Then I read this:

I still need to be rescued from me because as long as sin remains I’ll be drawn to desire, think, say and do what God names as evil.

Quickly followed by this:

It’s my heart that’s the problem. People, locations and situations don’t cause me to sin, they’re where the sin of my heart gets revealed.

Paul Tripp, via @PaulTripp, Friday, January 13, 2012.

APTAT!

But I received a good reminder yesterday from the pastor I referenced for my Desiring God blog post this week.  He’s a godly man and I like him a great deal.

He reminded me that there’s something better than meeting a legal requirement to serve – the call to joy!  Pastor Chris reminded me he doesn’t serve Kristina out of reluctant obligation, but out of the benefits he receives and likes, for himself and his church:

Kristina is an amazing example of how God takes the very things that we would see as weaknesses and makes them strengths.  God has blessed me and the body of Christ through Kristina’s life.  I can’t tell you how many people appreciate her smile and hug every Sunday.

I believe it; I’ve been in his church and seen Kristina work a room.  She doesn’t care one bit about economic standing, physical ability, age, race or anything else when it comes to sharing her affections!

And it’s nice to see leaders understand that she may live with complicated disabilities, but she is all gift to the body of Christ, from God himself.

The same God who commands us to pursue our joy in him!

One of the benefits of having a blind son (yes, I said benefits) is that words that used to flow by me land with power.  It happened again during one of the songs from Sunday morning, You Are Amazing, by Lincoln Brewster:

You’re the one who welcomed sinners
And You opened blinded eyes
You restored the brokenhearted
And You brought the dead to life

Four miracles right in a row – welcomed by God, spiritual sight, restoration, life.  Simple words, but only God can do it!

Yes, he is more than amazing!

Yesterday he was making the point to remember who God is and who we are as we deal with the anxieties of the day using Luke 12:28-34.  But he began by saying:

We are all leaky buckets.

That image was so good and so helpful.

There are days when I feel ‘full’ of the grace of God and the presence of the Holy Spirit.  Those are good days!  Not unexpectedly, they are more likely to come when I am filling myself up with God through prayer, time in God’s word and time with God’s people.  My desire for my own joy encourages it!

And when I neglect those same disciplines, the leaky bucket starts to empty.  Ironically, the more I neglect getting close to God, the less I want to pursue my own joy in him.  That’s a terrible cycle.

And, of course, there are those days when we must fight for joy.  Pastor John provided some helps for us in his sermon, The Fruit of Hope: Joy, that he delivered back in 1986:

How then do we obey the commandment to rejoice? How do we fight for joy in the ups and downs of everyday life?

First, let us acknowledge that by nature we are sinners and helpless to become the kind of people who rejoice in the glory of God rather than our own glory.

Second, let us cry out to the God of hope that he would send his Holy Spirit and pour the love of God into our hearts.

Third, let us set our minds on the biblical expressions and evidences of God’s love for repentant sinners. For example:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written,

“For thy sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:35-39)

And so, finally, when the love of God has filled us with hope in the glory of God, we rejoice in that hope, and again I say to you, REJOICE!

I was a pretty good legalist for the first 2/3rds of my life, believing if I did the ‘good’ things (prayer and Bible reading) then God owed me (like a non-disabled child).  When he revealed himself as greatest treasure, the legalist in me still exists, but he gets quieted (most days – that’s still a battle!) by remembering who God is and pursuing him and getting closer to him.

So, a simple plea today – remember and fill your leaky bucket.  Seek your own joy in the only place where there is real, everlasting, infinite measures of it:  Jesus Christ.

Paul Harland Knight is the sixth grandchild of Harland Paul Knight.  We’re not very creative with names in our family, but we know why our children carry the names they do!

There is a part of me that wants to be reckless and effusive with my praise for my dad, because I think it is warranted.

But I know there are people who have never experienced this kind of fatherly support, and this is a painful reminder of what you long to have.  If you are in that group, remember that God is always a good father, infinitely capable beyond the capacities of any earthly father, even a good one like I have.

