Jesus has been busy getting his ministry off the ground and he’s got an excellent start. He is healing, teaching, preaching, and even squeezing in a meal that he can write off as counting for work! He’s called a few disciples thus far and he has a knack for attracting a crowd.

In Mark 3:13-19, Jesus is ready to take yet another step. From among those who are following him, seemingly showing interest and some commitment as disciples (that is, learners/students or apprentices), he appoints twelve as “apostles.”

Twelve. The symbolic connection is clear–twelve tribes of Israel, twelve apostles.

Apostles. “Sent ones.” That is to say, persons commissioned and sent by someone greater to represent them and/or do work on their behalf.

Jesus is ready to expand the ministry through some key leaders who will have a peculiar role as persons appointed to represent him and share in his ministry of preaching (declaring the word and gospel of God) and casting out demons (we could say, just as accurately, “standing against the forces of evil, injustice, and oppression”).

But what is the very first thing on the list?

“…to be with him”

Well, that makes a lot of sense. After all, how can they (we) preach or testify to Jesus without serious proximity to him? How can they (we) stand courageously against the demonic forces of evil and injustice without a serious connection to Jesus’ power? Look at what they’re (we’re) being appointed to do! Of course, they’ll (we’ll) need to spend time with him.

Here’s a tension. We can’t do what Jesus appoints and sends us to do without being with him. But at the same time, being with Jesus is not simply an instrumental means to a pragmatic end.

Being with Jesus is it’s own reward. With is a relationship word. And it’s the first word used to describe the nature of our appointment by the King of all creation. Before he gives us anything to do, he appoints us to be with him.

With him for it’s own sake–that’s how relationship works.

How might we nurture and practice being with him? Of many spiritual disciplines or practices we could list, let me simply offer three.

• Scripture (thoughts on how to start here)
• Silence (in prayer)
• Community

I could say more, but I trust you can make the connections yourself.

“He appointed them to be with him…” Amazing.

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Scripture quoted is from the new Common English Bible. I have access to a limited number of copies to give away for free. If you are interested, please send me a message with your name and contact information.

I usually create a list of goals and, truthfully, I list too many. Less is more. Focus is critical. Yep, I’m working on that. I believe in it and do plan some of my life (particularly at work) around it.

But here’s something I did the other day that gave my goal-thinking a twist. I wrote my Christmas letter for December 2012 now. I tried to keep it short–about 300 words. It’s sort an extended version of the question “What would you like written on your tombstone?” And, it’s more narcissistic than I’d actually send to anyone at the end of the year. But hey, it’s about what I’m wanting to do this year, some of which is about individual achievement and some of which relates to family goals or milestones. And it’s written for me to read, reread, and envision, not for others.

I can’t guarantee this method, of course. I’m just trying out something different.

But I’m finding myself energized by seeing it in narrative form rather than in a bullet-list. I hope it will become true. It’s already stronger in my imagination.

Other voices come from within. They actually tap into the significance of the season and struggle with it. Perhaps we hear a voice of sadness because the holidays remind us that someone we love is no longer with us. Perhaps it is a frustrated or despairing voice due to a strained relationship. Perhaps it is a depressed voice wondering why we don’t feel as joyful and upbeat as others appear (comparing our inside to others’ outside can be a shaky enterprise though).

Isaiah 40 offers 2 different voices to the conversation. The first voice is found in 40:3-5 (CEB):

A voice is crying out:
“Clear the LORD’s way in the desert!
Make a level highway in the wilderness for our God!
Every valley will be raised up,
and every mountain and hill
will be flattened.
Uneven ground will become level,
and rough terrain a valley plain.
The LORD’s glory will appear,
and all humanity will see it together;
the LORD’s mouth
has commanded it.”

I remember a drive out to the Texas Panhandle several years ago. I grew up in East Texas with slightly hilly terrain. But a little west of Fort Worth the earth begins to flatten. When you see the Amarillo skyline on the horizon, you’ve still got a good distance to travel. The view is completely unobstructed.

