class—students who are now in college or out working in the world.  (My, how time flies!)  We studied a workbook that used that old standby phrase “the Christian graces,” describing the passage in 2 Peter 1:5,6. 

Although this phrase is nowhere found in the Bible, when one grows up hearing things over and over, one tends to accept them without question.  Before teaching that lesson I decided to check a dictionary.  Imagine my surprise to discover that use of the word “grace” meant “an embellishment, adornment, enhancement, or garnish.”  In other words, graces are something not essential to the entity in question, but which make it more attractive.  Like that parsley next to your steak dinner at a restaurant—it just makes the plate pretty.  The steak is still a steak without it.  Are we still Christians without these characteristics?  Is that what we want these children to believe about Christianity?

Even my fifth-graders were able to pick out these phrases in the context of the list:  they make you to be not idle or unfruitful, v 8; he who lacks these things is blind, v 9; if you do these…you shall never stumble, v 10; thus you shall be richly supplied…the entrance into the eternal kingdom, v 11.

And the traits which do this?  Virtue, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly kindness, love.  Can one be a Christian without loving others?  Without controlling himself?  Without persevering to the end?

Maybe some of us treat these things like parsley on our plates of Christianity, but my fifth-graders decided that we should call them “the requirements of being a Christian.”  I think they are right.  Truly, out of the mouths of babes…

Yes and for this very cause adding on your part all diligence, in your faith supply virtue, and in your virtue knowledge, and in your knowledge self-control, and in your self-control perseverance, and in your perseverance godliness, and in your godliness brotherly kindness, and in your brotherly kindness love.  For if these things are yours and abound, they make you to be not idle or unfruitful unto the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.  For he that lacks these things is blind, seeing only what is near, having forgotten the cleansing from his old sins.  Wherefore, brethren, give the more diligence to make your calling and election sure, for if you do these things, you shall never stumble, for these shall be richly supplied unto the entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  2 Peter 1:5-11.

Dene Ward

I never had much trouble sightreading piano music.  You read the note, you find it on the piano, and you play it.  I wasn’t perfect by any means—trying to read music and translate that to a mental keyboard in your mind and then have your hands immediately go to the correct place on the real keyboard in just a matter of milliseconds takes a quick mind and perfect eyesight, neither of which I had even then.  But for the most part I was a good music reader and got the job done, even if I did have to slow the tempo down so I could play in the correct rhythm too. 

Then I got to college theory classes and was expected to sightsing!  Now that is a completely different issue.  Looking at a page of notes and singing them seemed like an impossible task to me.  It takes a natural ear.  If you don’t have one, you have to train it.  I had to put mine through boot camp the entire first year of theory classes.  Eventually I learned to do it—I could look at a piece of music and sing the notes, without accompaniment of any kind, not even chords to keep you in the right key.  I wasn’t any more perfect at it than I was at the piano, probably less, but I was musician enough to pass my tests, classes, and juries, and to make two college choruses and a women’s sextet.

Most of the hymns in our books are written in standard major keys, with standard four part harmony.  They are nothing like the music I had to sightsing in college, so I can usually sightsing them without too much trouble.  It’s sort of like being asked to boil an egg when you have been making soufflés for four years--simple.  Most of the congregation, though, do not have the advantage of being trained musicians and they just sing it the way they first heard it, which in many cases was incorrect. That means that very often I stick out like a sore thumb (or a sour note).

I have tried to sing what everyone else is singing just so I won’t, but I have trained myself so diligently that I can’t.  I’m a musician—I see the note, I sing what I see.  We were singing “When We All Get to Heaven,” the other day, and every time (at least three) I sang it right I created a clash that was hard to go unnoticed.  “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” creates at least five such clashes.  With “Amazing Grace” the list is nearly as long as the song itself.

But you know what?  While I don’t want to cause those clashes, my training makes it nearly impossible to sing the songs wrong, and my desire to please God by obeying His commands to sing makes it completely impossible for me to stop singing.

Isn’t that the way life is supposed to be for a Christian?  You really don’t want to clash with your neighbors.  You really want to “live peaceably with all men.”  But you should have trained yourself so well that you find it nearly impossible to sin.  Sticking out like a sore thumb shouldn’t matter to you.  Yes, it may be difficult, but no one ever promised us “easy.”  We are supposed to be different from unbelievers.  We are supposed to “conform to the image of His Son,” not to the world. It should be a habit by now.

Sometimes when I sing things correctly, but differently, I get funny looks.  Once, a song leader even went to the microphone when that section came up on the next verse so he could sing the (wrong) note loud and clear.  I guess he heard my different note on the first verse and it bugged him. 