And pray that God would raise up a man like this man in your life:

• He loves God’s word. My dad didn’t have the chance to go to college, but several little churches around Winona have asked him to fill their pulpits for vacations and the like because he has the reputation of loving God’s word and handling it carefully.
• He prays, earnestly.
• He has been married to the same woman for more than six decades, and he clearly delights in the wife of his youth (they met when he was three years old!).
• Though he has taken on fewer things as he entered his 80s, he still volunteers at church and in the community.  ’Retirement’ only meant more time to pour himself into others more freely!  He likes walking on the beach, but his passion isn’t seashells! (If that reference doesn’t make sense, see page 46 of this book.)
• He loves his children (and their spouses) and grandchildren (and their spouses) and great-grandchildren.  He hurts the most when they hurt.  He delights the most when they are around.
• He is generous.
• He is unafraid of hard things.
• He doesn’t quit on those he loves.
• He is the same at home, in his work, at church or out in the community; no hypocrisy in our household.

I’ve always respected my father – it is hard not to, especially when everyone in our little town seemed to know him, like him and respect him.

But the arrival of my Paul put everything into a different kind of clarity for me on who this man is.

Only days after Paul was born, while he was still hooked up to machines, dad held him and simply said to him, “if the only reason I was put on this earth was to be your grandpa, that’s good enough for me.”

Tears still come to my eyes, nearly 16 years later, at the memory.  My father was for me.  My father was for my boy.  Nothing could change that.  Nothing could stop that.  He didn’t require Paul to love him back.  He has NEVER required Paul to love him back.  He didn’t require me to do anything for him.  Paul simply was his own, and that’s all dad needed to know.

This is love.  This is God’s gift in fulfilling the commandment: By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers (1 John 3:16).

And that is what I mean when I title this blog, ‘he taught me everything else.’

Thanks, dad.  Happy Father’s Day!

At some unknown point I went from being a ‘new’ dad to one with some experience.  That’s just weird.  I still feel like a new dad, given how inadequate I feel much of the time.  And I continue to prize the example of men who are years ahead of me in their parenting and their skill and their dependence on God.

But today I want to acknowledge God’s goodness through the example of the younger dads I know.  These men are precious to me, many of them holding on to the promises of God in ways that are beautiful and faith-filled and God-centered and which make God look very, very attractive.

• I’m grateful for men who are looking at disability with clear eyes and seeing God’s grace instead of the darkness I saw in our early days.
• I’m excited as I observe God’s leading younger men with disabled children into areas of responsibility and ministry that show off God as of greater value than anything.
• I’m humbled by the testimonies of wives who speak so well of their husbands and the godly leadership they are experiencing in their homes.
• I love to hear stories of God calling men away from the darkness in which they were living and into his marvelous light, frequently using their children’s disability to help them see God clearly.
• I’m hopeful for those dads who were like me, that God would do the same miracle in their hearts that he did for me.
• My faith is encouraged when I see broken-hearted men persevere in faith with strength only God can provide as they seek to love their wives and children through impossible circumstances.

I realize in writing this that God has granted me a lot of those younger men in my life!  What a gift to see God moving like that!

I’ll close with an example of encouragement from one of them.  Kempton Turner is one of those younger faith-filled dads described above.  His oldest boy lives with multiple disabilities.  His wife is a leader on this subject at church.  Together they parent three children.  I’m grateful to learn from him how to pray to the God we both love:

Kempton Turner praying at BBC June 5, 2011

I can’t remember when I first met Karl Kanowitz.  It was sometime in the early 1990′s and he was simply doing what he always does – serving other people.  In this case it was an adult Sunday School class I was attending.  There wasn’t anything particularly special about him nor did we have a close relationship.

Then God gave us our Paul.  For some reason, God put us on the hearts of the Kanowitz family.  And while I’ve been emphasizing men this week, the kindness we received was definitely extended from their entire family to my little family.

The lesson I want to emphasize here is how much Karl practiced the discipline of understanding, as Pastor John has taught, when words are wind:

In grief and pain and despair people often say things they otherwise would not say. They paint reality with darker strokes than they will paint it tomorrow when the sun comes up. They sing in minor keys and talk as though that is the only music. They see clouds only and speak as if there were no sky.  John Piper, When Words Are Wind, November 10, 1993.

