He’s near the top for me in terms of his musical skills. A co-founder of the Allman Brothers Band, he penned many of their most well-known, enduring songs–“Blue Sky,” “Ramblin’ Man,” “Jessica,” and my personal favorite, “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” and more.

Dickey was a pistol, that’s for sure, a volatile, seemingly possessed man, for much of his career. I’m blessed to have seen him and the ABB in concert. Truly a force of nature on his guitar, on his long, long, long guitar solos. The blues, jazz, and country and western styles all influenced him. You can hear Albert King, B.B. King, Miles Davis, and Hank Williams, Sr. in him, plus many more.

Dickey, I don’t know where you were spiritually, but in terms of one using the gifts that God gave him to their fullest potential, I salute you with everything in me.

Introduction: At the church where my family and I serve, I am currently teaching through the most oft-quoted and well-known sermon in the Christian faith, the Sermon on the Mount. This coming Sunday, I will focus our attention on Matthew 7:13-28. Those sentences contain three striking metaphors that serve just one purpose. That purpose? To confront all of us with our only options. Option 1: the broad way; the way of destruction. Option 2: the narrow gate/the way of redemption. The three metaphors Jesus uses to burn the images into our imagination: 

• Narrow vs. Broad (Mt 7:13-14)
• True vs. False Prophets (Mt 7:15-23)
• House Built on Rock vs. House Buit upon Sand (Mt 7:24-27)

One of the beauties of Scripture is its clear imagery and unvarnished truth. God does not author confusion. He makes things plain. 

Connection to Today: When I returned from a flight this week and finally got back near post, I was very tired, and went to be early. I woke early this morning, did PT, showered, and sat to read some. And when I was reading the news on my computer, I was again struck by what I read. Of course, there was the latest about Iran and Israel, and all the politics about yet another war in the Middle East. But I literally laughed out loud when I read the article about students now biting and licking one another because they’ve drunk the identity politics and wokester Kool-Aid madness. Now the urchins are identifying as beasts, and sane people are asked to go along with it. Yes, this is what our taxes are going for, this kind of stuff. So much for reading the classics, learning history, learning to discern, teaching civics, and learning how to balance a checkbook. Now, the kiddos are barking and purring and using litter boxes: School district responds to rumors of kids identifying as ‘furries’ after student protest | Fox News

Encouragement & Application: See, when you reject God and the narrow way, you get the madness of the broad way. As always, it’s Christ or chaos. When you reject the Author of life, you inherit the prince of darkness and folly. That’s the beauty of the binary. When you have a generation of children who cannot write a coherent sentence or do much but play the victim and scream talking points, you should not be surprised. They’re just living out the lies they’ve imbibed. Yet the Word of Christ still stands with the offer to return to our senses: “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Mt 7:13-14). 

My friend Jim loves his birds, especially hummingbirds. So, I am indebted to him for sharing his pictures with me.

How any honest person can look at hummingbirds in action and say they are the results of unguided accidental random purposelessness is, I shall say it nicely, willfully misguided.

(I’m with you, Jim. This is creation manifesting the Creator’s greater glory.)

I had stowed my ruck and my suitcase overhead, sat down in my window seat, secured my thermos of water in the seatback pocket in front of me, put on my reading glasses, and retrieved Dostoyevsky’s Crime & Punishment to read again during the flight. I’ve read Dostoyevsky consistently since I first discovered his works as an undergraduate. Once I read Crime & Punishment as an eighteen-year-old boy, I was hooked for life. I devoured his other works then, as now. Dostoyevsky repays a lifetime of rereading.

I had begun to think I was going to have the little row to myself on this flight, and I again was captured by the tale of Raskolnikov, until a heavy man with a grizzled beard lumbered into the aisle and all but collapsed into the aisle seat. The whole row shook, but he seemed unaware of it. He reminded me of a character from a movie. He exhaled heavily–Ssssshhhhheeeewwwww!!!–every few breaths as if from frustration. I looked briefly up from my novel in his direction. To be such a large man, he had feminine hands with long fingers that ended in long and dirty fingernails.

