My in-laws own a Chihuahua named Boomer.  He is a dog of many faults.  For one, his toilet habits are erratic.  The worst fight that I’ve ever seen my wife have with my mother-in-law took place because my wife had stepped in a deposit that Boomer had left in the floor of the guest bedroom. 

However, Boomer does reliably erupt with yaps and snarls whenever a stranger comes on to the property.  His bark is worse than his bite, but it’s not for lack of trying.  My in-laws keep him penned up whenever they have visitors so that he does not fall upon them in his wrath. 

Occasionally, my in-laws’ vigilance has failed, with results both distressing and comical.  Most notably, Boomer once bit a political pollster.  If his abilities had been equal to his outrage, I suspect he would have killed the pollster.  In fairness, though, he never has tried to bite me nor anyone in my family.

I’ve never mistreated Boomer, but I’ve never been at pains to hide my opinion of the dog either.  The nicest thing I’ve ever said about him is that he’s not a cat.  At my urging, my wife once put a set of rat traps in my mother-in-law’s Christmas stocking to help her with her infestation.  Wherever I am, stories of Boomer the psycho Chihuahua are good for a laugh.

However, my opinion of Boomer has changed of late.  He seems to know that I have ALS.  I suspect he can smell it on me. 

When I get down on the floor to stretch, now Boomer will be there beside me.  Sometimes he stretches too; sometimes he licks my hand.  More generally, he wants to be in the room where I am, even if he’s just snoring in the corner. 

Now that I am recovering from COVID in my in-laws’ house, his vigilance has increased.  He certainly can smell the COVID stank on me (I fear that people the next county over can smell it), and he is concerned about me.  Last night, my mother-in-law had to pick him up and carry him out of my bedroom because he refused to leave. 

Boomer remains a dog of many faults.  As I write this, one of his omnipresent white dog hairs is on the keyboard of my laptop.  Given the rate at which he sheds, I figure he must be about half hair.  However, he is loyal, and in my book, that counts for a lot.

At the end of my life, I must acknowledge that I too have been a dog of many faults.  I haven’t bitten any pollsters (though I may yet if they hold still long enough), but I have transgressed the will of my Master in a myriad of ways.  However, I also have sought Him all my life, and I desire nothing more than to be where He is.  In a word, I have been loyal.

If the loyalty of a dog matters to me, how much more does our loyalty matter to God!  “I delight in loyalty,” He says.  Delight!  When we seek Him diligently despite our imperfections, our Creator is delighted!

In this I find great comfort, as should we all.  God isn’t looking for reasons to turn His faithful people away.  He is looking for reasons to forgive, to embrace, and to welcome.  “God knows my heart,” generally doesn’t get people as far as they think, but if loyalty is what He finds in our hearts, we have nothing to fear from Him.

If Kermit The Frog were a Bible student, he might wonder why there are so many songs about Revelation 3:20.  Hymnists from every era have written about the stranger at the door, etc.  As with rainbows, the answer is self-evident.  The Scriptures are full of magnificent word portraits of God, but this is perhaps the most appealing of them all.

The God of the Bible is utterly beyond our understanding.  His power is so vast that He created the reality we inhabit.  His awareness is such that not a sparrow, not a grain of pollen, not a molecule, falls to the ground apart from Him.  In His wisdom, He knows all that was, all that is, all that will be, and all that might be.  He is not like us, and because He is so alien, we no more can sit in judgment on Him than a worm can sit in judgment on us. 

This God sounds like a perfect candidate for the divine Watchmaker of the deists.  Surely such a One would preside unmoved over His dominions, as unconcerned about us as we are about the insects in our front lawn, following His incomprehensible purposes to their incomprehensible conclusion!

The God of the Bible is not like that.  The God of the Bible stands at the door and knocks.

Indeed, though we can’t understand it, we have a name for His purpose.  It is love.  The sparrow does not fall to the ground apart from His awareness, but it also does not fall apart from His love.  How much more, then, does He love us, fashioned in His image and likeness, the crowning glory of His creation!  Truly, we are more valuable than many sparrows.

The story of the universe is the story of the patient working-out of the love of God.  Satan, sin, and death oppress and destroy us, but He is greater than they are.  His love shines most clearly in His Son.  John 1:18 says that Jesus has explained Him; literally, exegeted Him as we would exegete a passage of Scripture.

