City on a Hill

"You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden."
Matthew 5:14

We are indeed cities on hills whose lights shine forth into the darkness. A city on a hill can be seen for miles in the darkness of night. The lost man, sifting through the blackness, spies the light from afar and his heart is lifted; he has hope. He does not know what awaits him in the city but he knows he wants to escape the darkness. Welcome this sojourner. You have just won a soul for Christ's kingdom! This then is how our light should shine: bright and vibrant, without shame and piercing into the night. Let those who are lost see it and run to it for safety. Let the light of Christ shine out of our city gates and call to the hearts of the lost.

But be wary, O city on a hill, for just as the wandering soul can see you, so can the roaming bands of robbers and thieves. The enemy spies your city and seeks to pillage. He would steal our heavenly treasures and extinguish our lamps. Take heart! For the very thing that allows you to be seen from so far off is the very thing that helps in the time of defense. You sit atop a hill. Cities were built on hills because it is far easier to defend from higher ground. You will still have to fight, be sure of this; your armor need not rust nor was it made in vain (Ephesians 6:10-18). But your fight will be easier. This is no ordinary hill: this hill is called Calvary and on it was won the war. Christ's blood soaks the ground; it is poison to the enemy and strength to the ally. Dip your arrows in it and whet your sword. Paint your face for battle and, above all else, fuel your lamps with this oil that your light may shine into eternity.

A Mirror Dimly

When are the times I reflect on my sin the most? It is when I sin the "biggest". "Big" sins are defined by our culture in light of the bible and often (but not always) have more manifest consequences. It is a shame that it takes a "big" sin for me to wonder just how sinful I truly am. When I stop to consider how many times a day a thought or reaction or spoken word was simply dismissed because it was a "small" sin, I shudder to think how truly and utterly evil I am in my flesh.

I do not fully comprehend how desperate I am apart from Christ and His Holy Spirit. I do know partially how sinful I am but I do not fully know:

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face (I Corinthians 13:12).

For God to fully reveal my sin to me would be my utter destruction. Even now thinking about my sin quickens my heart and weighs down my soul. It is not the sin itself that destroys me, it is the holiness of God; for God to fully reveal our sin it necessarily follows that God must fully reveal himself.

Think about it: our sin is only counted as sin because it is measured against the standard of God himself (Psalm 51:4). Look at Isaiah's reaction to seeing God:

I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up: and the train of his robe filled the temple...And I said "Woe is me! For I am lost... (Isaiah 6:1 & 5)

Isaiah is terrified at the sight of God, and this is just a vision! It was a preview to the grand show in heaven! Consider Job's reaction:

I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes. (Job 42:5-6)

At the instant God is revealed our sin will be truly revealed and our weightless sin will crush us under the gravity of God's holiness.

But it won't crush us. At the moment God is revealed, our sin is revealed, and Christ on the cross is revealed. It is in that moment that we will simultaneously look with terror upon our sin and feel utter joy at the sight of the cross. We are not crushed by our sin because Christ was crushed by our sin. We do not fully understand the brevity of our sin and we do not fully understand the brevity of the cross.

We can only look in a mirror dimly but then...then we will see face to face.

A Nursing Mother

A tear hangs suspended from my wife's nose, hesitating like a young adolescent waiting to jump off a rock form into the water below. The tear splashes gently on my son's cheek but he is oblivious to the wetness on his face as he nurses peacefully at my wife's breast. Her toes clench and unclench and she grits her teeth to hold back moans of pain. The pain escapes her lips and my heart breaks as soon as the sound hits my ears.

Who knew that the first few weeks of nursing were so painful? The sensitivity of my wife's breasts combined with the surprisingly powerful sucking ability of our newborn son is an equation for pain. She dreads feeding him because she knows the pain she will have to face and yet, motivated by guilt or love or both, she persists in feeding him at the breast.

Why do I share this with you? Watching my wife go through this pain and longsuffering to benefit our son has given me a more vivid picture of a I Thessalonians passage:

But we were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children. So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us.

-I Thessalonians 2:7-8

This passage is about discipleship, and how Paul and Silvanus and Timothy (and possibly others?) discipled the Thessalonians and worked hard among them, so much so that God had produced abundant fruit from the Thessalonian church (I Thess. 1:7-10).

When I first read this verse I pictured a mother staring down at her child with loving affection as he nurses quietly at her teet. She smiles as she rocks back and forth and admires her beautiful child. I think Paul wants us to picture this too, look at the opening line to verse 8: ...being affectionately desirous of you... Discipleship should be affectionate. We should have a loving desire to see others grow in their faith and we should love young (not necessarily agewise but faithwise) believers as sons and daughters (e.g. Paul often referred to Timothy as his son in the faith).

Yet there is a second part of verse 8: ...we were ready to not only share with you the gospel of God but also our own selves... Which God has shown me through the perseverance of my wife.

For those of you who have recently experienced having a newborn, you know the amount of time and effort it takes to nurse your child. Our doctors and consultants recommend feeding him every two hours for the first few weeks! What a sacrifice of the body it is for the wife; what a time and energy consuming effort it is! The sleepless nights, the pain, the emotional turmoil. The mother has to eat at least 500 calories more per day to sustain her child via breast milk production. Oh how mothers must "share [their] own selves" to raise their children!

