Abide In Me: Being Fully Alive In Christ
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About this ebook
Douglas J. Early
Doug Early is an ordained pastor in the PC(USA) and has served the same congregation for nearly twenty years. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Washington and his Master of Divinity from Regent College in Vancouver, B.C. In addition to writing sermons, Doug posts regularly on his blog, Hints & Guesses. He lives with his family in a leafy neighborhood of Seattle.
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Abide In Me - Douglas J. Early
Abide In Me
Being Fully Alive In Christ
Douglas J. Early
9549.pngAbide In Me
Being Fully Alive In Christ
Copyright © 2016 Douglas J. Early. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Wipf & Stock
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
paperback isbn: 978-1-4982-9111-8
hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-9113-2
ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-9112-5
Manufactured in the U.S.A. 09/19/16
Table of Contents
Title Page
Permissions
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: A Substantial Faith
Chapter 2: The Light of the World
Chapter 3: Fess Up
Chapter 4: Hope is a Person
Chapter 5: Let It Be
Chapter 6: Embracing the Family Name
Chapter 7: Love Is a Verb
Chapter 8: Christian Spirituality
Chapter 9: Love Is a Noun
Chapter 10: Real Life
Bibliography
For Andrea, Bronwyn and Ben—without whom, being fully alive would not be possible.
Permissions
All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV
and New International Version
are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™
Stanza 24 from the poet Bhartrhari as it appears in Poems From the Sanskrit, translated with an introduction by John Brough (Penguin Classics, 1968). Copyright © John Brough, 1968, reprinted with the permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
Excerpt from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: Copyright © J.K. Rowling 1999, reprinted with the permission of the Blair Partnership.
Excerpt from St. Thomas Didymus
by Denise Levertov, from A Door In the Hive, copyright ©1989 by Denise Levertov, reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Excerpts from Burnt Norton
and The Dry Salvages
from Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot. Copyright 1936 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company; Copyright © renewed 1964 by T.S. Eliot. Copyright 1941 by T.S. Eliot; Copyright © renewed 1969 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Love (III)
from The Country Parson; The Temple, by George Herbert. Edited by John N. Wall Jr. Copyright © 1981 by Paulist Press, Inc. New York / Mahwah, N.J. Used with permission of Paulist Press. www.paulistpress.com
Excerpt taken from Connecting by Larry Crabb, Copyright © 1997 by Larry Crabb. Used by permission of Thomas Nelson. www.thomasnelson.com
Preface
Years ago I read a line from John Calvin that sparked in my mind so powerfully it felt like an electrical current ran through my body. Calvin wrote, When Christ is preached, the Kingdom of Heaven is opened to us so that being raised from death we may live the life of God.
¹ Some days, I’ll confess, I’m lucky to be raised from bed. So as I read this line, I stopped and pondered whether I really believed this to be true—not in a theoretical way but in a shake-up-my-life-and-cause-my-family-to-worry-for-my-sanity kind of way. As I looked back, I realized that through the years I had been fortunate enough to be raised from death
by the words of certain preachers and teachers who opened my soul to an electrifying awareness of the presence of the living God.
Since I preach on a regular basis, this line from Calvin also caused me to evaluate whether I was doing the same for my own congregation—opening the Kingdom of Heaven
in a way that raised them from death
to live life in full. Unfortunately, I realized that some Sundays I was lucky just to raise a few people from sleep. Yet Jesus calls us all to far more than somnambulism.
At about the same time as I read that line from Calvin, I was lucky enough to find another preacher who opened the kingdom of heaven to me, who helped raise me from death, to live, at least more than before, the life of God. That preacher was the Apostle John. When reading John’s First Letter, I found a person who spoke in a way that awakened my soul. His images, his personality, and his thought processes opened the door on my slumber and led me into the fuller light of day.
Not wanting to keep this good news to myself, I preached a series of sermons from 1 John to the congregation of Queen Anne Presbyterian Church in Seattle, the church I serve as pastor. Over several months, the congregation and I received inspiration from John’s letter. What follows in the pages of this book got its start in those days of study and reflection. As I have given John’s words additional scrutiny and reflection in the process of writing this book, I have become even more convinced of the value of John’s wisdom for our time.
One of the main reasons why I believe John’s wisdom is helpful to people in our age can be summed up in a line of thought I once heard Eugene Peterson share in a class at Regent College. Peterson asserted that most of us don’t need any more information
in our lives, what we need is transformation.
Alain de Botton notes in his book, The News: A User’s Manual, More data flows into the [European control room of one global news organization] in a single day than mankind as a whole would have generated in the twenty-three centuries between the death of Socrates and the invention of the telephone.
² And virtually all that same data can be accessed by anyone with a smartphone within seconds. As a consequence, I would venture to guess that many of us, at least at times, feel buried under this avalanche of information. So, I offer this book in hopes that God might use it as one of the means to help lift readers from this rubble of data. I offer this book in the hopes that God might use it in your life to open the door to the kingdom of heaven. I pray that these pages might help you share more in the life of God.
The good news in all of this is that the hard work has already been done. Experiencing the fullness of life that God desires for us is not a matter of us lifting ourselves out of the avalanche of information in order to find God. Nor is it a matter of finding new disciplines or working harder at the ones that we already know. John reminds us that kingdom of God is already with us, even within us. John witnessed Jesus raised from death to new life. John himself heard the words from Jesus that provide hope for us all. If we want to be fully alive, Jesus says, Abide in me.
It is not a matter of finding something new or working harder than ever before. It is a matter of attending to what already is.
One final note about gender in language throughout this book. My quotations of scripture come almost entirely from the NIV translation. I use this version primarily because it is the version our congregation had in the pews before I even started there. While the newer version has made progress in removing many of the male, gender-specific nouns and pronouns that need not be specific, they have not yet made it as far as I would like. In addition, several of the authors I quote also used male, gender-specific nouns and pronouns in their original writing that might be written differently today. I have tried to be respectful of the translation and