This coming Sunday morning, if you hear someone sing a different note than you are singing, maybe you should check the notes you are singing.  Then do something much more important.  Use it as a reminder to check your life.  Could anyone tell you apart from your neighbors, or do you blend right in?  Out there in the world, you should be sightsinging a completely different tune.

But the wisdom from above is first pure—then peaceable…James 3:17.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed…Rom 12:2.

Dene Ward

I had a beautiful flower garden this year—brick red gaillardia, their blooms lined with yellow-gold trumpet-shaped petals; pink, magenta, white, and burgundy cosmos fluttering on feathery spring green plumes: hardy, yellow gloriosa daisies shining like beacons among the leaves; yellow, orange, and rust colored marigolds perched on the bushiest plants I had ever seen in that flower; bright purple Mexican petunias who, though they shed their blooms every night, never failed to greet me with another show of dozens every morning; and zinnias sporting every color imaginable--white, yellow, salmon, cherry red, fire engine red, bright orange (Gator orange NOT Volunteer orange), purple, pink, lime green, and even variegated colors, growing as tall as five feet before the summer was out.

Unfortunately, those zinnias began growing something besides blooms. It started at the bottom, with black-rimmed white spots on just a few lower leaves.  It spread from one plant to several in an area until finally it had touched every single plant.  Then it began its inexorable climb up until only the top few leaves remained green, and only the newest blossoms, barely opened from the bud, were clean.  It took me awhile to realize what was happening, and by the time I figured it out, it was too late.

Still, I didn’t want to pull the plants.  They did have a little green left at the top, and where there is life there is hope, right?  Finally after several mornings of looking out on what had once brought joy to my mornings and seeing instead a mass of black leaves and stems, I made a decision.  Why did I have these flowers anyway?   Because they were beautiful, and even I could see all that color from a distance.  Were they beautiful any longer?  No, they were about as ugly as they could be.  And the longer I waited, the further that fungus spread.  The gaillardia were already infected, and a few of the marigolds.

So the next day I went out and began pulling.  It wasn’t even laborious.  Those plants were so sick that they came right up out of the ground, and do you know what I found underneath?  New seedlings growing from the deadheads I had been cutting all summer.  If I had left those ugly things much longer, the baby plants would have been choked out by the much larger roots and then infected as well.  Now they can breath and grow, and the sunlight reaches their tiny leaves. I have already gotten out the copper spray, a fungicide that is even considered “organic,” not that I would care since my goal is to save those new flowers no matter what it takes, and they aren’t on the menu anyway.

Still, it was hard to make that decision.  I have trouble even thinning the rows in the vegetable garden.  It goes against my nature to pull up a plant that is still alive, even if it does mean better production from the ones you leave, and far more food on my shelves to last the winter.

Sometimes we have to make decisions like that with souls.  Give not that which is holy to the dogs, nor cast your pearls before swine, Matt 7:6.  Who wants to make that judgment call?  And whosover shall not receive you nor hear your words…shake the dust off your feet, 10:14.  It is difficult to give up on someone you have invested a lot of time in, someone you have come to care about.  But sometimes our refusal to do so is costing many more souls out there the chance to hear and accept the word while we waste time on the stubborn and rebellious.

Sometimes that decision must be made among ourselves too.  A little leaven leavens the whole lump, Paul warned about immorality in 1 Cor 5:7, and then used exactly the same warning about false doctrine in Gal 5:9.  If you know anything about cooking, you know that leaven is alive.  It may not be a fungus, but it creeps in exactly the same way and spreads.  No matter how small a chunk of it you use, that dough will suddenly react, and there is no going back when it does.  Speaking of false teachers in 2 Tim 2:17, Paul says, “Their word eats as does a gangrene.”  When gangrene eats away the flesh, it’s gone.

Yes, we have to make these tough decisions, but I have seen some people make it with a little too much zest.  God never enjoyed it.  I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, He said, Ezek 33:11.  God would have all men to be saved, Paul says, 1 Tim 2:4, and Peter reminds us that God is not willing that any should perish, 2 Pet 3:9.  He waited a long time before He finally punished His people, and even then it was with anguish:  How shall I give you up…how shall I cast you off…my heart recoils within me, my compassion grows warm and tender, Hos 11:8. 

God never meant for this decision to be easy, but sometimes it has to be made.  It isn’t compassion not to make it—it’s cowardice.  My medical book says that fungus spreads worst among very young children and those who are already ill.  We must look underneath those infected branches to see the reason for our decision—to save many more before they too are infected with a fatal disease.  The souls who were sacrificed in the arenas by the Roman persecution are depicted as asking God, How long until you will judge and avenge our blood? Rev 6:10.  Desperate souls may be out there asking us, "How long are you going to waste time on the unwilling, when we want it so badly?”

