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Fridays With Isaiah: Isaiah 3 – On Leadership!

Posted in Fridays With Isaiah, tagged , , on August 25, 2012| Leave a Comment »

The fact that Leadership is such a big topic now frightens me after reading and thinking about Isaiah 3 this week!

Isaiah 3:1-7  –  “the Lord Almighty will take away . . . everything they depend on”

As Isaiah prophesies concerning the fall of Jerusalem and Judah—which would occur about fifty years later–not only do the signs of the catastrophe but the means of destruction include the absence of real leaders for the community.  Look at the list of leader-types that are missing because of Israel’s failure to follow the Lord Almighty!

  • Heroes
  • Warriors
  • Judges
  • Prophets
  • Elders
  • High officials
  • Leaders of fifty (could be either civilian or military. Let’s just say community leaders.)
  • Counselors/Advisors
  • Skilled craftsmen
  • And even the astrologers and fortune-tellers who, though forbidden, had large followings

Compare this list of absent leaders to our own time:  We certainly live in the age of the anti-hero.  Our judges and political officials do not inspire great confidence. Where does one turn today for leadership and have categorical confidence in that group? Church leaders? Educational leaders? Military leaders? Union leaders?  Societal  or cultural leaders?

So what happens when such a leadership vacuum exists? People start turning to non-leaders and asking them to lead.

The Youth start leading! What young people want rules the day! “I will make boys their leaders, and toddlers their rulers.”  Well, that doesn’t work in Isaiah’s day because it results in social disaster: “man against man; neighbor against neighbor; young insulting their elders and vulgar people sneering at the honorable.” (v.5) I’m not sure that a society—including a church community—should be built on the immature desires of youth.  Isn’t that what Isaiah is saying here?

Or those with more stuff are chosen to rule! “Since you have a coat, you be our leader.”  But those with More Stuff  refuse because it is not in their own best interest. They are taking care of themselves first.

“Oh my people, your leaders mislead you; they send you down the wrong road.” (v.12)  And, as is always the case, the poor suffer the most because those with coats and contrived leadership oppress them, an abuse of power that leads to general destruction of the society—under which the poor suffer even more.

Isaiah 3: 16-26 – “The women of Zion are haughty.”

I bet this section got Isaiah into big trouble.  I found it fascinating because in railing against the haughtiness of women, Isaiah acknowledges the impact of women even in that very patriarchal society.  Why mention the women of Zion if they had no influence!

But they did. (See v. 12). They had stepped into the vacuum and had done no better than the men. The very graphic picture that Isaiah draws of bejeweled women, “craning with their necks, flirting with their eyes, walking with dainty steps, tinkling their ankle bracelets,” all seems intended to show the same kind of misplaced sense of what real leadership looks like.

Just as the Lord stripped away from Judah the male leadership that had abandoned His Way, he does the same with the women who flaunt their beauty and sexuality for power and control—again sounding very much like our day, doesn’t it!  The Lord Almighty strips Zion’s women of “everything that makes her beautiful”(v. 18). . . .”Instead of smelling of sweet perfume, she will stink. . . .Shame will replace her beauty” (v.24).

Conclusion

If Jerusalem’s false and vacuous leadership resulted in its destruction, then shouldn’t the titanic number of words bemoaning, attacking, and attempting to generate leadership in our age sound like a warning to us?

The warnings of Isaiah point all of us back to God’s leadership. There is no other that will not lead to destruction.

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Fridays With Isaiah: Isaiah 2 — Choose Your Mountain!

Posted in Bible Study, Fridays With Isaiah, tagged , , , on August 17, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I have been on many mountains in the world, and most are much more beautiful and majestic than the smallish Mt Zion where Jerusalem is today.  But fewer mountains have seen the drama this mountain has witnessed.

As with many ancient sites, which of the elevations is Zion is disputed—but it doesn’t matter. Abraham was there, as were Isaac and Jacob. David was there and the first temple was there. And Nebuchadnezzar and Herod and Jesus were there.  On Pentecost, Peter preached there and Paul was there and the Romans destroyed its buildings and made it a little taller with its own rubble.

God has history with this mountain!  So Isaiah uses it to prophecy about the future for God’s people.

Isaiah 2:1-5  “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD”

While a physical return to glory for the mountain of the Lord is a seductive and tempting understanding, if we went that route, I think we would be standing with the apostles near that mountain, saying, “Lord, and now will you restore the kingdom to Israel?”  And He would be again frustrated with my lack of understanding.