I said some horrible things at his dining room table in the presence of his children.  And I knew how to hurt people with my words.  Even my attorney once said that I frightened him.

None of those words seemed to have that impact on Karl.  Sometimes, I wasn’t even sure he had heard me and he certainly didn’t seem to feel the emotional explosiveness of the verbal grenades I was lobbing at him.

He just kept coming, and he kept coming with affection and confidence that God is good.  He understood that there are ‘words on the wind.’

Again, from Pastor John:

These words are wind, or literally “for the wind.” They will be quickly blown away. There will come a turn in circumstances and the despairing person will waken from the dark night and regret hasty words.

It is tempting to assume that he saw something in us that confirmed God’s work in our lives, something to give him encouragement to persevere.  That wasn’t the case.  There was no evidence, for a season, that anything positive was happening.  They prayed, and trusted God.  And kept coming.

All my bitter, angry words frightened many people away, but not this man (or his entire family).  And in fearing God more than me, God worked on me through him.

Eventually, God would open my eyes and I would see my sin and my need for a savior more clearly than I had ever known.  But before that happened, he gave me a man who righteously feared the Lord and practiced a depth of wisdom that simply crushed my bitter rationalizations.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom;
all those who practice it have a good understanding.
His praise endures forever!  Psalm 111:10

In God, whose word I praise,
in the Lord, whose word I praise,
in God I trust; I shall not be afraid.
What can man do to me?  Psalm 56:10-11

You can hear more about what this family did for us and my regard for them in this video interview.

All of the men I’m highlighting are both more interesting and more fallen than I can capture in five or six hundred words.  That may be particularly true for this man.

My father-in-law, Miles Hahn, was a German Lutheran farmer who fit nearly every stereotype that those three things conjure.  The German part of him kept most of his emotions under wraps.  The Lutheran part of him kept his faith private.  And the farmer part of him meant he knew how to work hard, fix things, and trust God to provide the rain and the sun that would turn seeds into a profitable harvest.

He also had a complicated relationship with all his children, not all of it happy.

But, he also had a sly sense of humor and loved to be with people.  He would be the first to volunteer to sing in the church choir.  One pastor who came through their little rural church wasn’t being clear on some important Biblical principles, so Miles read passages from the Bible and asked her to explain them.

And though he never really understood anything I did for a living, he knew that I loved his daughter and would seek to take care of her.  He also loved his multiply disabled grandson, and he loved his oldest granddaughter, also with multiple disabilities.

I didn’t really know what to do with myself when we would visit the farm, so I started tagging along with him on occasion to pick up parts and the like.  At minimum, that would mean an hour in the truck with him by myself.  This, at first, was a frightening proposition because I didn’t really know anything about what he was good at, and he wasn’t that interested in what I was good at.  But we were now related.

And God made something special happen.  I remember our traveling to see his grandson (my nephew) in some sporting event that was more than an hour’s drive away.  And as we drove he talked about some of his regrets in his own parenting of my wife.  He was being very vulnerable, especially for him, and clearly warning me away from some of his behavior.  I appreciated it deeply.

A couple years after Paul was born I wrote a little paper about disability and the church that I shared with David Michael and a few others.  I also sent it to Miles, and hoped he would read it.  To my surprise he called me – he never did that – and wanted to talk about it.  It was a pivotal moment in my relationship with him.

God took him from this life very suddenly in August 2000, so he only knew Paul for a few years.  But those were good years.  I was honored to be asked to speak at his funeral and I still miss him.

He taught me there are lessons to be learned in failure. And obviously he lived with the hope that in sharing those lessons maybe I could be a better father and husband than he had been, for our benefit and the benefit of our children.

That humility and wisdom is something I cherish, and something I want to pass on to my children.

David Michael is the Pastor for Parenting and Family Discipleship and oversees the disability ministry at Bethlehem.  He also received a couple of emails in the early, dark days of my parenting that I wish I could take back!  But his responses were like Pastor John’s responses – kind, pastoral, Biblical.

