The Old Testament law is no more a boring legal code than a wedding is a mere contract signing. Rediscover God as the heart of the law reveals a good God, our hard hearts, and God’s costly plan to save his marriage to his people. Also… find out how the law is the spoiler alert for the rest of the story and why you need heart surgery to be free.
This video is part of our church’s journey in Rediscovering God – and what better way to get to know someone than getting their backstory and hearing what they say about themselves? So we’re hitting the highlights of the biblical story as a preaching team. My contributions have been on creation, the image of God, and the Exodus.
On a personal note, this sermon ties together so many of my key takeaways from seminary and work: a love for biblical theology, an appreciation of the OT (Chris Wright), the need for an apocalyptic intervention to save us from the law (Fleming Rutledge), identity before ethics (Stanley Hauwerwas), God’s covenant relationship with us (Stuart Foster), freedom from the law (Joseph William Black), and our true blessings (LVCC class on prosperity). Check out those authors or reach out to me if you’d like to learn more about anything specific that I shared!
What do you get when you cross finals week with Holy Week? I wrote this spoken word piece around the end of the semester in college and performed it at a gospel party and an event raising awareness about modern-day slavery. In cultures where our importance is measured by how busy we are, we need to remember what my friend likes to say: “Don’t kill yourself over this. Jesus already died.” Here’s the full poem:
Holes
“We’re not competitive at this school. We care about our grades as our personal best.”
– Tour Guide
“Don’t even complain to me, girl. I haven’t written one word of my capstone yet. You think you’re busy? You ain’t got nothin’ on me.”
– Student
This is King of the Mountain backward,
we climb the social ladder by
digging ourselves the furthest into the depths of despair,
crown you,
King of the Pit.
But if you keep your head above
grounded
level
we will shame you
back to our level.
Until there is no one left
with two feet on the ground
to pull us out.
Hole-ier than thou
tunnel vision
creates division
everyone’s doing their own
drills
down, not across
filled with cross words
when we cross paths
we’re not even building subways,
just potholes.
If we
pull our heads out of the sand
wash our hands –
will we find it is a dirty trick,
are we in too deep now?
Stress
got us into this mess
pit power
overpowers
now
is it over?
Piles of sand
miles high
immobile mountain ranges
double the range
between us and the sun.
Just as we drag the last rescuer down
we find
we are our own gravediggers
slaving away for
the King of the Pit
we have buried them with us.
I wrote a worship song and recorded it in a jam session here on YouTube.
Lyrics:
Took the lead to map my own course
until I got lost
Sold my soul and bought a kingdom
was it worth the cost?
Broke and broken
Chasing the wind
Please show me the Way
Chorus:
Thanks be to God!
Thanks be to God!
We were against him
but he was for us.
Thanks be to God!
Thanks be to God!
When we were done for
he did it for us.
Tried to root out lust and anger
they sprung up like weeds
Kept competing with my neighbor
what was wrong with me?
Sin enslaved me
Death destroyed me
Set this rebel free
Chorus
Covered up my shame by hiding
in the dark alone
Tried to numb my pain but my heart
toughened to a stone
Fear degraded
Separated
Change me with your love
Chorus
Thought I had my act together
‘til I fell apart
I determined to do better
still I missed the mark
Law was heavy
Curse was deadly
Bring me back to life
Chorus
Bridge:
Part 1: Thanks be to God!
Thanks be to God!
Thanks be to God!
Thanks be to God!
Part 2: Perfect to save
Lamb that was slain
Up from the grave
Conquering king
Both parts together
Chorus
Theology behind the song:
I wrote this song to process the incredible truths I learned from Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixion. A key theme Rutledge emphasizes throughout her book is our need for God’s apocalyptic deliverance. She says that in the late Old Testament period, the prophets articulated a growing awareness of humanity’s inability to keep the law and the insufficiency of repentance. Instead, they felt a desperate need for deliverance that comes from beyond ourselves: an apocalyptic intervention. This song is intended to highlight our desperate need for God to intervene.
I organized the verse progression roughly around potential phases of Christian life. First we don’t want Christ’s lordship (verse 1). Then we accept it but struggle with our sin in our own strength (verse 2). We may give up, feel shame, and try to protect ourselves (verse 3). Or we may begin to trust in our own legalistic righteousness and feel proud (verse 4). Each verse ends with a call for help, much like the Psalms cry out for God to deliver them. The structure of this song, with the trouble of the singer, the cry for help, and the praise given to God for deliverance, fits the genre of the thanksgiving Psalm.
Verse one highlights our human desire for power and control over our lives, the kingdom of self. We are tempted to gain the world but lose our souls (Mark 8:36), just as Jesus was tempted to worship Satan to gain dominion of all the world’s kingdoms without the cross (Luke 4:5-8). Judas is an example of someone who sold his soul for monetary gain, only to realize the reward was not worth the cost (Matthew 27:3). We discover our leadership is inadequate, but then we have no resources to save our lost souls. We need Jesus, who is the Way (John 14:6).
