Tears

Psalm 56:8 - You have taken account of my wanderings; Put my tears in Your bottle. Are {they} not in Your book?

Put tears in a bottle? What does this passage mean?

In the Old Testament times and continuing through to the Roman times when Christ walked the earth, tear bottles were used by mourners for the purpose of respect to the deceased. Those who sorrowed would fill tiny bottles with tears and placed them in burial tombs. Called "Lachrymatories," these bottles were considered very precious.

Could it have been the woman in Luke 7 poured her bottle of tears first on the feet of Jesus before anointing his feet with alabaster? This would have been a powerful display of emotion and affection, to pour out the treasured bottle of tears!

The commentator Fausset says : "The custom of bottling the tears of mourners as a memorial, which has existed in some Eastern nations, may explain the figure."

The commentator Matthew Henry says: "(God) observes them (sorrowing people) with compassion and tender concern; he is afflicted in their afflictions, and knows their souls in adversity. As the blood of his saints, and their deaths, are precious in the sight of the Lord, so are their tears, not one of them shall fall to the ground. I have seen thy tears, 2 Ki. 20:5.

God cares.

Are Christians Unable to Decide Right and Wrong?

Isn' t Exodus 20:15's teaching about stealing very clear? Here's troubling news:

" ...a new study conducted by The Barna Group suggests that, despite the widespread coverage of the legal arguments and fight against piracy, most young consumers possess no moral qualms about getting music illegally."

"The study shows that born again Christian teens are not much different than are non-born again teens in terms of holding an anti-piracy moral position. Just 10% of Christian teens believe that copying CDs for friends and unauthorized music downloading are morally wrong, compared to 6% of non-born agains (the four-point difference barely qualified as statistically significant). Also, the proportion of pragmatists was statistically equivalent - 64% of born again Christians and 66% of non-Christians."

For more on this story, click here:
http://www.cmta.com/research.htm

"With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come." - Shakespeare

"And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count.
It's the life in your years."
Abraham Lincoln

Surprise of the Missionary

This picture is of a first-century fishing boat, used during the time that Jesus walked the earth. It was excavated in 1985.
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Big happenings on Tuesday - my birthday! I'll be a spritely 48 years old! Come and join my party at the Cove, just outside of Farragut, TN.
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I think one of the wondrous things about our God is that He’s a God of miracles. He does things that we cannot even begin to comprehend.

One of my friends Lauren Phillips is a missionary to Eastern Asia. She’s about 24 years old and is energetic in wanting to see the Lord work in and among the people of Eastern Asia. Earlier this year she read aloud a letter given to her from one of her fellow missionaries. They are called the Dao people and the letter from her friends is enough to shock anyone.

The new missionary couples came into a totally new area, the letter said, and yet when they arrived, the men of the village greeted them warmly and let them sit by the fire. While one of the men fiddled with his nose bone and smoked a cigarette, he mentioned casually that his father, now dead for almost two decades, said that the missionaries would come.

"Long ago, when I was a little boy, my father was waiting for you to come, He told me you would come," said the man. The man, in his late thirties, said that there would be people with white skin who would come and tell them about the truth about God and the way to get to see Him. "We had never seen a white person, so he told us all, don’t be afraid of their white skin! They look very different but they will become like our own brothers and sisters. They will be one family with us. They will bring a talk about God."

When the young couple added up the years, they realized that the father had told the message to his village the very year the missionaries were born!

As the missionary heard these amazing things, he thought about the passage in Ephesians 2:10 which said "God has made us what we are. In Christ Jesus, God made us to do good works, which God planned in advance for us to live our lives doing." This is the God that we read about in the Scripture and we talk to in prayer. He’s not a far-away God. In Isa. 43: 1-4 we read of a compassionate God whom nobody could have ever imagined. A God who openly pursues us with His love and His care. Listen to this passage:
"Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are Mine! When you pass through the waters, I will be with you...you are precious in My sight...you are honored and I love you."

Concerns about the mood

This photo is of the Garden of Gethsemane if you were to visit it today. One of my lifelong dreams is to go over and visit the Holy Land.

While at the Christian Academy of Knoxville, one of my positions was that of scheduling chapel speakers and heading up our Tuesday chapel time. A few times in this past year I had student-led chapels, and after two of these chapels I was approached by a small band of students. Both times they chastised me for not allowing the chapel to go beyond the scheduled hour that our school has allotted.
Although both chapels were very powerful, I found that this clutch of students were agitated about the length of the service.

"It must be longer - at least an hour more than you've allotted," insisted one boy.

When I asked him why, he responded, "because we need time to get into the Spirit, and the song time is what we need to do this. It's got to be much longer. We've got to get into the Spirit."

Now, I find this curious. I have encountered people who have told me this before, and I fail to see where the Bible gives directions on how Christians need a massive amount of time to "warm up" to the Holy Spirit's movement. To be sure, singing prepares a heart for the Word of God's instruction, but I was told by this group that there must be gobs of songs and lengths of time in order to get ready, and I find this lacking in Scriptural authority. We are to spend two, three hours in singing before we can allow God's Word to be brought forth?

