600 POUNDS

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

By Joyce Kilmer

Joyce Kilmer was a journalist, literary critic, lecturer, poet, and editor. He was considered the leading American Roman Catholic poet and lecturer of his generation, one whom critics often compared to his British contemporary, G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936). Kilmer enlisted in the New York National Guard and was deployed to France with the 69th Infantry Regiment in 1917. He was killed by a sniper's bullet in 1918, dead at 31.  

His most famous poem is the one above and was made into a song. Kilmer may have said more than he knew because he echoed a beautiful truth found in Psalm 92: "The righteous man will flourish like the palm tree, He will grow like a cedar in Lebanon. Planted in the house of the Lord, They will flourish in the courts of our God. They will still yield fruit in old age . . ."

Psalm 92 is one of thanksgiving by the righteous man and in the song, the unknown author writes about what we would call the grace of Christian aging. He speaks of the believer, "the righteous man," who "will flourish like the palm tree," who "grows like a cedar of Lebanon," and who will yield fruit in old age."

That struck me: "the righteous will yield fruit in old age." The tree under discussion is the date palm which  "bears from three to four, and in some instances even as many as six, hundred pounds of fruit. (!) And there is no more charming and majestic sight than the palm of the oasis, this prince among the trees of the plain." (Delitzsch) Six hundred pounds of fruit. Six hundred pounds of fruit in maturity!

What a sight he is to behold--the Christian, growing old and as he does, producing fruit for the Lord! How refreshing he is as opposed to a person as he grows older, watching time passing so rapidly and becoming old, becomes bitter, sarcastic, rude, and mean. 

But the maturing believer who's producing six hundred pounds of fruit has come to that point by having a life of persistent prayer, one during which he has built into a fellowship of Christian friends, irrigated his mind with Word, been giving, and engaged in evangelism--he's an example of someone who set his focus on Christ years and years ago. Like the tree, this type of believer has "looked at God all day and lifted his arms to pray." 

When asked, "How can I have a lush green yard in August?" the answer was, "Prepare in March." The aging righteous man ever-productive for Christ--may his tribe increase.

 

 

TAKE JOHN WOODEN

John Wooden was the most dominant basketball coach in the history of the game, a coach who achieved legendary status. The reason is simple: no coach will ever approach his record, as John Finstein writes:

"There's one men's college basketball record that not only will never be broken, but the likelihood is also it will never even be threatened: 10 national titles. That's how many NCAA championships John Wooden won at UCLA. No other coach -- not Mike Krzyzewski, not Adolph Rupp, not Bob Knight, not Dean Smith -- has even gotten halfway to that mark. In fact, those four generally considered the four greatest college basketball coaches in the game's history not named Wooden, have won 13 titles combined. Perhaps even more remarkable: Wooden won those 10 championships during a 12-season span, beginning in 1964 and ending in 1975 when he retired after UCLA beat Kentucky in that year's national championship game."

His UCLA Bruins won 88 games in a row. Can you imagine 88? Week after week, month after month, at home and on the road, 88.

Coach Wooden must have liked that number; it had symmetry and he loved balance and symmetry. He never had any of his players wear #31 because a three and a one have no symmetry. His number in his playing days was 99. That number had symmetry.

WOODEN'S RULES

Coach Wooden had his rules for the players, every player without exception. Among those rules were, "No profanity." Profanity would get the player a sit-down on the bench. The strongest language Wooden used were phrases like "Goodness gracious!" and "Goodness gracious me!" Something like that.

He had rules that governed every player on the proper way to put on socks. Each player was to put them on the coach's way, just as Wooden demonstrated and each player was to wear two pair during the games and at practice. He had rules for their pregame meal; it never varied. Each player was to take a nap after the meal for a certain length of time. During a game, no player was to pass behind his back. That was showboating. That was a player's saying, "Look at me!"

