…and in His law he meditates day and night. (Psalm 1:2)

The best thing that ever happened to my Bible study was that I decided to start thinking about it.

That might require a little explanation.

Scripture says people who hear the word but do not act on it are like a fellow looking in a mirror, then walking away and forgetting what he has seen (James 1:24).

That’s pretty close to the way I was for a long time. I would read a Bible passage and study it, but make no effort to take it with me when finished. One day I began memorizing Scripture in order to reflect on it while walking or driving or lying awake at night.

That began to make a great difference.

The Word of God does not yield its richest fruits to the casual, occasional visitor to the orchard, but only to those who come regularly and practice patience and diligence.

This, I suspect, is a major failure of many who teach and preach the Word, but who confine their inquiries to the study room. Then they wonder why others find more in passages than they.

“These words I command you today shall be in your heart. And you shall…talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down and when you rise up” (Deuteronomy 6:6-7).

The best kind of Bible study may well take place while you are stopped at a traffic light, lying awake in the middle of the night thinking, sitting at the breakfast table with your newspaper or chatting with your spouse. Because a passage of God’s Word has been near the forefront of your mind (as opposed to filed away in the back somewhere), your subconscious works on it, your active mind begins to see parallels in everyday life, and something your wife said speaks to it.

It’s a wonderful thing.

Here’s an example.

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There was a time I had the answer to everyone’s depression.

“You’re down in the dumps? Your spirit is so low you wish you were dead? The answer is simple. Just memorize scripture and quote it to yourself.”

The simplest response to that is that it was well-meaning but truly stupid. A dead giveaway that I’d never been depressed.

The day came when I was depressed–by then I had logged more than four decades on Planet Earth and thought I was home free; bad mistake–and found just how ineffective and even insulting my little home remedy could be to those in its death-grip.

In my defense, I did not think that up by myself. Somewhere along the way, someone smarter than me–there are so many of those!–had said it, and it sounded logical. (My one wish is that all to whom I spouted that well-meaning nonsense have forgiven me and forgotten it.)

The Bible has great powers, and Scripture can do many things. In some cases, no doubt, memorizing or quoting or meditating upon God’s Word does indeed banish the “blues.” But to make it a panacea, a cure-all, for all kinds of depressions is not wise.

So, where is wisdom concerning depression? Herewith my little contribution to the subject.

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The March 2012 National Geographic has a fascinating photographic essay on rocks and boulders that were brought south by ancient glaciers and deposited where they now adorn playgrounds, city parks, and roadsides. Fritz Hoffman is the guy behind the camera.

These randomly strewn boulders are called errata officially. But the biggest ones go by another and better name: Leaverites. As in, “that rock is so big, we’ll leave ‘er right there.”

The preacher in me saw that and kicked into overdrive. In our lives, your and mine, there are “leaverites,” massive realities that we have to work around and aren’t able to displace, hide, or control.

One’s family members fall into this category. Your brother-in-law. Maybe your boss or a next door neighbor. One’s physical limitations might be a leaverite, particularly one’s height or some types of features.

We can say that this sinful, fallen world is a “given,” a “leaverite.” It’s there, it’s been this way since Eden and will be such until Christ’s return, and we only frustrate ourselves when we expect it to act in any other way.

People are flawed, are sinners, even the best of us. There is no room for perfectionism. As Psalm 103 puts it, “He Himself knows our frame; He is mindful that we are but dust.”

Whle all of these could be called rock-solid realities that we cannot ignore and must deal with, there is one greater Rock on our landscape, one that dominates everything and deserves a category all by “Itself.”

God is our Rock.

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This morning, Today Show’s Matt Lauer interviewed a movie starlet who has struggled with personal issues for most of her young life. She was unrecognizable.

Her hair, normally a mousy brown, was gleamingly yellow and long, the makeup was heavy, and the dress made certain that no one paid attention to any feature other than her long legs.

“Who is she?” I found myself wondering. There was no way to tell by looking at her. She was in camouflage, wearing a mask every bit as effective as the riders on a Mardi Gras float.

