i’d wait in line
for something I knew that I would get to keep
The utter joy of BT’s “The Emergency” is infectious. The song is propulsive, driving, leaping, bounding forward with energy and far-ranging sight. Here at work, while listening to it on my earmuff headphones, I briefly turned up the volume while pushing the headphones more snugly over my ears. The bassline and harmonics completely filled my ears. I need to listen to it at that volume more often, and in a place where there isn’t the danger of not being able to hear a summons from another part of the office. Yep.
One thing I appreciate about the pastor of our new church is his humility. He preached an excellent sermon yesterday, beginning a new series in which he’ll be drawing parallels between the life of Joseph and that of Jesus, an entirely appropriate and good thing, since
- The Bible is first and last about Jesus, and He is the foundation of the entire meta-narrative, and
- Too often the applications from Joseph’s story are reduced to mere narcissistic moralizing (e.g. “How can you be ‘a Joseph’ today?”), when the whole point of his life was to point to Jesus,
two points which the pastor alluded to in his opening remarks about the sermon series. He moved on by highlighting the correlation between Joseph’s brothers’ response to his dreams and the religious leaders’, His society’s, and by extension our own response to Jesus’ person and teaching. The connections were divided into two categories:
- The ways in which they/we are condemned by our guilt, and
- the ways in which they/we are condemned by His glory.
Without rehashing the entire sermon, I was struck by (among other things) how the pastor chose to emphasize his experience of being rightly condemned before a holy God, in the midst of the sermon’s application for the congregation. I don’t recall the specific example or examples he used, and they probably wouldn’t bear repeating here even if I did, but I will say that it was refreshing to have the dose of application, not shoehorned into the text, underscored by the pastor’s reflections from his own life. And all of this in a sermon that could be characterized as a teaching sermon, which can often be devoid of application altogether. I appreciated it very much.