I returned to my book, only occasionally looking up as the final passengers boarded and the flight attendants came by to check that our seatbelts were fastened, and the flight attendants went through their script about safety, etc. And soon we were out of Atlanta and headed to Pennsylvania.

Thirty minutes into the flight, we were offered a snack. It’s a good thing the man and I were not starving. We both looked at one another and chuckled when we each received our ginger ale and some chips. When we saw the ‘bag’ of chips, we laughed simultaneously. I put the ‘bag’ of chips on top of my novel and snapped a picture just so I would have a record of the irony. Dostoyevsky’s books are heavy and thick; this ‘bag’ of chips was just enough to keep one from passing out from starvation. Then, when my aisle buddy and I opened these ‘bags’ of chips, there were sixteen ‘mini’ chips at the very bottom of the bag, hiding out in the last regions, tiny orange shingles, daring us to forage for them, all sixteen of them.

The clouds were thick for most of the flight until we were over West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Then the clouds broke and I could see the ridges of WVA and PA below.

But my grizzled buddy and I made it. We ate the thirty-two tiny orange shingles. We drank our ginger ales. He fell asleep immediately after he took his last drink of ginger ale, and I read a few more chapters of Crime & Punishment and followed Raskolnikov’s mad plans in his wrestling with philosophical ideas of humanity, our good and evil.

Text: “Whoever ignores instruction despises himself, but he who listens to reproof gains intelligence” (Pr 15:32, ESV).

Context & Teaching: As with much of Proverbs and the Wisdom Literature in Scripture, this verse is an example of literary parallelism where the second part of the verse parallels the meaning of the first part of the verse; it just teaches the same principle but with different words. The first part of the verse reminds me of the teenager attitude where the boy or girl thinks he/she knows better than anyone else, especially more than Mom and Dad. The teenager attitude is one where the boy or girl thinks the world is dumb but he/she is the lone sage amidst all the world’s folly, etc. But in the end, the teenager attitude usually dies a series of deaths to all that pride and bravado. The second part of the verse above teaches the same principle as the first part of the verse, namely, that listening to wisdom–and actually heeding that wisdom–go a long way towards the path to maturity and wise living.

Encouragement & Application:   Where I live through the workweek and from where I work, I do not own a TV. That’s deliberate. It’s largely vapid and a complete waste of my time. But I do read the ‘news’ online, and like you probably, I am nervous about the conflagration brewing in the Middle East. I don’t want to see yet another Middle East war that invariably affects the world. I’ve seen enough of those sands as part of my military life. But if I’m called, I will go in an instant. After all, I work for civilian politicians, most of whom have never served at all, but that’s a different topic for another day.

I cannot help but believe that the events we see unfolding are directly related to Proverbs 15:32. Are we not as a culture ignoring instruction from God? Would we not fare better if we would listen to the reproof of God and gain divine intelligence about who we are as sinners, and about what God has done to redeem and restore all those who will listen and heed?

I was perusing my notes for this morning’s homily at church and spotted this young doe at dawn. I weary not of these lovely creatures. This year’s fawns will appear soon. Spring has sprung.

Took to the hills today. Cerulean skies above. Trees are shooting forth buds. Flowers are opening. Bird sounds echoed in the hills. Butterflies fluttered hither and yon, their yellow and black-peppered wings floating in silent mad whisks on April’s winds. The creeks ran steady and cool over limestone and granite.

Text: 2 Corinthians 3:12-18

Question: Why the spiritual hardness & spiritual blindness of some people? 

Context: 2 Corinthians is one of the clearest examples of spiritual warfare in the entire Bible. Chapter 3-4 specifically deal with why some people respond to truth with humility and repentance vs. why others hate truth and respond to it via hostility and rejection. Of those who are hostile to truth, Paul says “their minds were hardened” (2 Cor 3:14) and in v. 15, he says “a veil lies over their hearts” (2 Cor 3:15). Specifically, he is addressing unsaved Jews overtly here in this passage, those who’ve been given formidable evidence that Christ is the Messiah, but still approved and even demanded His murder. There’s a hardening of their hearts and minds that is God’s means of judgment for their impenitence. 

