I Will Boast – Jeremiah, Paul, and Paul Baloche

What he had to say, the people did not like. In fact, Jeremiah the prophet (see depiction of Jeremiah [The Prophet Jeremiah (1511), from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, by Michelangelo] here) did not much like what he had been given to tell the people of the southern kingdom of Judah either. ‘Don’t brag about yourself’ – that was the message that a descendant of this weeping prophet, someone named Paul, would recast some six centuries later, and which another Paul (Baloche) would repeat for us another 20 centuries later in history. If you want to brag, say “I Will Boast” because you know your Creator, the only righteous, just, and compassionate One, your Redeemer. You want His approval? Good, then practice those characteristics in your life, and see what that does for your outlook and rapport with Him and with others whom you know. It’s the only way to avoid eternal and terrestrial calamity, if you really take some time and think about what these three in history have had to say.

 

Jeremiah had the unenviable task during his prophetic mission (between 626 and sometime after 586 B.C., so around 40 years) of telling Judah’s inhabitants that doom was coming. Here’s a paraphrase of his message: ‘The land will be laid waste, and exile to Babylon awaits. If you want to prostrate yourselves and admit that you’ve violated the covenant with the Lord God, and reengage with the true One, here’s what you have to do, though your punishment cannot be avoided ultimately’. Then Jeremiah tells them in some short directives what Paul Baloche repeats in his musical rendition in 2006. Don’t boast in or count on the following: your wisdom, your strength, or your riches (Jeremiah 9:23-24). That covers an awful lot in the human experience, and the penchant to chase after these still entices a lot of people today, some 26 centuries after Jeremiah first delivered this rebuke. The great apostle Paul must have taken note of his ancestor’s words, for he too talks about boasting pretty frequently, and then tells his contemporaries in the first century that any such crowing should be exclusively connected with Christ. (Paul wrote at least nine times in five New Testament letters about boasting in Christ [Romans 5:11; 1 Cor. 15:31; 2 Cor. 10:14; 11:10; 12:9; Galatians 6:14; Philippians 1:26; 2:16; 3:3].) His namesake 2000 years hence has thus connected what Jeremiah said so long ago with the apostle’s instructions, in order to consummate some ordinances for a God follower’s lifestyle in our current era. The 21^st Century Paul links our boasting to being ‘humble’ and full of ‘thanks’ for Him because He created us in His image and has saved us (v.1 of  ‘I Will Boast’). So, boast in the ‘Lord’, the ‘worthy’ One, in fact ‘in Christ alone’, Paul Baloche says over and over. It never gets old.     

 

What Jeremiah says after his warning about the harlots of human wisdom, strength, and riches is fairly important also, and when lived out today are pretty meaningful. Paul Baloche mentions humility in his lyrics, versus what Jeremiah says in the latter words of his two verses – that kindness, justice, and righteousness are the ways to please God. It sounds a lot like what another prophet, Micah (6:6-8), had already said to the northern kingdom of Samaria approximately 100 years earlier (sometime between 750 and 686 B.C.), in his warning to those people of what was approaching. If worship – true worship – to the true God is not connected to heart-level attitudes like kindness (mercy), justice among people, and ability to humble oneself to Him, then all the sacrifices on earth you can make won’t matter to God. He’s a righteous God, Jeremiah said, and He expects His image-bearers to mimic Him in these key character traits that He gave to His prophets to tell us. Be kind, practice justice, and be humble, if you want to know what righteous living resembles. That is so needed today in early 2025, so get out there and boast in a shining Christ-likeness everyone…or will we need another weeping prophet to come preach?

 

Read about the contemporary author-composer here: Paul Baloche - Wikipedia 

 

See information on the image of Jeremiah here: File:Michelangelo Buonarroti 027.jpg - Wikimedia Commons …This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 100 years or fewer. {{PD-1996}} – public domain in its source country on January 1, 1996 and in the United States.