He and I have been in conversation about disability and the Bible for well over a decade, and he has been pivotal in making the disability ministry happen at Bethlehem.  Without God’s call on David Michael to nurture, support and oversee this ministry, we would not have the ministry we have.  I love this man and am grateful to God for him!

But the thing I want to emphasize here is how much he wants people to talk about God. He particularly wants fathers to live up to Psalm 78:

He established a testimony in Jacob
and appointed a law in Israel,
which he commanded our fathers
to teach to their children,
that the next generation might know them. . . Psalm 78:5-6a

And he wants us to do it carefully!  I have learned so much from this man in how to think about and talk about God and God’s word.  I couldn’t find a clip of David’s telling and then retelling the story of David and Goliath.  It is priceless and very helpful, because Pastor David completely turns the typical telling – that the boy is courageous and we should be like David – to a more accurate telling – God did a mighty deed through a boy; to God be the glory!

Out of that passion he and his equally God-centered wife Sally started developing curriculum which has turned into Children Desiring God.  It has been deeply encouraging to see how God has fueled David’s passion for talking about God, and God has turned that passion into a movement that includes hundreds of churches using this curriculum – including churches in Africa, South America and Eastern Europe!

But I don’t think about that too often when I think about David.  I mostly think about him as my pastor and my friend.  And as my pastor he has been in the middle of every important thing that has happened in my life at church in the past 15 years.  More specifically, David has called me to publicly proclaim God’s sovereignty over disease and disability, and then given me a platform.

And typical of David, he has done it under the most unusual, some might even say foolish, of circumstances.

David was the last person to pray for Dianne before her cancer surgery in March 2005, and he took me to lunch.  I appreciated the distraction; the surgery was going to take a while.

God was very close to us in those days; Dianne and I both felt held by him.  It was easy to talk about the goodness of God in the midst of Stage IV breast cancer because we felt it so profoundly.

I still remember David looking at me across the table and saying, ‘do you think people should hear about the sovereignty of God over all things?’  I was perplexed at that, because of all people he should know that EVERYONE needed to hear about this God!  And then, in the basement cafeteria (what a cheery place that wasn’t!) of Fairview Hospital while my wife was being cut open to attack a disease that could kill her – he asked me to speak the very next month at the first Children Desiring God conference with him for the keynote address.

So, with God’s help, I said yes and we did that session together, though Dianne was still in the midst of her radiation treatment and we didn’t know the outcome.

And David has continued to press on me to talk about God and his good, kind, merciful, helpful, sovereign role in disease and disability.  This blog is one outgrowth of his encouragement to talk about God.  I’m grateful for that encouragement, and for both of us pointing directly at God as the source.

I want to encourage my children (and I hope you want to encourage your children) to talk about God like that!

Paul Larimore was a giant of a man to me. He stood well over six feet and more than 200 pounds, was a respected businessman, served as a civic leader, and commanded the respect of people. He did interesting things and liked to share those interesting things with other people, like airplanes and fishing and radios.

He was my grandfather. My middle name is Paul. My son is named after him. So is my nephew. So is his daughter, my mother (Pauline, in this case). He liked being the patriarch, and I liked it, too.

He was married to the same woman for more than 50 years. Grandma Ruth was the kind of woman who delighted in her family and wanted everyone around her to be happy. She would do her best to make people feel comfortable, welcome and included. The last few of those years Grandma was not well. I was just a boy and don’t remember the details, but she was sick a lot of the time and toward the end I don’t think she knew who I was.

But this giant, masculine man loved his wife, that was obvious because he didn’t try to hide it. He did as much as he could for her, though she couldn’t do anything for him any longer. And he made sure she was in her own home for her last days on this earth.

He died in 1991 and I wish he could have met my children. I think he took particular delight in his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Maybe my Paul’s disabilities would have been hard for him; I wonder about that sometimes.

But he taught me a great many important things. This is one that may be the most important: you love and serve your wife right to the end, no matter the cost. And that example has helped me already, only 21 years into my own delightful marriage.

I know what loyalty looks like; Lord willing, so will my children, and yours.