The explanation is astounding.  He sent His eternal Son to earth, not to reign over an earthly kingdom, but to serve, suffer, and die at the hands of His handiwork.  It was the greatest evil possible, but in the unfathomable wisdom of God, it became the greatest good.  In Christ, rebellious, doomed sinners can find life.

Such is the love of God for us.  Such is His deep yearning.  Well does Jesus say of Himself that He stands and knocks at the door of every human heart.  With all the power at His command, He does not coerce or force.  He seeks admittance.  It is the King who implores the unworthy servant.

He is so very near to us, and He refuses none who invite Him in.  If we do, the Bridegroom will bring the wedding feast to us, and we will continue to dine at His table forever.  God has explained all this to us, and we still can’t grasp it.  All we can do is rejoice that it is true.

ALS has brought many changes to my life, some anticipated, some not.  Though I have not welcomed my physical deterioration, it has proceeded in the ways I expected.  I did not expect, however, the ways that it has affected others’ perception of me.

Before my diagnosis, I looked like, and indeed was, a fit, healthy man in early middle age.  People look at you differently when they can tell you keep in shape.  I liked that.  In the earliest stages of my disease, my condition still was not obvious.  I could still bike, kickbox, and do pilates, and it showed.

Those days are gone.  These days, my capacity for exercise tops out at stretching and taking walks.  There’s nothing obviously wrong with me when I’m sitting in a chair, but when I try to do anything, the illusion vanishes.

Yesterday, I got my hair cut.  When my name came up, the stylist invited me to her chair.  A few seconds later, she repeated the invitation in case I was delaying because I didn’t know what to do.  She quickly realized that wasn’t my problem.  She watched me as I levered myself up from my seat, shuffled stiffly over to her chair, maneuvered around the footrest, and collapsed into place.

She treated me with great kindness, but as I bantered with her, there was an uneasy edge to her laughter.  She probably thought it was pretty weird that this messed-up dude was cracking jokes.  When I started to get up, she said, “Watch that footrest, hon,” as though I were not already painfully aware of it.

This bothers me, even though I think it’s a dumb thing to be bothered about.  I want to pass for normal, and when I can’t, I don’t enjoy the distance it creates between others and me.

One of the great puzzles of the modern church is the lack of evangelism by its members.  We talk about evangelism all the time, we pray about it constantly, we hold training sessions, but few indeed are the congregations of the Lord’s people that are evangelistically dynamic.

Explanations abound, everything from lack of devotion to fear.  I don’t think any of those are true.  I think Christians want to pass for normal, and they know that if they are vocal about their faith, they won’t be able to pass anymore.

The most successful personal worker I’ve ever known is Westley Pollard, elder of the Dowlen Rd. church in Beaumont.  When Lauren and I still lived there, she once ran into him at Walmart.  He was going up and down the lines at the registers, inviting people to church.  Normal behavior that is not, but in his time, Westley has baptized hundreds if not thousands of people.

I know this is a painful thing to say, but the question before each of us is whether we love God and our neighbor enough to not be normal.  Are we willing to act out, do the socially awkward thing, and have people look at us funny to possibly save a soul?  That sounds like a small price to pay, but I’m here to tell you that it isn’t.  It’s hard!  However, only if we are willing to pay it will we let our light so shine before men.

Of the letters to the seven churches in the early part of Revelation, by far the most negative is the missive to Sardis in Revelation 3:1-6.  Thankfully, the Jackson Heights church as a whole is not like the church in Sardis, but in any larger congregation of the Lord’s people, it’s likely that the lives of some individual Christians match the description.  Though it’s unpleasant, each of us ought to soberly consider whether these words apply to us.

They had the name of being alive.  The Christians in Sardis continued to meet.  Others regarded them as faithful, but the reality was tragically different.  Sadly, our reputation among brethren may not reflect our true spiritual state either.

They were doing some things right.  Even though Jesus’ tone is harshly condemnatory, some parts of their former spiritual health remained.  They still were doing a few good works that could be strengthened and completed.  However, such remnants of righteousness can foster a dangerous attitude of complacency.  When others question our spiritual health, it’s easy to defensively point to the things we’re still doing rather than being honest about the decline in our discipleship.

They were dead.  It is possible to have the name and some of the works of being a Christian yet be headed for spiritual disaster.  One of the characteristics of a living organism is its ability to grow and change, and the same is true of a living, healthy disciple.  We must learn to assess the way we have changed spiritually over time so we can know whether we are growing or dying.