THE CASTLE

We have a saying: "A man's home is his castle." The saying is based on a legal principle that goes back to the 1700s. It means that, no matter what the Constitution says, each home has a right to set its own rules. For example, in the home in which I grew up, there were certain rules, rules that violated the Constitution of the United States. There were no First Amendment rights in our house. Just as in Wooden's "castle," the gym, there was no profanity. Never. Speech was regulated in our house.

In our house, no one was free to use the word, "ain't." If anyone said, "ain't," the offender would be corrected to use proper grammar. Nor one could ask, "Where's he at?" without the stated correction of "Between the "a" and the "t." Proper grammar demands, "Where is he?" not, "Where's he at?"  "At" is a preposition and one doesn't end a sentence with a preposition. (This is why I need a T-shirt that says, "I'm silently correcting your grammar.")

SARTORIAL SPLENDOR

Every castle has its rules. Your castle did and still does. A castle without rules is chaos. Schools have rules, seminaries have rules. One rule at Dallas Seminary used to be: coats and ties are the proper attire and only attire for every class. A class syllabus sets the rules for the semester. "The class begins at 1 PM." "Late work will be penalized one letter grade for each day late." Things like that. Then there are unwritten rules: during the lecture by the professor, students aren't to stand up, jump up and down, screaming.

THE QUESTION

This brings us to the question of the day: are rules legalism? Was Coach Wooden a legalist when it came to profanity? Of course not. Abiding by rules or setting rules don't make a person a legalist. Paul gave us many commands--"Be filled with the Spirit," "Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church," "If a man doesn't work, he doesn't eat," and "Be not drunk with wine." Christ gave rules for the Christian life: "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another as I have loved you." The Bible has rules governing the Lord's Supper.

Then what makes legalism legalism? Legalism is taking the commands of the grace age and making them into rules to keep to get to heaven, rules to earn God's favor, rules to be considered spiritual. Grace reorients everything. When the Christian reads one of the commands of the epistles, he should understand that the command is not something God gives for the believer to try to keep to earn God's blessing.

Under grace, the command is something the believer wants to obey because he's already saved. He obeys Christ out of love and gratitude as his response to what Christ has done for him. The legalist takes a command and thinks he and everyone else must obey it to get to heaven. The Christian, liberated from a works-oriented-go-out-and-earn-it-life, delights to do God's will because he has already been blessed with every spiritual blessing in existence (Eph. 1:3; the command of Romans 12:1-2 is based on the blessings of chapters 1-11).

To use the basketball analogy, look at the player who does as his coach says because he loves the game. His motivation is the opposite of the player who hates the coach's rules and looks upon the hours of practice as a drudgery to be endured to earn the coach's favor. Which player is the legalist?

WHAT? HOW?

In 1952, in Ritter, Oregon, Mrs. Parkins sends her three young children out back to play in the barn. She later calls them to dinner and the two older children come back to the house. She asks where their 2-year old brother Keith was and they tell her that he left the barn just a little while before she called them.



She goes to the barn, but Keith isn't there. It's the dead of winter, snow is on the ground. Keith is wearing his jacket, but it won't be sufficient for such weather when the sun goes down. He isn't equipped to spend the night outside.

His family and a local search party began looking for him immediately. They found his footprints in the snow going away from the barn. They followed them up to a point before they completely stopped. His were the only tracks. There were no animal or adult tracks or any tracks of any kind nearby. The boy's footprints just stopped. The night came and went.

Nineteen hours later, they found Keith. He was 12 miles away, lying facedown in the snow on a frozen pond. The searcher who had found him called for Mr. Parkins who was nearby. He ran over to the pond. He rolled his son over, picked him up, and saw that Keith was alive.

To get to where he was, the toddler had to have traversed through barbed wire (his jacket was cut in several places) and gone the 12 miles, at night, pitch dark, in the snow and ice, then survived the night without his jacket. When they asked him why he had run away and how he survived, he said he didn’t remember.

Later, a survival expert and former police officer attempted to do the same thing as Keith, walking alone at night in the dark in the snow and ice. He said that he couldn’t see a foot in front of him and he had to stop. The journey would require the toddler to venture over two mountain ranges, as well as fences, creeks, and rivers. He demonstrated that what Keith had done, a two-year-old walking 12 miles in that weather for that distance, then surviving the night, was impossible.

