INTRODUCTION:

Thinking back, I can remember one particularly great weekend years ago where things couldn’t have gotten much better.  The main event that weekend was a football game that I played in – junior year of college.  It was homecoming weekend.  There was a big campus event Friday night where everybody had a great time.  Saturday afternoon we won the game.  There was another big event Saturday night where we were all together with friends.  Things went so well that weekend that it was almost like it must have been scripted that way.

Of course, now (and you know how this works for you, too) – now things like that probably fit pretty well into that Bruce Springsteen song "Glory Days".  It can be pretty sad when the only thing that lights up a person’s eyes is talking about something that happened decades ago.  The good old days undoubtedly had their good moments, even their very good or great moments, but what about…

Having The Good Life... Now!

What does it take for today to be just as good as any of those good old days? 

These days it’s easy to catch ourselves thinking, “I could really be happy if only…”   If only, if only!  If only I possessed all mechanical knowledge, I’d never have to take a car in to the shop and get it fixed and worry about getting ripped off.  If only I possessed all computer knowledge then I could always fix those machines myself and never get frustrated when they don’t do what they’re supposed to do.  If only I had all psychological knowledge, then I could iron everything out and there would be no strained relationships.  If only I possessed all construction knowledge, then I could fix everything that ever went wrong with the house.  If only I had all medical knowledge, then I could always diagnose the aches and the illnesses and get them taken care of right the first time.  If only, if only!  Is the good life that illusive, that we can only find it in the past or endlessly wish for it in the present?

When you open the Israelites’ version of the hymnal and turn to #1, it’s right in front of you.  You’re not going to find the good life by taking the advice of people who have no clue about who God really is.  The most well-meaning person in the world could look you in the eye and tell you, “Here’s what I’ve found to be true.”  The most well-read, highly-degreed doctor in America could write a New York Times best-selling book touting the top ten ways to turn your life around for the better.  But if the triune God is not at the heart of what they’re saying, then it’s all hot air and nothing else.

Do you think the good life can be found in doing whatever you want?  Wouldn’t it be grand to eat the finest foods, drink the finest wines and wear the best clothes money can buy?  Say whatever you want, sleep with whomever you want, live wherever you want, travel wherever you want, watch whatever you want, buy whatever you want?  Just once, or just for a little while, cast off all restraint, forget about, “The Lord says this,” or, “The Lord says that,” and do as I please!  Have you already tried these approaches as if they actually were the good life? or spent too many days doing nothing more than wishing you could?  That’s not where it’s at.  As just one example, you can remember that Solomon tried all that a long time ago and the only place it took him was a long way from God, as frustrating and futile as trying to grab hold of the wind.

There is such a thing as the good life, a life that could very accurately be described as healthy and productive, but the healthiness is not the absence of illness or pain or disease and the productivity is not the presence of accomplishment and awards.  The good life is what you have when the most heart-breaking news comes in but despair does not come with it.  The good life is what you have when the good or bad events of the past year do not have to dictate the tone of what you write in your Christmas letter to family and friends.  The good life is what you have when you know that layoffs, diseases or deaths do not speak against the fact that God is loving, kind and good.  The good life is what you have when you lose the big game, miss out on the scholarship or grant, don’t get chosen after a good audition or tryout, but still know that it was a day the Lord made and you can be glad in it.

Despair stays away, the Christmas letter is genuinely joyful, God is always good and every day does contain reasons to be glad as the Lord gives you something to mumble (which is the meaning of the term meditate in verse 2).  Day and night, day in and day out, day after day there are words from God to keep mumbling to yourself, to keep mulling over, to meditate on literally (and I do mean literally) every hour of every day.

Lord God, what have I done!  With my greediness and my words that injured people I care about and my out-of-control anger and my thinking that I’m one of the better sinners, not one of the worse, I’ve gone to war against you, the Creator of the world and the one who holds my life in his hands.  What have I done!

Lord God, what have you done!  You filled your holy Son with my guilt and killed him with the full blast of your anger.  You laid out his corpse in a quarried tomb.  You gave him a sentence of death and me a verdict of acquittal.  You gave Jesus his life back to give me life with you that will never end.  What have you done!

Memorization makes for good mumbling, good meditating.  He has redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature…(catechism – 2nd article)  On the last day he will raise me and all the dead…(catechism – 3rd article, as a restatement of verse 5).  All day and all night, every day and every night – what Jesus has done for me and keeps on doing for me and will do for me, echoing and re-echoing in my heart and mind, leaving me calm and content, blessed beyond belief.

“Blessed is the man…”  is probably not the way that we would start a sentence in normal conversation in the year 2006, but the first hymn in the Israelite hymnal carries a message we do not want to miss.  The good life is not lost somewhere back in the good old days, and it’s not perhaps attainable today if only this were the case or that were the case.  In the common, quiet, non-sensational daily existence of the person who is relieved and delighted to hear Jesus say, “I forgive you,” life is good.  That relieved, delighted, forgiven person is you.  For you, blessings are busting out all over.  The good life?  In Jesus Christ, the good life is always right now. 

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