I Want to Know Christ – Paul, and Gerald Moore

 

Was he thinking of making his words into a song? Paul, the apostle of the Bible’s New Testament, certainly would have endorsed any system – like music – that aids memory retention of important things that one wants to implement as life strategies, like the declaration he made when he told a group of believers “I Want to Know Christ” (Philippians 3:10). This was an especially noteworthy assertion because Paul was under house arrest at the time, possibly in Rome (perhaps 61 A.D.), or maybe in either Ephesus (53-55 A.D.) or Caesarea (57-59 A.D.) (The picture, Saint Paul Arrested, was painted in the early 1900s [author Publisher of Bible Cards]). Would Paul have thought that the Greeks like Plato and Aristotle (who lived four or five centuries before himself) practiced something really useful for the Christian disciple to adopt, a memorization technique called Mnemonics? It might more certainly be said that Gerald Moore, a believer who helped popularize Paul’s words to the Philippian church, must have believed that this ancient Greek method was really valuable, since he borrowed it to create in 1991 his version of Paul’s prison-inspired words. Song-making is indeed one of His best gifts to us.

     

What would provoke a person to say something like what Paul voiced here – ‘bring it on, give it your best shot and make me suffer, just go ahead and kill me!’ Has the individual gone mad, beset by dementia, or else decided that suicide is his best option? One might say so, if Paul had not also included the part about ‘know(ing) Christ’, and more deeply ‘shar(ing)…’, and ‘conform(ing)’, and ‘ris(ing)’ in power like Him. One could look at this one-time enemy of Christ and say that he got what he had coming to himself; in fact, Jesus told Ananias, the first believer to encounter Paul (when he was still known as Saul), that this threat-breathing persecutor would be shown how much he needed to suffer for God’s name (Acts 9:16). In Paul’s many letters (Gal. 1:13-14; Eph. 3:8; 1 Tim. 1:15-16, and 1 Cor. 15:9), he comes across vividly as one who remembered his previous ways and still felt dogged with regret. He owed a lot, more than he could ever pay. And, the only way out was for him to offer the rest of himself in the service of Jesus’ cause. He saw his own life – hearkening to his Jewish roots – as a kind of drink offering that should be ‘poured out’ for his many sins (Philippians 2:17). Near the end of his life, Paul repeats this metaphor (2 Timothy 4:6), anticipating that his own demise and resurrection in the image of his Master was close at hand. Impossible, you say? Saul-Paul might have echoed this, had he not received the ‘fill(ing) with His Spirit’ through the ministering hands of Ananias (Acts 9:17). He never forgot how much damage he’d done, but he also never forgot how much he had received in his conversion, a story that he told at least two times, many years later in his life (Acts 22 and 26). Jesus’ words still rang like new in his ears. It was a life he couldn’t keep to himself, praying that others would likewise be filled in a powerful way with this same Spirit (Colossians 1:9), transforming the impossible into reality.

 

Gerald Moore enters the picture, some nineteen centuries later, with a tune that musically sums up Paul’s greatest purpose following his Damascus Road conversion. Nothing more than his name is known of Gerald. Is that intentional, so that the focus is on how to follow my ancient brother’s model, to be sculpted as a follower of the Holy Sacrifice, even as Paul was? Gerald was merely the conduit, as any believer is, of a Spirit who’s at work, doing something that takes years, even decades – as it did in Paul’s life – to be fully realized. Gerald may have been the arranger, the tune-writer, for what someone else already was singing – we just don’t know much about that part. If it was first sung around a campfire, as perhaps many folk melodies like this one were, an as yet anonymous soul must have also wanted what Paul had the insight and courage to say. Look deep inside his words…they’re more than a campfire song. Want to know Christ? Gerald helps remind us what Paul knew comes with this life goal.

 

See here for publication information about the song and its full text: Praise for the Lord (Expanded Edition) 864. I want to know Christ and the pow'r of His rising | Hymnary.org

 

See here for description of memory system called Mnemonics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic

 

Information on Paul gleaned from the NIV Study Bible, Zondervan Bible Publishers, 1985.

