The core message of the gospel is that God invades us with new life, but the setting for this is most often in the ordinariness of our lives. The new life takes place in the place and person of our present. It is not a means by which God solves problems. God creates new life. He is not a problem solver but a person creator.

The contrast between world and church in this regard is stark: American culture is doing its dead level best with its celebrities, consumerism, and violence to keep us in a perpetually arrested state of adolescence. Yet all the while the church is quietly and without false advertising immersing us in the conditions of becoming mature to the measure of the full stature of Christ.

As we grow into maturity in Christ our distinctiveness is accentuated, not blunted. General directions, useful as they are, don't take into account the details that face us as holiness takes root in the particular social and personal place we are planted.

What we are after is first noticing and then participating in the way the large world of the Bible absorbs the much smaller world of our science and economics and politics that provides the so-called worldview in which we are used to working out our daily concerns.

But there is a broad similarity between the directions in the psalm and the contemporary movement known as "behavior modification" which in a rough-and-ready way means that you can act yourself into a new way of being.

Many think that the only way to change your behavior is to first change your feelings.

People who are forever breaking the rules, trying other roads, attempting to create their own system of values and truth from scratch, spend most of their time calling up someone to get them out of trouble and help repair the damage, and then ask the silly question "What went wrong?" As H. H. Farmer said, "If you go against the grain of the universe you get splinters.

But there is an older wisdom that puts it differently: by changing our behavior we can change our feelings.

The cultivation of consumer spirituality is the antithesis of a sacrificial, "deny yourself" congregation.

Prayer is a way of language practiced in the presence of God in which we become more than ourselves while remaining ourselves.

And I remembered Willi's prophetic portrait of me, warning me against entering the American competition to be a pastor who "gets things done" and who is "going somewhere.

We are so used to considering everything through the prism of our current feelings and our most recent acquisitions that it is a radical change to consider the vast before . But if we would live well, it is necessary.