And That Is Why I Love David Crowder

A Passage from David Crowder's Book, Praise Habit: Finding God in Sunsets and Sushi --

To live how you were intended, to interact with God's creation in ways that were His breathings, brings life. Real life. Not just tedious existence, but life that breathes like a tree by a cool river with the grass of Eden stretching broad an embowering under limb. And to live in ways that twist and distort His creation brings death. Not just the redundant (none of use are getting out of here alive) burying of the corpses, but the walking around kind that tastes of dust rather than the Maker's exhale of love. It is repulsive. It doesn't hold together. It is not the genesis-shape imagined for a human.

This is the argument proposed in the first psalm, that praise erupts from "right living." We usually miss the psalm's intent when we attempt to define right living. Our cultural conditioning of Western nationalistic Christianity typically sends us headlong into pharisaical discussion of R-rated movies and cussing and drinking and smoking and the dangers of associating with heathen who do any of the previously mentioned activities. I am familiar with a copious quantity of people who do not participate in any of these activities yet walk around lifeless, as dead and intriguing as a pile of dirt. The coversation is bigger and grander than this. Right living doesn't have its roots in conservative American politics; it is not simply adhering to conventional ideas of morality, propriety, or decorum. It is the living of Eden, it is living in the way that was intended, it is true living.

This mirror of the psalms and this argument for right living exposes our distortions right here at the start. We are a long way from "the beginning." It has been many days since we have felt the grass of Eden underfoot. But there is a right living that is ordered by the ways of Christ. There is a right living that erupts from the embrace of grace. This is the reason for the psalms, this is why there is cause for praise: we have a God who is bringing us back and we are responding with every heartbeat. There is a choosing. Life is not trivial -- how it is lived is decisive.

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It seems that if our motives behind living right are driven by the full understanding of grace in our lives, everything else falls into place. We are going to make better decisions when we realized that the sacrifice that has brought us grace.

I really dig David Crowder.

yac