"Rejoice with him, O heavens; bow down to him, all gods, for he avenges the blood of his children and takes vengeance on his adversaries. He repays those who hate him and cleanses his people's land." Deuteronomy 32:43

Dene Ward

In the last few years, my life has really slowed down.  I am no longer able to teach piano and voice lessons because I cannot read the students’ music well enough, especially when it comes to sightreading aria and concerto accompaniments.  This means fewer teachers’ meetings, and no more competitions to prepare for, sweat over, and pray about--I had the usual bunch of cardiac kids who waited till the last minute to pull it off.

My jog has also become a walk, at times with a big sturdy walking stick to steady myself when I stumble over something I did not see.  Even something as harmless as a pine cone has taken me unawares at times, rolling beneath my feet.

It isn’t true that your other senses become better when one fails.  Your hearing doesn’t improve, nor do your taste buds suddenly wake up.  But you do learn to use them more, and that makes them seem like they have improved.  So I am suddenly paying more attention to the birds on our property when I am outside. 

Though I cannot always see them, I have learned many of their calls, and can now identify quail, doves, owls, whippoorwills, hawks, blue jays, crows, titmice, wrens, woodpeckers, and hummingbirds—and I don’t mean the pecking and humming of the last two, but their actual vocal sounds.  And now that I recognize all of those, the ones I have not yet identified are more distinct when I hear them.  There is one out there that sounds like a bad flutist.

My son thinks it is pretty amazing when I say things like, “There’s a wren in the live oak outside your old bedroom window.”  But would I know where it was if I could not hear it?  What is the most amazing thing of all is that my Heavenly Father knows where each and every bird is whether it sings or not.  And that means He knows where I am, both physically and spiritually.  He knows, not just because He is able to know, but because He cares to know.  And that is the greatest security a child of God can have.  “Yes for me, for me He careth.”

Are not five sparrows sold for two pence?  And not one of them is forgotten in the sight of God  But the very hairs of your head are numbered.  Fear not.  You are of more value than many sparrows.  Luke 12:6,7

Dene Ward

This business of treating small dogs as fashion accessories strikes me as a little barbaric.  I’m surprised PETA hasn’t stepped in and complained.  Of all people, they should take offense at an animal being treated as an inanimate object.

I understand loving an animal.  I have cried at the loss of every dog and cat we ever had.  I planted flowers on Magdi’s grave, one that blooms all summer and one that blooms spring and fall.  The only time I can’t look out the window and know at a glance where she lies is the middle of winter.  But she had her place and it wasn’t in my purse.

Some people treat pet peeves as if they were real pets, live creatures that must be fed and cared for.  In fact, feeding is a good word for the way they nurture those peeves at every opportunity.  Understand, I am not talking about matters of sin and morality, but things we like or don’t like, opinions we hold about certain behaviors, and even matters of courtesy.  Courtesy is usually a cultural notion, not one of moral right and wrong.  It may bug me to death to be in an elevator with someone yelling into a cell phone, but I doubt it will send him to hell.

If it is possible, so far as it depends upon you, live peaceably with all, Rom 12:18.  Nowadays, when our culture is calling on us to take a stand on things we used to take for granted, it is even more important that we not raise a fuss over the inconsequential.  “Choose your battles,” we often say, something parents must learn so their children won’t view them as prison guards but as wise guides instead.  We need to learn that in regard to pet peeves too.

When you take that unpopular moral stand, no one will listen if all you have done before is rant about minor things at every opportunity.  No one will care what your opinion is or how well you back it with facts when they are used to tuning you out.  If, on the other hand, you have always been fair-minded, cool-tempered, and tolerant of others’ social gaffes, making allowances for them without even being asked, when something comes along that actually causes you to stand up and speak, they are far more likely to pay attention—and consider.

It is also important to stifle those pet peeves with your brothers and sisters in the Lord.  Be at peace among yourselves…seek peace and pursue it…suffer wrong [for the sake of peace]…be one…so that the world may know you have sent me, 1 Thes 5:13; 1 Pet 3:11; 1 Cor 6:7; John 17:22,23.  God could not have made it plainer that how we get along with one another affects far more important things than our own personal agendas.  Today we must be as tightly bound as the threefold cord spoken of in Eccl 4:12.  We need one another when the world turns against us and labels us “hateful” simply because we exercise our American right to disagree and, much more important, our Christian obligation to speak out.  If my reputation precedes me as an irrational ranter who isn’t worth listening to, it isn’t just myself I am hurting, but the Lord and His cause.