It leads me to see a danger that I will talk about in coming blogs: the danger of over-emotionalism in today's Christian generalization. Many, many times I see the abstract thinkers of Christianity push away the concrete thinkers with an insistence that the service be flowery and mood-sensitive.

Hey, I want to have time with Jesus and praise Him, but I don't want a Woodstock experience to have to achieve it.

Security of the Believer

We Christians are such losers sometimes...could Jesus take our salvation away as punishment?

Many a time in my youth I wondered if Jesus would simply get tired of us. After all, people can be pretty stupid a lot of the time. We endeavor to do right but we fail. We set lofty goals and get nowhere near attaining them. Why would Christ have any interest in us as we keep stumbling about? We Christians attempt to honor Him but we end up wanted to honor ourselves more. We lose control of so many of the ways to give Him glory, why wouldn't He just forget us and deny us Heaven? We're trying to do good, but doesn't His patience have a limit?

Then I look at His Word and I am comforted. Can we lose our salvation? I read the Word and see some powerful truths that tell me otherwise...

1. God does not let saints fall
Micah 7:8 - "when I fall I shall arise"
Psalm 37:24,25 - "Though he fall he shall not utterly be cast down...I have not seen the righteous forsaken..."

2. This is the Lord's doing, and it is not in our power to "undo" it.
Psalm 37:37,40 - "But salvation of the righteous is of the Lord..."
2 Tim. 1:12 "He is able to keep that which I've committed unto Him against that day."
Jude 24 - "...now unto Him who is able to keep you from falling..."
1 Peter 1:5 - "who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation ready to be revealed in the last time."

3. God knows the believer.
John 10:14 - God tells us He knows His child.
Compare that with the lost He speaks to in Matthew 7:23. "...I never knew you..."

4. The believer is in Jesus' hand.
John 10:28 - "...neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand."

5. The believer will not come into condemnation.
John 5:24 - "He that...believeth on Him that sent me hath everlasting life and shall not come into condemnation..."

Thank you, Jesus, for making a Way. Thank you for keeping us going on that Way.

Foundation of holiness - the Word

The Gospel of John fragment (8:14-22) from the 3rd Century

Why should we read our Bible? It's just a guide, isn't it? It's just a rule book, right? Wrong.

The answer is found in the book of John. In John 17:17 Jesus says, “Sanctify them...that is those who belong to Him in the world, believers...sanctify them in the truth. Thy word is truth.”

The Greek word aletheia is the word for truth. We Christians are sanctified ("made holy") in this aletheia. So, then, the key to being holy and pleasing to God is to know and obey the truth, and that is what the word of God is. Reading the Bible and getting into its depths is the doorway to holiness.

I had a talk with a young man this week who is desperately seeking to be a true, genuine Christian. He finds this authentic walk in holiness by going to the source of God's communication with us: the Bible.

Graduation on Sunday

Here is a picture of me along with one of my dear students, Alison Poland. Alison was very special to our family and was a great camper at our Theology Camp last year. Hard to believe she is heading off to college in the fall. The Zockoll family will miss you, Alison!

Another one of my star pupils, Chris Bernard, made a "tribute" to me on You Tube! Please go to You Tube and enter "Zockoll" in the search category. You'll find it there. Thank you for such a wonderful gift, Chris!

I see the Finish Line

School has its final day tomorrow, and my official retirement from classroom teaching will be a reality. As it is, this last week is Exam Week, and since I taught an elective (Biblical Greek) there were no exams to be taken in my class. I have been cleaning up and sorting my papers in preparation for my exit.

It has been a long race, but I see the finish line. I will be heading back into writing. I'm already into my first chapters of my next book.

It has been a fantastic year, and a fun teaching career. I will truly miss my students. Seeing them grow in both knowledge and Godly wisdom is a satisfaction that few other achievments can equal. I've shed a few tears in the past weeks, realizing that this part of my life will be over, but that my students will head into careers and ministries of their own. These are tears of sorrow and gladness - quite a mixture!

Thank you Asa, Yani, Bret, Jonathon, Kate, Jennifer, Jacob, Brandon, Abby, Alison, Jessica, Rose, David, Chris, Ben, Kate, Melanie, Josh, Jeremy, Jeremiah, Robert, Taylor, Jackson, Nick, Kerry, Tim, Jordan, Amanda...the list goes on.

3 John 1:4 - "I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth."

Col. 3:11

"Christ is all, and is in all."


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"Christ is not valued at all unless He is valued above all." - Augustine

High Flight

(Thanks for being so patient - my computer's problems joined up with the end-of-the-semester assignments to make blogging impossible for a while).

Graduation is upon us! Time for the grads to move on in life.

I will truly miss my young students as we all go our separate ways.

I give you "High Flight". perhaps my favorite poem, written by Gillespie Magee:

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there

I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air.

Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,

I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, or even eagle flew -

And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod

The high untresspassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

May you, in your coming years, enjoy God's presence so much that you feel you have touched His face.