When the gospel writers reflected on the ministry of John the Baptist, this text from Isaiah leapt into their minds. Surely John was enacting this scene from the prophet. He located his ministry in the wilderness geographically. But his work of calling the people to repentance was work in the wilderness of the soul.

Receiving the gift of life in Jesus Christ requires inner work that removes the barriers that obstruct the work of the gospel in our lives. That’s what John’s ministry represented. Repentance removes barriers in the heart that obstruct the grace of God.

Advent is a season of preparation for Christmas. It is a season for us to hear an ancient voice in the midst of other voices calling us to prepare to receive Christ by repenting of our sin, thereby allowing grace to work in us obstructed.

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This post is part of the Common English Bible (CEB) Blog Tour. The publisher has made copies available for me to giveaway. To participate, please link this post on your Twitter and/or Facebook. You can use the buttons below to share (for twitter, please add #CEBtour). If you don’t have twitter or facebook, please share this post via email and cc me.

I’ll make a decision on Monday and contact you via twitter/facebook/email. I’ll be able to give away one per week, so if I don’t pick you this time, please try again!

A surprise play, one that no one expected, served as a huge pivot point for the momentum of the game. The Saints executed a successful onside kick to begin the second half. They recovered the ball and scored, then went on to win the game.

After the game was over, that play could be referenced as a huge shift in momentum and as a pivot point for the outcome of the game. But in the moment, even though onlookers could see the importance of that play, they would not have said the game was sealed for the Saints.

In Luke 1:46-55, Mary sings a song of praise that has inspired some of the best music of the Advent and Christmas seasons, both classical and contemporary. She is visiting her cousin Elizabeth, herself pregnant with John the Baptist. Elizabeth shares Mary’s excitement and blesses her for her faith: “Happy is she who believed that the Lord would fulfill the promises he made to her” (1:45).

Her response to Elizabeth’s kind words of blessing is praise:

“With all my heart I glorify the Lord!
In the depths of who I am I rejoice in God my savior.
He has looked with favor on the low status of his servant.
Look! From now on, everyone will consider me highly favored
because the mighty one has done great things for me.
Holy is his name.
He shows mercy to everyone,
from one generation to the next,
who honors him as God.
He has shown strength with his arm.
He has scattered those with arrogant thoughts and proud inclinations.
He has pulled the powerful down from their thrones
and lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things
and sent the rich away empty-handed.
He has come to the aid of his servant Israel,
remembering his mercy,
just as he promised to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to Abraham’s descendants forever.” (Luke 1:46b-55 CEB)

The word I notice most among all of these grand verses is the simple word has. Now, I do think that Mary is probably referring to past events here. After all, praising God for what he has done in the past is a way of proclaiming faith in him for our present and future. The same God who has been faithful in our past is the God we can trust this time too.

But perhaps there’s another dimension. Perhaps Mary is grasping that the coming of God’s Messiah means that the outcome of history is accomplished in him. “Victory in Jesus,” we sing concerning his cross and resurrection. Maybe there is a trust in God’s decisive work in sending the long-awaited Messiah that warrants speaking about history in the past tense.

That is our hope.

Jesus, we trust, is the pivot point of history. A little like the gutsy, unexpected onside kick by Saints coach Sean Payton to begin the second half of that Super Bowl game, Jesus is the game-changer whose birth (and everything else for that matter) represent something no one was predicting. Yes, they expected a Messiah, but not one like him.

Mary’s Song  declares what God accomplishes in the birth of Jesus. A decisive turn-of-events that signals that the outcome is now set. Jesus saves, God sets things right. The game is being played out, but we who have been graciously included on the team have the advantage of knowing that the Spirit’s labor through us is in the service of a victory already gained in a lowly birth in the City of David roughly two thousand years ago.