Keith Parkins, now an adult, remembers nothing about that night. No one is exactly sure how Keith survived. His mother kept what he was wearing. Keith has the articles of clothing.

How do you explain those 19 hours? Guardian angels? Why did the footprints abruptly stop? How did a toddler get that far? How did the child survive? It remains a mystery.

We live with mysteries. “The greatest mystery of all revealed truth is confronted [in the Trinity]. Mere difficulty in conceiving what is peculiar and befitting the Infinite One should offer no objection to a doctrine based on revelation. The nature of God must present mysteries to the finite mind, and the triune mode of existence is perhaps the supreme mystery. . . In approaching the theme of the Trinity, the student may well be prepared to confront a deep mystery which, of necessity, is not explained to finite minds.” (Lewis Sperry Chafer)

Dr. Robert South wrote: “As he that denies it  [the doctrine of the Trinity] may lose his soul; so he that too much strives to understand it may lose his wits.”

OTTO AND ELISE

Otto and Elise received the news. The mail had been hand delivered by a woman who left quickly. Elise opened the envelope with trembling hands. She read it and sat in silence with her head in her hands. Her husband asked, “Is it about the boy?” She looked at Otto and furiously tore up the letter. Their son had been killed in the war, killed fighting for Nazi Germany. Otto and Elise were both grief-stricken and furious.

Otto understood that their son had died fighting for an evil regime on a scale rarely seen in world history. Otto was a simple man living in Berlin. He worked in a factory making coffins for the military. Otto was far from being powerful or a man of influential, but Otto decided to do whatever he could to defeat Hitler.

An idea came. He bought a supply of postcards. He bought thin gloves for his hands. He disguised his writing. With the painstaking strokes of printing the texts, he wrote words on the postcards, words which criticized Hitler, the man, who, in Otto’s words, had murdered his son. He would take meticulous care to write words incriminating the government.  He took those cards, one at a time, and put them in various areas where passersby would see them. His wife was scared and advised against it. Their elderly Jewish neighbor had jumped to her death when the authorities came for her.

Otto spent the evenings donning his gloves, taking up his pen, and writing the truth. Then he would put a card on the stairwell of a heavily entered administrative building. He would put another card at an entrance to an elevator. One by one. One day at a time.

A person would see the card, stop, pick it up, read it, then turn it over to the authorities. As the few cards turned into many, the German machine roared into action to find, stop, and kill the author. The man in charge of finding Otto read the cards and put a pin on a map of Berlin which would signify the location where the card was found. Soon pins with red flags covered the Berlin map. A white-hot obsession gripped the Nazis. For two years in Berlin, finding Otto was the #1 priority of the regime. They knew that one day, Otto would make a mistake. During this time, his wife joined him in their dangerous card-placing.

One day Otto made a mistake. As he arrived at work, he took off his coat and found that the right side pocket had a hole in it. Several of the cards were missing and then Otto saw them, lying on the factory floor, being picked up by a worker. The worker took them to the manager who called the authorities. They took Otto into custody. During his interrogation, the Nazis made him kneel. They circled around him. They celebrated his capture by drinking champaign, then breaking their glasses over his head.

They found Elise. Their trial was a speedy one with the pronouncement of “Guilty!” Otto and Elise were led out to the courtyard where a guillotine awaited.

The man who had pursued and captured them came to realize the evil of the government, stood in his office, raised a pistol to his head, and killed himself, but not before taking those 200 collected cards and throwing them out the window. They fell on the street below and passersby picked them up. In death, the truth was distributed.

The world system hates the truth. It will ruthlessly and with all the resources available, hunt down those that dare to offend the regime. Otto and Elise were only two modest people who used the only resource they had to get the truth to not only 200 people, but also to the authorities who read cards and the 200 others who picked them up when they fell from that window. 

Acts 8:4 tells us about the common folks in the early church: “Therefore, those who had been scattered went about preaching the word.”