But we see this pattern extrapolated to all who suppress truth and harden themselves against the truth. And it all comes down to a dirty 3-letter word the world hates but remains true nonetheless: sin.   

Encouragement & Application: It is not that there’s a paucity of evidence for the Christian faith; it’s that the world system, drunk on lies and moral rebellion, does not want the truth. Just like infamous atheist Richard Dawkins revealed this week, he wants to remain a ‘cultural Christian’ but reject the Christ who undergirds it all. He sees what’s coming, and he fears it, and well he should. He wants the fruit Christianity brings, but he thinks he can reject the root that is Christ. He cannot. No culture can. It will be Christ or chaos. It will be truth vs. the Lie. It will be the Lion of Judah or the roaring lion of Satan who comes only to steal, kill, and destroy. And what Paul is explaining to us in 2 Corinthians 3-4 is spiritual warfare. He lays out the reality of it and explains the consequences and characteristics of human sin but also the glorious forgiveness and restoration of redemption for all who will come in repentance and faith to the Christ of God. 

I was walking hills I have walked many times, but each spring the colors burst upon my eyes in purple, violet, every hue of green, and white. With the spring rains, the creeks run fast, too, and I can see shad dart to dark areas under rock overhangs when my shadow falls on the surface of the water. The laurel is soon to bloom and the scents of trees and flowers are everywhere if one only observes the testament revealed.

This evening I was reading Paul’s letter of 2 Corinthians. He writes of his love for his people in chapter 3: “You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all. And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts” (2 Cor 3:2-3, ESV).

I was thinking of our group of saints from class, too, of how Paul’s ideas in the 1st century are being played out today, still, as the church–so threatened by false believers, government persecution, and cultural secular rot–still endures, just as Christ promised. And I know how Paul felt, I think, to pour oneself out for people, to plant gospel seeds in them, to pray for God to give the increase, and for the Spirit to deepen them in the great things of God.

Paul calls them nothing less than his “letter of recommendation” in 2 Corinthians. Why? Because he loved them, he labored for them, and longed for God to do in and through them what only He can and does do–fashion vessels of redemption, and bring theological spring in times of secular winter, and know that God always does what is right.

Principle: Shoulder to Shoulder

Context: It was news that we all hate: suicide. We’ve had a spate of suicides across Guard Nation lately. I’m not special, of course, but as a chaplain, suicides grieve me like few other things. We try to minister to the families and friends of the Soldiers that took their lives. We try to minister to the peers of the fallen Soldiers. We try to give wisdom to the command teams about indicators, cultural trends, and more. But the reality is that there is now a hole, a space, a void where once there was a Soldier.

Text:  In Ecclesiastes, Solomon writes, “Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken” (Eccl 4:9-12, ESV).

Encouragement & Application: I have to be careful here. I cannot force my worldview as a Christian upon Soldiers. We are free to believe as we will. But I do think it is quite worth asking, “How is secularism working out?” It seems that we’re more technologically connected than ever but yet more isolated than ever, at least at the levels it most counts—spiritually and theogically. I learn best via narratives and stories, so let me share a very short illustration:

This week on post, I am blessed to be able to watch some of the finest Soldiers do things that I could never do physically. They run almost non-stop; they set up mortar tubes; they fire them; they break them back down; they go on almost no rest; they land nav; they eat cold MREs; they ruck, and ruck, and ruck some more; they fast-rope from UH-60s; they work as teams in sniper competitions; they simulate MEDEVAC SOPs; they run, ruck, run, and ruck some more. And on and on it goes, and it’s fascinating to behold—to see what they can do together.

But that’s the key thing: they do it as teams. They’re literally shoulder to shoulder. That’s what Solomon is driving at in Ecclesiastes 4:9-12.