In light of that truth, we join Mary in praise: “With all my heart I glorify the Lord! In the depths of who I am I rejoice in God my savior.” (1:46b-47)

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This post is part of the Common English Bible (CEB) Blog Tour. The publisher has made copies available for me to giveaway. To participate, please do the following:

1. Link this post on your Twitter and/or Facebook. You can use the buttons below to share (for twitter, please add #CEBtour). If you don’t have twitter or facebook, please share this post via email and cc me.
2. Post a comment on this post on the theme of what you find inspiring in Mary’s Song.

I’ll make a decision on Monday and contact you via twitter/facebook/email. I’ll be able to give away one per week, so if I don’t pick you this time, please try again!

Assigning a moral value of good or bad to someone’s actions is what the word “ought” means. Lewis points out that the physical Law of Nature is about what the natural world does. Gravity is his prime example. If you let go of a rock in mid-air, the rock falls. The Law of Nature describes what happens.

But the Law of Human Nature (what Lewis has called The Moral Law), is about the word “ought” in a moral value sense.

But what if, Lewis asks, someone questions his use of an “ought” moral value and claims that what he is saying someone ought to do describes not a moral principle but a preference that relates to his own convenience: “we might try to make out that when you say a man ought not to act as he does, you only mean the same as when you say that a stone is the wrong shape; namely, that what he is doing happens to be inconvenient to you.”

So, is all this “ought to” really about behavior that isn’t morally bad, but is simply inconveniencing me? Lewis says no and gives four lines of argument to support his claim.

1. Intentionality: “A man occupying the corner seat in the train because he got there first, and a man who slipped into it while my back was turned and removed my bag, are both equally inconvenient. But I blame the second man and do not blame the first.” In other words, there is an “ought to” attached to the second man’s actions that is not attached to the first man’s actions.
2. Motive: “I am not angry…with a man who trips me up by accident; I am angry with a man who tries to trip me up even if he does not succeed. Yet the first has hurt me and the second has not.”
3. Universal Standard: “In war, each side may find a traitor on the other side very useful. But though they use him and pay him they regard him” poorly. Their actions may be more convenient to us, but that alone does not determine how we assess their character.
4. True Inconvenience: Obeying the Moral Law is itself the inconvenient thing much of the time–honesty instead of cheating/lying, honor and respect instead of gratification, bravery instead of safety, truthfulness “even when it makes you look a fool.”

So, the Moral Law, or the Law of Human Nature/Behavior, is not a matter of preferences that convenience us. Rather, it is a hard edge. Something that holds us to a standard even when it would seem more convenient to be free of its demands. And since it is not a statement of how we’d like others to behave for the sake of our own convenience, the Moral Law “must somehow or other be a real thing–a thing that is really there, not made up by ourselves.”

It begins to look as if we shall have to admit that there is more than one kind of reality; that, in this particular case, there is something above and beyond the ordinary facts of men’s behavior, and yet quite definitely real–a real law, which none of us made, but which we find pressing on us.

Having dealt with some potential objections in chapter 2, Lewis now gets back to advancing his argument for the existence of the Moral Law. To do that, he picks back up where he left off at the end of chapter 1: Humanity has a sense of a Moral Law, and humanity fails to follow it.

Here’s an interesting difference between the Moral Law, which we might call the Law of Human Nature, and the Laws of Nature that we find in the physical universe. The Law/s of Nature are not laws for nature to obey, but rather a description of how nature actually behaves: “what Nature, in fact, does.”

But contrast that with the Moral Law, or the Law of Human Nature. It does not refer to “what human beings, in fact, do” because many do not obey it and no one obeys it completely.

“The law of gravity tells you what stones do if you drop them; but the Law of Human Nature tells you what human beings ought to do and do not. In other words, when you are dealing with humans, something else comes in above and beyond the actual facts. You have the facts (how men do behave) and you also have something else (how they ought to behave). In the rest of the universe there need not be anything but the facts.”

We’ll blink and Christmas will be here. This is the time of year when the calendar seems to accelerate, holidays racing past us at the speed of light. The accelerated pace on the outside—on the calendar—has a way of creeping in so that we feel hurried on the inside.