Verse two describes how our sinful nature is not something we can overcome through making good choices, because as Rutledge mentions, Sin and Death are also Powers enslaving us. In Romans 7, Paul describes sin as “sprung” (Romans 7:9) and “What is wrong with me?” echoes his frustration in the same passage (7:24). I chose lust, anger, and envy/pride because these are common besetting sins even for Christians. Paul describes how Jesus sets us free to be slaves of righteousness (Romans 6:16).
Verse three focuses on broken relationships. It evokes how original sin separated Adam and Eve from each other and from God. Their nakedness symbolized their shame, which they attempted to deal with by hiding (Genesis 3:7-11). The result of broken relationships means fear and distrust. The Bible frequently mentions disobedience using the metaphor of hard hearts, and in Ezekiel 36:26-27 God promises to give his people new hearts that will obey his commands. I mixed this idea of hard hearts symbolizing disobedience with hard hearts symbolizing fear and emotional coldness. Disobedience, at its root, is an inability to love God and neighbor (Mark 12:30-31). So a lack of feeling can be linked to the biblical concept of hard hearts. I think sin and its consequence of broken relationships often connects to the emotional fallenness I see in today’s world. Though I am not in any way saying, for instance, that those who suffer depression as punishment for sin, I do think it is important to speak to the emotional pain that affects so many people and say this is not how God intended for us to live, but is a result of the Fall and Jesus will eventually restore us psychologically as well, even if it is not fully complete until the new creation.
Verse four describes the futility of trying to earn our own righteous standing before God through our works. Paul says that no one is made righteous according to their obedience to the law (Romans 3:10, 20). In her exposition of Romans, Rutledge describes how we are enslaved to the powers of sin and death, which have turned the law, intended for good, into a lethal club. She also describes the godlessness of the cross; that Jesus was in some sense separated from God because he became sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21) and took the curse of the law upon himself (Galatians 3:13). In Romans 7, Paul depicts the resulting struggle the law evokes inside himself against the power of his sinful nature. He ends with describing how his body is subject to death (Romans 7:24), which I echoed in this verse’s cry for resurrection.
The chorus echoes Paul’s cry after his long exposition that points to the fact that we are delivered only through Jesus Christ our Lord (Romans 7:25). It refers to how God saved us when we were still his enemies (Romans 5:10) and if he is for us nothing can condemn us (Romans 8:31). It also refers explicitly to Christ’s work in finishing the work of our salvation (John 19:30, Ephesian 2:4-10).
The bridge combines the themes of Christus Victor and substitutionary atonement. As Rutledge argues, the way in which Jesus set us free from the Powers was by becoming the sacrifice for our sins. I deliberately combined the victim lamb with the victorious king to keep the strength within the context of suffering, avoiding the triumphalist view but still emphasizing spiritual warfare.
Our missionary family “prayer card” – about a year after my salvation
Last month, I moved into a new associate acquisitions editor position at Oasis International. Over the weekend, I realized that God has been preparing me for this for twenty years!
I moved to Tanzania as a two-year-old and grew up there as a missionary kid. When I was four – exactly twenty years ago this weekend – I decided to follow Jesus. I don’t remember it, but my dad recently unearthed his old journal and came across the night I became a Christian. Earlier this year I noticed the file on my computer, realized this would be twenty years, and decided to celebrate my “re-birthday.” So I read over what my dad had written:
October 22, 1996 Hannah is 4
Dear Hannah,
I want to write this now for you to read later so you can remember what happened tonight. Tonight at bed time you wanted to read your Swahili book and they you wanted to read a book that your Sunday school teacher at the PEFA church next door gave you awhile back. (We had never read it before.) It was in English even though he only speaks Swahili. It was about heaven and hell and a little African boy named Mutu having salvation explained to him. You and I had talked about heaven and that Jesus died for us and what that means.
My dad writes that he explained the gospel in four-year-old terms and we prayed for my salvation.
Mutu’s story might have come from this Christian bookstore in my hometown in Tanzania
I shared this story with a friend, who noticed, “Books have been part of your story from the beginning.”
“Wow, I never thought about that. This was even before I was reading on my own. But I guess they have!”
And as I thought about it more, I realized that it wasn’t just any book. It was a Christian book written in English, contextualized for Africa, distributed to me through a local pastor. It was exactly the literature that Oasis creates and distributes! Jesus saved this little American-African missionary kid through the same work that I do now!
Editing Christian literature for Africa from my office in Nairobi, Kenya
From there, God weaved the rest of the story together: The second-grade teacher who told me I’d become a writer. The pastoring grandparents who always gave me Christian books for my birthday. The many childhood visits to village churches. My preteen years on a seminary campus where my friends biked to the bookstore for candy, browsed the shelves, and made our faith our own. The last-minute English major in college and the unexpected call to ministry. An Oasis job opening after graduation asking me to move back home to Kenya – literally to my parents’ house. Getting sick of Pulitzer winners and discovering African fiction. Multiple people randomly telling me last summer that I should go into acquisitions editing.
How does God do it? Not only saving me and continuing to affirm our relationship as I grew up, but designing the way I was saved to chart my destiny? I’m so in awe. I felt like I stumbled into this path, but what a comfort that God has known all along where we’re going!
So all I do is echo Ephesians 3:20: “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.”
hannahras 