I must stop tending those pet peeves as if they were pedigreed pooches, when all they are is a crack in my armor.  Who do you imagine rejoices the most when I lose it over a trifling matter of preferences?  The Lord or Satan? 

We are all sojourners on the same trip, stopping for a night at a second rate motel.  No pets allowed.

A fool’s wrath is known at once, but the prudent ignores an insult…a fool utters all his anger, but a wise man keeps it back and stills it…love covers a multitude of sins, Prov 12:16; 29:11; 1 Pet 4:8.

Dene Ward

I find Job to be one of the most perplexing books in the Bible.  After trying many years to understand it, I have come up with this:  the book of Job does not answer the question of why bad things happen to good people; it is merely God saying, “You do not need to know why.  You just need to trust me no matter what.”

We all know the story.  In an attempt to make Job renounce God, Satan took away every good thing in his life.  What did he lose?  Seven sons, three daughters, seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, five hundred female donkeys (remember, wealth was measured mainly by livestock in the patriarchal times), many servants, standing in the community, and even his health.  About the only things he didn’t lose were his house (42:11), his wife, and his closest friends--if you can call them that.  In fact, when you think about it, Satan probably knew those people would be a help in his own cause, and that is why he left them.  He certainly would not have left Job with a support system if he could have helped it.

And that brings us to Mrs. Job.  Now let’s be fair.  When Job lost everything, so did she.  And as I have grown older I have learned to be very careful about judging people who are going through any sort of traumatic experience. 

Keith and I have been through a lot together.  I have had to take food off my plate and put it on my children’s plates because they were still hungry and there was no more.  We have dug ditches next to each other in a driving rainstorm to keep our house from washing away.  I have held a convulsing child as he drove 90 mph to the emergency room thirty miles away.  We have carried all the water we used in the house back and forth for a month because the well collapsed and we could not afford to repair it.  I have bandaged the bullet wounds he sustained as a law enforcement officer.  But all that happened over a period of thirty years, not in one day.  And never have I lost a child, much less all of them.  What I would do if I were Mrs. Job, I do not know.  What I should do is easy to say, but however glibly it rolls off my tongue, that does not mean I would have the strength to do it. 

She was suffering just as much as her husband.  But somehow, Job hung on, while his wife let her grief consume her.  Job actually lost his wife in an even more painful way than death because she failed the test of faith.

So what happened to her afterward?  Job did have a wife or he would not have had more children (42:13).  Without further evidence to the contrary, the logical assumption is that it was the same wife.  Since they had a continuing relationship perhaps he is the one who helped her, and she repented both of her failure to be a “helper suitable” and of her faithlessness.

So what should we learn about sharing grief as a couple?  What I hope we would all do when grief and suffering assail our homes is support one another.  The thing that Job did not have from anyone is the thing that should make all single people desire a good marriage:  support and help.  Troubles should pull us together, not tear us apart.  What I cannot lift by myself, I can with help. Sometimes he is the reason she makes it over a personal hill and other times she is his light to make it through the dark places, and that is how God intended it.

Now here is the question for each of us.  If Satan were going to test my spouse, would he take me, or leave me?

Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor.  For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow, but woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up.  Again, if two lie together, then they have warmth, but how can one be warm alone?  Eccl 4:9-11

Dene Ward

The day of our 20th anniversary marked the day I had lived with my husband as long as I had lived without him.  Well, not exactly, since I did not marry on my birthday, but you understand my point.  Every year after that meant I was further and further removed from my “first life” as a dependent of my parents.

As the years went by I saw even more “lives.”  I spent several years as a preacher’s wife and homemaker who taught a few piano lessons here and there among the many moves we made.  Then I went through a life when my husband worked the regular hours of any provider and my in-home music studio became nearly a full time job.  Now I am in another life, one of increasing disability.  Yet in many ways it is the best “life” yet since I am finally able to spend hours in Bible study and writing, and have come to know the joys of being a grandparent.  I suspect there will be yet another life sooner or later.  All things being equal, as they say, I will probably be a widow someday, and due to this eye disease will be blind and once again living as a dependent.

When I was young, I remember people speaking about a TV show called “I Led Three Lives.”  I never saw it.  It first aired on Oct 1, 1953, before I was even born, and its last episode was broadcast May 1, 1957.  It was a product of the Cold War, loosely based on the life of Herbert Philbrick, an advertising executive in Boston who infiltrated the American Communist Party for the FBI.  His three lives were as advertising man, “Communist,” and counter spy.  A little mulling it over and I realized Christians all lead three lives—first sinner, then believer, and finally immortal.

