Jack Pelham

The market desperately wants
Us to consider it a friend
While it continues to
Consider us suckers.

It will never have its fill
Of its artifice and scheme
Which is, at the very best
One of wanton neglect.

While there are indeed some contrasts between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant, it is a grave mistake of hermeneutics to assume that they will differ at every point of doctrine. I do believe that they have much more in common than many have been taught to believe. And many will assume a difference before ever checking for similarity.

How curious that a man
Can be willing to do a thing
And yet not be willing to be it—
That he will commit to it outwardly
And even for impressive periods of time
And yet not love it with all his inner being—
And live on for years divided about it in his spirit!

We will take the empty young man
Who knows nothing and has no wisdom
And we will fill him up
To bursting with pompousness
With the vacuous ideas
That since we have put him up front
That must mean that he is
Knowledgeable and wise after all
And that God himself has ordained it.

I’m going to do my best to keep this short, as I just want to put a couple of thoughts out there without composing the volumes of supporting ideas that should eventually go with it. So here’s my main point: I think that in our complicated selves—somewhere amid that thing—or groups of things—that we sometimes refer to with words such as mind, heart, soul, spirit, or being, there’s an important part that underlies the parts of which we are more often aware. The parts we more commonly “see” in action—that we are more routinely aware of—have to do with mental functions or features like thoughts, words, actions, feelings, plans, decisions, and actions. Though probably none of us are fully aware of all of these things when they happen, most of us are at least generally aware that such things are indeed doing on inside our selves. That underlying part is what I will (today) call “the will”; it’s our set of desires (wants, wishes, inclinations)—and the important feature of it that I’d like to draw attention to in this post is that not all of the desires that reside there are pointing in the same direction; sometimes they are at odds with one another. And when this happens, it can sometimes make us miserable. I’ve lately taken to describing this misery by use of the metaphor of a horse having a burr under its saddle.

My church may not be perfect—
It may have its shortcomings and flaws—
It may have its errors and bad habits
And its imperfect leaders—
And even some of its sins
Swept under the carpet—

As well as it is obeyed
One might think it had been God himself
Who forbade thinking about what we say
And do and teach and believe at church.