We can say the same thing about several older celebs. Joan Rivers and Dolly Parton come to mind. Underneath all that camouflage is someone, and we assume, someone worth knowing. But as for “who is at home” underneath the disguise, only a privileged few ever find out.

Someone once said about Los Angeles as a city: There’s no ‘there’ there.

Looking at the young person who has turned herself into a mannikin to display the work of cosmetologists and clothes designers, we wonder, “Who is there?”

When your makeup, coiffure, and clothing dazzle everyone around to the point that no one notices “you,” it’s time to cut back on the accessories and start peeling back the layers of adornment to the real person underneath.

Do you remember what workers discovered in painting the stacks on the Queen Mary?

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(This is the second on our VISITING NEW ORLEANS series.)

My first visit to New Orleans was by train in August of 1961. As a senior in college and having been called into the ministry, I wanted to see the seminary which the Lord had impressed upon me as “right.” (True statement. I knew no one who had attended here. But felt a strong need to spend time in the city where I could make a difference for the Kingdom’s sake.)

I came in one day, checked in to the old DeSoto Hotel, walked around downtown a little, and the next morning, rode a city bus out into the Gentilly section to check out the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. I walked around campus, chatted with someone in some office or other, picked up some literature, then rode back to town, picked up my bag, and checked in at the train station for the return trip.

Venture into the French Quarter? Are you kidding? No way. Surely the vice there was so overpowering I could never have extracted myself. I gave it a wide berth.

Three years later, my wife and baby son and I moved into an apartment on campus, and thus began our slowly evolving love affair with this strange and wonderful city.

Some who read this will be traveling to New Orleans for the first time. Many will be coming in June to the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, gathering in our Morial Convention Center right on the river.

You’re coming for business. You don’t have a lot of time for touring. You want to invest your time wisely. So, what should you definitely see? Here are three must-see places in this city.

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So, you’re coming to New Orleans, are you? Great! This city loves guests, and the welcome mat is always out.

NOTE: With this, we are beginning a series of brief articles on the subject of VISITING NEW ORLEANS. The instigator was a request for such from various SBC publications in preparation for the annual Southern Baptist meeting to be held in our convention center June 2012.

Yesterday, over lunch with two people from our Baptist Press office (located in Nashville), I learned that this was the first visit to New Orleans for one and only the second for the other. Laura said, “But the first time was for a ball game. We didn’t see much of the city.”

I wish they’d had longer than the 90 minutes yesterday. There are so many places I would love to take them. Having lived in metro New Orleans since 1990–plus, I attended seminary here in the 1960s and early 1970s–I’ve learned to love this city dearly and to enjoy pointing out little known eateries, shops, and historic points.

Before sharing about some of my favorite New Orleans places, sights, and people, let me address three misconceptions which may be helpful for anyone coming this way.

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“Who would not fear you, O King of the nations? For this is your rightful due. For among all the wise of all the nations, and in all their kingdoms, there is none like You.” (Jeremiah 10:7)

Fear may be the greatest motivator in the world.

Fear makes the pilot do one more last-minute check before taking off. Fear makes the passengers buckle up and pay attention to the flight attendant’s instructions. Fear keeps the air controller attentive to the blips on her screen.

Fear restrains us from driving too fast or following too closely on the highways. Fear causes me to replace my tires before they get too bald, to slow down in school zones, and not violate that downed arm at the railroad crossing.

Fear drives us to take our vitamins, see our doctors, and keep making those insurance payments. Fear gets us out of bed and into our sneakers for our exercise.

Fear is a great motivator.

Fear of God is the best motivator of all.

Now, everyone has his/her own definition of the fear of the Lord, what it means and how it works. This is mine.

By saying ‘I fear God,’ I mean a lot of things, but mostly these three:

His power is mighty and awesome. His wrath is biblical and fearsome. His displeasure is scary and then some.

Scripture says repeatedly the starting place for getting smart and wising up is fearing God. (Proverbs 9:10; 15:33)

Here’s a great quote on that subject.