 

See here for information on the picture showing Paul being arrested: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paul_arrested.jpg. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 70 years or fewer. {{PD-US}} – US work that is in the public domain in the US for an unspecified reason, but presumably because it was published in the US before 1929.

Lord, Take My Life -- Debbie Dorman and Paul

I am not my own. Said first in a paraphrase by an apostle almost 2000 years ago, and this phrase still echoes today. This writer, a virulent opponent of these very words, had to first have his own life broken down so that God could use him. And these five words apparently rang true for Debbie Dorman in 2001. They were words originally intended for a mixed-up, frankly dysfunctional church in the ancient world, but they still spoke to this 21st Century woman; in fact, it’s the one line in her song that she repeats. “Lord, Take My Life”, Debbie also said, perhaps because she looked at the surrounding world and surmised that maybe us 21st Century folks still need what that old apostle (Paul) admonished his 1st Century world to rethink. Do depravity and apathy, and the human proclivity for wrongdoing, especially in the most sordid ways, even bother us? Does it seem like illicit thoughts and behavior travel as fast as the internet can carry them? If Debbie asked herself similar questions, that wouldn’t be surprising, coming from a songwriter who ministers at a church in Austin (see the Austin flag here) that communicates a different way forward for us who have been stained, even just a little bit, by dissolution. HOPE. That’s what Debbie wants to say to you and me; it’s a word that comes straight from Him, the only real source for it.

Debbie and her husband (Jack) minister at Hope Chapel in Austin, and the compact disc on which ‘Take My Life’ appears is called Songs of Hope. Those are good signposts for what Debbie would have the searcher find, this spring of hope that Debbie’s official site settles on for her message. She zeroes in on what Paul wrote a group of Corinthian believers (1 Corinthians 6:19-20) for her song’s inspiration and theme. This paragraph from Paul, in which these few verses are contained, is pretty blunt. Sexual immorality was menacing and compromising the Corinthians’ relationship with God  -- the same God who was supposed to be inside each of them. How dare you degrade your own body with these debased practices! ‘…you are not your own’…’bought with a price’, Paul says, and which Debbie reiterates for us some 20 centuries later. And, then she adds words that help sum up what Paul most certainly would have also said in the same breath. ‘Make (my body) your home’, ‘reign in me’, ‘live through me’, and ‘take my heart’  – words that indeed Paul was living out, ever since his encounter with Him on the Damascus road and the aftermath of that life-altering episode. The ‘blood of Your Son’ was the price, one that Debbie recognized should compel others toward a Savior, and not just an intellectual exercise, but a step – a commitment – to make Him Lord. ‘Make (my heart) your throne’ no doubt describes what the Dormans have been doing for a long time at Hope Chapel, to the point at which they see others (like Andy Combs…read what he says about Debbie on her site), who they coaxed toward Hope, now living out and helping to point others in the same direction. That’s not unlike what Paul himself would have dreamed could happen when he wrote to a group of baby Christians. I’m still his child, and so are we all, in need of fellow seekers to whom we link arms, to keep each other moving toward the light of hope.

I am not my own…a declaration that really runs counter to my high school Civics class, my undergraduate and graduate degrees, and my everyday interaction with the culture in which I live. ‘I have rights!’, someone says. True enough, but what really is best for me? Tunnel vision and egotism can hound and mislead me, as they do you, too. I have to realize that He knows me better than I know myself. The same can probably be said of the Tempter, too, and does that give me pause? That Ensnarer surely wants me in his trap, and I can so easily find myself there. Can’t you? With two spiritual beings at work who know me so well, am I helpless and hopeless? With one I am, and the other actually gives me what is best. Have you figured out which one is which? 

 

See the songwriter’s official site here, and the biblical reference she makes there for the song: http://www.debdorman.com/songs-of-hope/lord-take-my-life/ , and read about her here:  http://www.debdorman.com/about/

 

Read about the church where the songwriter and her husband minister here: Hope Chapel - Ministries

 

See information about the image of the Austin, TX flag here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Austin,_Texas.svg . The image’s public domain status is as follows: This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 70 years or fewer; and also, because it was published (or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office) before January 1, 1929.