The beginning of COVID in March 2020 makes a handy benchmark.  Since that time, a living disciple will have grown.  They will have learned to bear more fruit for the Master.  They will have won victories in the war against sin.  They will have become more committed to assembling, Bible study, and prayer.  By contrast, the dead disciple will have become stagnant or lost ground in these areas.

Which one describes us?

They needed to wake up.  The devil rejoices in every Christian who needs to change but doesn’t see the need.  He loves to lull us into a false sense of security so that we don’t confront our spiritual problems until it’s too late.

It’s pleasant to hear the soothing lies of the devil, but it’s very unpleasant to hear warnings from the word and our brethren.  Nobody loves the sound of an alarm clock!  However, if we reject those warnings, if we roll over and continue to sleep on our dangerous condition, eternal disaster is the certain result.  The obnoxious Christians who keep harping on our shortcomings really are the best friends we have.

They needed to repent.  The hard part of discipleship isn’t the knowing.  It’s the doing.  It’s the determining to change and then changing.  Satan is amazing at providing us with excuses not to change.  If we are in decline, we will have no trouble coming up with reasons why our decline is inconsequential or even necessary:  “I just can’t make Sunday evening services anymore because. . .”

That voice is not the voice of our Master.  Instead, He summons us to repent, to make the hard choices, to pluck out the offending eye, to sacrifice earthly comfort for the sake of an eternal reward.  If we find discipleship comfortable, we aren’t doing it right.  Repentance is never enjoyable, but it’s the only path that leads to life.

One of the best-attended funerals I’ve ever preached was for a school lunch lady.  Her name was Marlene Norris.  She was a faithful member of the church in Joliet, with which I was working at the time, along with her husband and three of her children.  As is the custom in those parts, they asked me to offer the eulogy.

I arrived at the funeral home early and noticed when I went into the parlor that half the chairs had been removed.  Only 40 or 50 remained.  Nobody was expecting a big turnout.

This didn’t surprise me.  I’d known and been friendly with Marlene ever since my arrival in the area, but she wasn’t a standout in the congregation.  She attended regularly, but she didn’t speak up in Bible class, teach children’s classes, or sing so that I could hear her voice.  If I remembered her for anything, it was for faithfully updating me on her various ailments every time I greeted her.  To the extent that there is such a thing as an ordinary saint, she was it.

The family was already there, both those who were members in good standing and those who weren’t.  I knew them all.  I also knew the funeral-attenders from the congregation who were beginning to arrive.  You know the type:  those staunch older Christians who can be relied upon to show up for absolutely everything, including the funerals of members of the congregation, their relatives, and even notable brethren from surrounding congregations.  They offer one of the little-recognized fringe benefits of being a child of God—the knowledge that no matter who dies, you won’t have to grieve alone.

However, a third group also began to trickle in, a group of people I did not know.  They weren’t family.  Frequently, they had the wrong skin color to be family.  They weren’t funeral-attenders either.  They weren’t nicely dressed, utterly respectable, utterly at ease.  They didn’t look like they belonged.  They sure thought they belonged, though.

There were a lot of them, too.  They filled the available seating, so the funeral-home staff brought back a row of chairs.  Soon it was filled with people, then another row, then another row.

The process continued even after the funeral service began.  These weren’t people who had ever known the stern duty of appearing punctually at The Next Appointed Time.  Being 10 or 15 minutes late was nothing to them, but Marlene Norris was something.

By the time the last amen was said, the room was full of chairs, and the chairs were full of people.  If I remember rightly, there were even folks standing because there were no more seats to be found.  I’ve never seen anything like it.

The only explanation I can offer is the one in Marlene’s obituary.  It reads, “No one could ever walk in her home and not eat.  She will be remembered for her giving and caring spirit, always putting everyone else’s needs before her own.”  That sounds like an obituary commonplace, right up there with “She loved her family,” and “She loved to travel.”  All the dead are generous and compassionate in their obituaries. 

In Marlene’s case, though, I think the obituary spoke truth.  I think there were students at Gompers Junior High School for whom Marlene the lunch lady was the only kind voice in their lives.  I think there were people who came to her kitchen at home because it was the only place on the planet where they could find warmth and food and love. 

I’m guessing about all this because Marlene never mentioned any of it to me, even while she was giving me every detail about her ingrown eyelashes.  I don’t think she thought about it much.  Compassion was simply the water in which she swam.  However, at the end of her days, the recipients of her kindness rose up and bore witness.

Such is greatness in the kingdom of heaven.