The season of Advent is an invitation to “just say no” to allowing the busyness of the time of year to busy our souls. Like a hurricane that has a calm center around which torrential winds and rain swirls, Advent invites us to allow the busyness in our society to be held at arm’s length from our center, from our soul.

One way we say “no” to a busied soul is by practicing an attitude of waiting. We usually think of waiting as cultivating patience. That’s true—patience is only acquiring by waiting (even though we all wish we could get more patience without having to actually practice it!). But waiting also cultivates trust. Why? Just listen to how we assess when waiting makes sense and when it doesn’t. We ask ourselves, “Is is worth the wait?” In other words, do we really believe this person will come through or that circumstance will come about? That’s a trust question.

And in this sense, trust is another word for hope. Hope says that how we live in the present is based on who or what we trust holds the future. The psalmist says, “I hope, LORD. My whole being hopes, and I wait for God’s promise.”  The psalmist can wait because God’s promise is trustworthy—worth the wait.

Advent is a time of waiting in hope. It is a time when we acknowledge that Christ is worth the wait. Advent invites us—yes, challenges us—to navigate a busy calendar but choose a posture of the soul that waits in the hope of Christ.

To get the word out, they’ve invited folks who blog to post reflections over the next few months that use this translation and work on the themes of the season, from Thanksgiving to Advent & Christmas to the New Year.

As a participant, they’ve generously provided me with a free copy, and—even better—my readers can get one too. I’ll be able to give away some paperback editions, so keep an eye out for your opportunity.

In the meantime, if you’d like to check out the CEB website for more info, here’s the link: CommonEnglishBible.com.

In one of his answers to potential objections, he offers the following illustration to prove their is something in our minds in addition to our instincts toward certain kinds of actions.

He writes: “If two instincts are in conflict, and there is nothing in a creature’s mind except those two instincts, obviously the stronger of the two must win. But at those moments when we are most conscious of the Moral Law, it usually seems to be telling us to side with the weaker of the two impulses.”

A paragraph earlier, Lewis gave the example of hearing a cry for help. When we quickly survey the scene, it turns out that the man is drowning. Lewis says that we feel two instincts–one to help him and another for self-preservation. Those instincts are both good instincts. Whether they are right or wrong to follow depends on the situation. Something must judge which should win out in the particulars of that situation. Which ought to be elevated, strengthened, and acted upon? Which should be suppressed and denied?

Lewis continues: “But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away.”

Perhaps in that moment the stronger impulse is the one to help. Perhaps it is the one to run away. If we’re truthful, I think we would find that we have had both experiences ourselves.

We know the experience of having known the good we ought to have done. But we found that the impulse we ought to follow in that moment of decision was the weaker one. And it needed an extra voice advocating for it when we were tempted to ignore it and go with the other.

Lewis contends that the Moral Law is not an impulse because it is the judge between our impulses at times of situational application. It is the advocate for the impulse in that moment that represents the right, but finds itself weaker than the other impulse.

In Lewis’ example, when we act with sacrificial courage and give help, we feel good in the end that we “rose to the occasion” and acted with courage and conviction (does this common phrase not indicate the struggle of the weaker impulse to exercise itself?). But if we succumb to allowing the stronger of the two impulses, self-preservation in our example, we are filled with regret and feelings of guilt that we didn’t do what we should/could have. We’re even tempted to hide our inaction and keep it a secret because we feel shame.

There’s more that the Christian gospel has to say about this latter situation, but Lewis delays speaking to that and so will I. The point here is to underscore the reality and toughness of the Moral Law. It only mediates and tells you which impulse you should follow, and reminds you of it if you fail to do so. If we are to understand the Christian gospel fully, we must reckon with this aspect of the Moral Law.

• “First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it.”
• “Secondly, that they do not in fact behave that way.”

Objection 1: Isn’t the Moral Law just a “herd instinct” we’ve developed like all the others? By “herd instinct,” Lewis is referring to what comes to us through evolutionary biology as a species.