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The big event on my Spring calendar is a pastors-and-wives retreat for English-speakers in Europe. We’ll be there several days and have time to run out to Pompeii and check on Vesuvius and such. (This is the Amalfi Coast of Italy, near Naples.)

Piece of cake, right? Not so fast.

The executive director of the International Baptist Convention, my hosts, pointed out in a recent email a thing or two I might want to keep in mind.

All the retreat participants speak English, but they are not all Americans. Therefore, guest speakers from the States have to be careful not to use idioms and references that only those from Yankeeland (my term, not his) will understand.

I knew that, but I had not thought of it.

So, I started going over some of my choice stories. These are tales of growing up in rural Alabama, of small church preachers and narrow-minded Baptists and Southern ways. Uh oh. We might have a little problem here. I’m going to have to revisit all my messages and stories and illustrations. And even then, once we begin in Italy, there will need to be some fine-tuning and tweaking.

What happens when the preacher does not make an attempt to learn the culture of his audience and adapt to it?

He messes up royally.

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My friends keep teaching me that it’s not enough to pose a negative and let it lay there. What’s the positive? So, recently….

When I did an article on this page about “how churches show you are not welcome,” among the comments it generated–and on Facebook, it pulled in more than here at the website–was one asking me to do the reverse: ‘Tell us how churches show you are welcome.” Great idea.

So, I posed that question to the 4,200 or so FB friends I’ve managed to amass in the last couple of years. And the comments began flying in.

Oddly enough, however, all the comments on how a church shows it wants you boil down to the same thing.

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Some of the laziest people I know are workaholics. But most aren’t.

The lazy-overachievers push themselves night and day in a vain effort to convince themselves they are not lazy, not sloths or couch potatoes or blights on humanity. But most lazy people are under-achievers of the first order.

The workaholic has his own demons to tame, so we will leave him to them.

The rest of us are just cotton-pickin’ lazy.

Who would have thought that the ancients would have identified sloth as one of the deadly sins? It looks so tame, so benign. It doesn’t hurt anyone, but just lies there on the couch doing nothing. How could that be a sin?

The sloth rises from the bed at 10 am and whiles away the day, then rises from the couch at 10 pm wondering where the time went. Where the time went is into the trash bin, into deletion, never to be recaptured.

The sinfulness of sloth is that it wastes life. It denies that “this is the day the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it” (Psalm 118:24). It takes what is God’s and buries it. Sloth is life-denying, and thus rebellion against the purposeful Creating God.

I know about laziness. You too?

Now, I’m known as the guy who rises early and works late, who gets up in the night to tweak something and stays at it for hours.

As a young minister, I went for years without a vacation or taking an off day. From the outside, it looked noble to everyone except my longsuffering family. On the inside, I was living in fear. I was afraid of being accused of laziness, of not doing enough, of not earning my pay.

From the outside, that does not look like sloth. But my heart is where sloth resides.

In the same way that some part of me is an unbeliever, a thief, a liar, and an adulterer, I am lazy. The urge is ever-present, the all-too human tendency toward rebellion and indulgence. Staving it off is a never-ending chore.

Now, one reason we know laziness is so prevalent across humanity is that Scripture–particularly Proverbs–has so much to say on this subject, none of it good.

Go to the ant, you sluggard! Consider her ways and be wise (Proverbs 6:6). The ant, says Solomon, is worthy of our study. Unlike the ancient philosopher-king, we have seen nature films depicting colonies of ants working and cooperating and fighting. We stand in awe of this little critter.

Now, Solomon clearly knew nothing approaching what today’s scientists have learned about ants. And yet, what he said is exactly on target. The ant, as well as the squirrel in my back yard, puts us to shame.

The lazy man is wiser in his own eyes than seven men who can answer sensibly (Proverbs 26:16). The person who does not get up off the couch to run the vacuum or wash the dishes or to earn his pay in the office always has reasons and excuses.

For the record, here are the Proverb references to sloth and laziness: 10:4,26; 12:24; 13:4; 15:19; 19:15; 20:4; 26:14-16.

First, let’s say what laziness and sloth are not.

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