The New Testament even speaks of it as “lives.”  In Col 3:9,10 the old self and its practices are put away for a new self, “renewed by knowledge.”  The old self was corrupt through “deceitful desires,” and the new self was “created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” Eph 4:22,24.  The old life was lived for ourselves, the new life is lived for Christ, 2 Cor 5:15.  We crucified the old man, one enslaved to sin, and the new man was set free from that sin.  We were once slaves of righteousness and are now slaves of God, Rom 6:6,7,19,20.  We used to live for human passions; now we live for the will of God, 1 Pet 4:2.  At one time we lived in darkness and now we live as children of Light, Eph 5:8.  Once it was I who lived, but now it is Christ living in me, Gal 2:19,20.

And that leaves only the eternal life to come, 1 Tim 4:8, the one Paul says is “truly” life, 6:19.  That one depends upon how we live this second life.  We must feed on the bread of life, John 6:51.  We must sow to the Spirit, Gal 6:8.  We must have patience in well-doing, Rom 2:7.  We must do good and believe, John 5:29; 6:40.  We must be righteous which, in the context of the verse, Matt 25:46, means we must serve, and we must love our brethren in order to experience that eternal life, 1 John 3:15. 

But simply making a list and following it won’t suffice.  The life must be such an integral part of you that the “list” takes care of itself.  Philbrick lived his three lives simultaneously; ours are supposed to be consecutive, one completely giving way to the other.  Anything else is a sham that will keep you from that third life.

Paul never speaks of eternal life as anything but a certainty.  As surely as you are living a life now, that final one will come too, the life that is “truly” life.  It will make these other two seem like nothing in its length, in its glory, in its joy.  “I led three lives,” we will say.  No, we only led (past tense) two.  We will lead the last one forever.

Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the sake of the faith of God's elect and their knowledge of the truth, which accords with godliness, in hope of eternal life, which God, who never lies, promised before the ages began, Titus 1:1-2.

Dene Ward

Now that I have become ninety percent deaf, few would be likely to guess that I was once a fair song leader.  From the teenage years when I first learned how,, a favorite was, “Sunshine in My Soul.”  These days, a favorite line from it is, “Jesus listening can hear the songs I cannot sing.”  When one cannot hear what note he is singing or hear well enough to stay in the same key three phrases in a row, the result is seldom melodious, but Jesus can hear what I cannot any longer sing.

Life throws us many curves.  Our plans seldom work and when they do, we are often forcefully reminded, “Beware what you wish for, you might get it.”  Health declines, for many it was not great to begin with.  I am going deaf, my wife is going blind.  We live in a “manufactured home” and our insurance company of 20+ years just dropped us. Yet, recently a young person (most of them nowadays) described me as a happy person to someone she did not know was my son.

I must admit, that made my day. “Happy” derives from things that happen.  I could make a long list of reasons I am not happy.  My deafness, my wife’s impending blindness are just the first items on each of our lists.  (She is so tired of repeating herself that she says if she had wishes she’d fix me first).  Everyone has a list, some longer or containing more serious matters than others.  Even healthy and relatively wealthy people are often not happy.  The basis for our JOY lies in a line of the title song: “For Jesus is my light.”  We are not the only ones with problems, in fact, I see JOY on the faces of those whose list makes mine seem like a wish list.  Jesus lights up your life when you live as he would have in your shoes.

Jesus emptied himself to accomplish things for others (Phil 2:5-8).  If self is the center of our ambitions, there will be no room for his light.  Jesus served others.  He gave up his time and place that he might save people who did not even like him.  If we will focus on doing kindness to others, there will be sunshine in our souls that can be seen.  The sunshine comes despite the things that happen, and because God knows what will fill us with joy and peace.  He sent his Son to show us.

Life is full of trouble and heartache and pain.  It often seems that good happens only so it will hurt when it is taken away, or to make the bitter worse by contrast….then you die.

But, then you will be raised--raised as certainly as God raised Jesus.  Raised to a heavenly body in a sinless world where everything always goes right. The sunshine in my soul shines from the hope Jesus gave of being in that place.

And he showed me a river of water of life, bright as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb, in the midst of the street thereof.  And on this side of the river and on that was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds fruits, yielding its fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.  And there shall be no curse any more: and the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be therein: and his servants shall serve him; and they shall see his face; and his name shall be on their foreheads.  And there shall be night no more; and they need no light of lamp, neither light of sun; for the Lord God shall give them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever. Rev 22:1-5

Keith Ward