Uncovered: There Ain’t No Grave

Mike Leake

Our family loves music. One of the things that I, personally, love about music is its diversity. One of the great joys that I have in life is listening to a well-known song cross genres. This is also a joy for our family. During car rides we play a fun game where we pick a well known song and search for covers of that song on Spotify. Then we decide if we like any of them better than the original. I thought it might be fun to share some of these with you and see which covers you like best. Today we are going to look at There Ain’t No Grave.

Perhaps it’s helpful to know the background to this particular song. There Ain’t No Grave was originally written by Claude Ely. Ely was a Pentecostal Holiness preacher. The story is that Ely wrote this song when he was twelve years old and dying of tuberculosis. As his family prayed for his health Ely sang this song as a response. This is the original (and in my opinion it’s pretty atrocious):

The most well known cover of this song was done by Johnny Cash in 2003 shortly before his death:

It’s pretty tough to beat Johnny Cash, but I’m wondering if you like any of these versions better than Johnny’s. Consider first this one by The Cageless Birds (with Molly Skaggs on lead vocals):

I also am very fond of this live version by Zach Winters:

Which one do you like the most?


Read This! 02.12.19

Mike Leake

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The latest 9Marks journal. Even if you don’t share a Calvinistic soteriology this is informative and helpful.

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Pastors Feel Political Pressure From the Pews

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20 Years, 700 Victims

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Christians, Can We Please Stop Joining the Culture of Destruction?

Mike Leake

The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him. –Proverbs 18:17

I’m going to sound like a heretic here for a moment, but please hang with me.

Here is my heresy—I’d absolutely love to read the anti-Bible. It’d be the Bible written by Paul’s opponents, the Gospels from the perspective of the Pharisees, the Psalms through the eyes of David’s enemies, Exodus told by Ramses, etc. It would be interesting because I bet they would be the hero in their stories. The Israelites would be the bad guys, Jesus would be a rabble-rouser, Paul would be exactly who his enemies in 2 Corinthians accused him to be, and David’s enemies would be those in power trying to squelch this rebel uprising.

Of course I don’t believe any of those things to be true. Those would be fake news. Jesus is the Son of God. While he certainly roused the rabble he wasn’t the enemy, he’s the hero of our story. But we read the Bible best when we realize that at the time of their original composition there was another case being stated.

Our Hero-Wannabe Tendencies

I say that it’s important and helpful for our own Bible reading because we have a tendency to always project ourselves as the hero in these stories. When we read the Psalms we read them as if we are in step with King David and the victims needing God’s rescue. And that’s very much how we should read them, this is their intention. But there is another very real sense in which often a Psalm isn’t actually our Psalm because we aren’t King David running from the enemies—we’re the enemy pursuing the King. We don’t need solace as victims we need rebuke as perpetrators. We just think it’s our Psalm.

I was thinking about all of this the other day in preparing a sermon on Psalm 56. David described his enemies as those who were trampling him, oppressing him, gathering for an attack, lurking in the background, watching his steps waiting for him to fall so they could take him down. But how would they have described their activity? Would they consider themselves faithful workers diligently pursuing a rebel in an attempt to preserve the rightful king of Israel, Saul? 

Joining in the Takedown

It is important for us to consider this perspective. And especially as Christians in our take-down culture. On a weekly basis there are a handful of people trampled by our outrage parade. And we followers of Jesus can be deeply involved in all of this. We’ll scroll through the sermons and clips of false teachers, lying in wait for that bit of false doctrine, and we’ll pounce. We’ll lurk on the politicians Twitter feed and wait for her to expose her hypocrisy. Pounce! Exposed! And all the while we are doing the Lord’s work. We are protecting the sheep. We’re protecting our nation from the infiltration of evil.

And maybe so.

There really are wolves. There really are enemies. There really is evil that needs to be pushed back.

But there is something interesting about shepherding and calling out evil and pushing back darkness which we find in the Scriptures. Shepherds stay on their land. They don’t leave the flock for the woods to hunt down the wolves. Yes we expose the works of darkness but we do it in the light. We aren’t lurkers. Real protection of sheep isn’t interchangeable with the activity of David’s oppressors.

There is a way in which the man of God is to proclaim the truth and to gently oppose those who are enemies to the gospel. Yes, satire is a thing. Yes, Paul basically told his enemies to castrate themselves. But there is a way to even speak in such a way and still be gentle and loving and truth-seeking and not a trampler of men.

So, can we please not join in on this culture of destruction? We will not be guiltless if we take up the strategy of the wicked, even if we are doing it for a righteous cause. There is one who aims to destroy. And there is one who actually has the right to destroy both soul and body in hell. We shouldn’t be the former and we aren’t the latter. Let us be those who lovingly proclaim the gospel even over our fallen “enemies”.

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Photo source: here

How Even a Biblical Vision Statement Can Rob Us Of Community

Mike Leake

In regards to the Christian faith I cut my teeth in what might be called seeker-sensitive, revivalistic, Bapticostalism. Then I broke off a few of those baby teeth on the other end of the spectrum travelling in angry and rigid uber-Reformed circles. In other words I went from believing that something like a vision statement is absolutely necessary to the life of your church to believing that a vision statement is probably the name of one of the horns of the antichrist. I landed somewhere in the middle and have pursued what I call Backward Compatible Church.

I’ve worked with a couple of churches now to move towards what I believe is healthier church polity. Part of this is making sure to have mission and vision which flows out of timeless biblical truths. “Gospel-saturated community” is a phrase that I’ve tried to see adopted in a few communities God has placed me. I could care less what phrases people use but the concept is absolutely vital to being a faithful and healthy church. But there is a way in which a passion for community can actually rob you of that very community. This is how Dietrich Bonhoeffer says it:

Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream. The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and to try to realize it. But God’s grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.

By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a God of emotions but the God of truth. Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both.

A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse. (Life Together)

What Bonhoeffer is saying here is that we are called to love the congregation as it is and where it is. Much as the Lord Jesus reached us as we were and where we were. He accepted us before we were acceptable. We aren’t called to pastor (or to live among and minister to) a fictional church in our heads. As if we will take up the cross only when our wish dream becomes reality.

I think most of us know this. And when we end up broken and battered through this “disillusionment” there are temptations within the church marketplace to take up a philosophy of ministry which hops aboard the bus of a vision statement and runs over everyone who doesn’t hop on the bus with us. And we do all this in the name of being biblical. I’m convinced this is the type of thing Bonhoeffer is referring to when he says that “God hates visionary dreaming…”

…it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly.
He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself. (Life Together)

What I’m hoping to communicate here is that it’s fine for us to set up an ideal—a biblical ideal—but we cannot sacrifice real this side of Eden community on the altar of an imagined community. We have to love people as they are and where they are. This is the way in which Christ loves us. This is what it means to welcome one another as Christ has welcomed us.

So as you write out your vision statement be sure that it is always subservient to real flesh and blood messy community. 

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Photo source: here