Paul uses the simile of a nursing mother for good reason. He wants us to understand discipleship as a twofold thing:

1) It is of loving affection
2) This loving affection drives us to spend ourselves for the benefit of the young believer

I want to focus on number two because I lack(ed) understanding on this end. As I reflect on my experience with younger believers (though I myself am still immature in many doctrines, still allow me to continue!), I remember the moments of grit teeth and wincing as they said some outlandish thing about God, often times heretical, yet it was simply because they did not know or understand: no one had fed them spiritual milk. I reflect on my own experience as a prodigal son, why had a I wandered from God? In part I myself was to blame because I would yolk myself to unbelievers and surrounded myself with unbelieving friends so that I myself could be enticed and even entice my friends into sinful endeavors and yet the other part of my wandering was a lack of discipleship; no one took me under their wing to guide me and teach. If there is no one to guide and teach the young believer, she simply will not grow. Let me put it this way, you cannot put a bottle in a one-week old baby's hands and leave her to eat for herself; she does not even know how to hold the bottle, she can't even use her hands yet! You must feed her the milk yourself for her to grow and mature. Eventually she will grasp the bottle or breast in her hands and soon (real soon if you talk to empty nest parents) she no longer needs milk but will eat solid food!

We must bear patiently through the pain of the first few weeks (or more likely months or years) of discipleship and we must be willing to put in the time if we want to see these young believers grow! Sometimes the believer will be ravenous and will devour the milk at the breast, other times the believer will be slow and sluggish, falling asleep and not getting what he needs; we must gently prod him and wake him and urge him to nurse all the while having much forbearance through the pain of their complacency, ignorance, and misunderstanding.

Let us share our bodies and expend ourselves with young believers, in loving affection, and let our hope and goal be this:

And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers.

-I Thessalonians 2:13

It is the milk that does the work, the mother simply delivers it. So it is God's word "which is at work" in the believer, it simply is us who are delivering it to them. This way we can have hope through the frustrating times because it is God who ultimately makes the child grow, and that is why "we also thank God constantly" when we see a young believer weaned from spiritual milk and able to find spiritual food for himself!

What Sleep Means to Me

What is sleep in these changing times? It is simply a vehicle for time travel; it carries me from one day to the next. I do not wake up refreshed (though I take joy for the brief moment when my head hits the pillow and I go from wakefulness to dreams) and my dreams only tire out my mind and make my journey seem arduous.

Sleep is not rest; Christ is rest. Too much sleep and you are a sluggard, too little and you are ineffective. Who ever achieves the perfect amount of sleep? Is the perfect amount achievable; does it even exist? I sleep for the conventional 8 hours: I do not feel rested. I sleep for 12 hours: I do not feel rested. I sleep for 5 hours: I am exhausted.

What, then, is sleep to me? It is a necessity, for when I grow exhausted my mind is weakend, my resolve attenuates, and I am left with only my flesh to battle temptation. I might as well leave a steak to battle a lion or a drop of water to battle a tsunami. So then, sleep is a vehicle for strength from God, but it is not true rest. It is a shadow of the rest to come...or is it?

Someone argued that sleep is good. Perhaps, but surely we will not sleep in heaven. We have no use for it there which means sleep is a grace granted by God to a fallen world. Rest in Christ means we will be able to worship tirelessly for an eternity. Isn't sleep more a shadow of death than it is of rest? When you sleep your thoughts are reduced to almost nothing, hours pass by as if only seconds, and you expend the least amount of energy. Death is the pinnacle of sleep; your thoughts are no more, time is no more, and you no longer expend your energy.

Therefore, sleep is bittersweet to me. Sweet because it helps me combat sin, bitter because it is not true rest (only a shadow of death). So then, I sleep to fight sin, knowing my true rest is in heaven with Christ.

Boaz

Now Naomi had a relative of her husband's, a worthy man of the clan of Elimelech, whose name was Boaz.

-Ruth 2:1




Our son, Boaz Mark Saltsman, was born on January 10th, 2010. When I tell my people my son's name I typically get the raised eyebrows and the "mmhmm" perplexed nod of the head. It's a different name, I know, but my wife's name is Skye and since her name is unique, it gives us license to give "different" names to our children. Get it? No? Ok, well anyway, we're going to call him "Bo" for short (this usually get's an approving nod , lowers the eyebrows, and shrinks the eyes back to normal size). Mark is my father's name in case your wondering how the return to normalcy came roaring back with the middle name. It has been a family tradition to name the son's middle name after a family member on the man's side. My dad named my middle name after his father and I did the same with Boaz. So his name is Boaz Mark Saltsman, Bo for short; Bo is a good nickname.

We picked Boaz because it is a unique name and because there is an interesting story in the bible that involves a man named Boaz. It is a story primarily about the faithfulness of a Moabite woman but Boaz's role cannot be ignored. His role as kinsman redeemer to Ruth (whom the book of the bible is named after) casts a shadow that points down the road to Christ. Boaz is the father of Obed who was the father of Jesse who was the father of King David who was eventually the father of Jesus Christ (Ruth 4:18-22, Matthew 1:1-17)!

I've heard many takes on what Boaz's name means: "quickness" or "swiftness" as related to a horse. It is also the name of one of the two columns in the temple that Solomon built for God. With regards to the temple, some scholars say it means "in strength." Whatever it means, I hope my son will be reminded of the redeemer who came to save him. I hope he will be reminded of the one who came to this earth to become "the firstborn among many heirs" and turn any who would believe into his kinsman.

May he remember the name of above all names,

Jesus Christ