The mountain to which we should be and will be drawn is the mountain of the Lord, to His presence. Instead of worrying about the place, let’s focus on why people want to go there:  “He will teach us His ways, so that we may walk in his paths.”  Peace will reign because He will judge with righteousness.

This mountain of the Lord draws all nations!  It’s glory is the presence of the Lord—not its history, not its political significance, not its own majesty.

“Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.”

Isaiah 2:6-22  “Stop trusting in man who has but a breath in his nostrils.”

While the future marches toward Zion and the beauty of worshipping His holiness there, the awful truth is that most people—even those who think they know all about God—are marching to a different tune and are running to mountains, but not to Zion.

They are fleeing to the rocks, hiding in holes, hoping caverns and caves will shelter them instead of Zion.  They fear judgment; they fear the Day of the Lord.  Why?  What have we done?

  • We are superstitious
  • We seek spiritual power from sources other than God
  • We trust in silver and gold—“there is no end to their treasures . . . .”
  • We trust in our own power to protect and defend ourselves—“no end to their chariots.”
  • We substitute other things for God in our lives.
  • We bow down to the work of our hands. ‘

I’m not a Hebrew scholar, but I just read that the word translated majesty when used for God is the same word but translated as pride when used for people.  This is a great lesson, i.e.,  that man’s pride is primarily his attempt to claim divine majesty.

A day of reckoning is coming!   Isaiah calls it the Day of the Lord and it’s a pretty frightening day if you have pretended to be God your whole life.  It will be one of those moments when all of those lies we tell ourselves will be exposed as self-deception. It will be a moment when the trinkets of false power—including fake spiritual power—will be “thrown away to the rats and bats (v. 20) as we run to hide from the truth.

God is rising to shake the earth!  The destruction of these quakes and tsunamis will make what we see on the news seem nothing because not only will the earth itself shake, but every mountain that we have built to compete with the mountain of the Lord will be shaken until it is just a pile of dust.

So choose a mountain!  Choose the mountain of the Lord, rush to it to learn to walk in the light of the Lord!   Or choose yourself a good hole in the ground to hide in, a cave that God cannot find, that’s so dark that God’s light can never penetrate it  . . . .

Wait a minute—everlasting darkness—that’s Hell, isn’t it?

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Fridays With Isaiah: Chapter 1 — The Leaves Faded On Bilbo’s Oak Tree!

Posted in Fridays With Isaiah, Uncategorized, tagged , , , on August 10, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I personally am going to be spending time with Isaiah for a while. My interest is not driven by anything external, like teaching a class or even pursuing a particular question or theme; rather, I’m interested in just listening to the Word—just listening—and hearing what He says to me today.  Sharing with you will help me understand better what I’m hearing, so I hope you’ll look forward to Fridays.

Chapter 1: 1-4 – “I reared up children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me.”

I really love my kids. I loved them when they were little and bouncing on us in bed. I loved playing ball with the boys and going to Emily’s music events when they were teens—and I love them even more now as adults.  I can only think of one occasion in recent years when I thought I had really offended one of them, and I was appalled! I could not rest until I had gone and apologized—which proved to be unnecessary, but I didn’t care. I would have done anything in my power to restore what I perceived to be a tiny chink in our relationship.

What pain God our Father must feel who has given us life, reared us up, guarded us, fed us, and loved us in every conceivable way—what pain He must feel at his children’s rebellion, “children given to corruption” (v.4).  How much pain do the parents of these recent shooters feel?  Just the pain of the loss of your children would be horrible, but put on top of that the pain of their victims for whom every parent would feel responsible, and then to add a child’s resentment and rebellion toward you would be almost unbearable.  God’s pain did not start on the cross!

Chapter 1: 5-9 – “…only wounds and welts and open sores.”

Many speculate that any remains of Sodom and Gomorrah—the two ancient symbols of total depravity—lie at the bottom of the Dead Sea—death, death, and more death!  Isaiah appears to write to a remnant which has survived. I once read a fictionalized version of Jesus bringing Lazarus out of four days of rotting in his tomb, which conjectured about how nauseating his skin appeared and how frail he was as he recovered from death.  I doubt that is really what happened with Lazarus, but it might be the condition of this wounded and sore remnant in Israel.

Chapter 1:10-17 – “When you spread out your hands in prayer, I will hide my eyes from you.”

If Isaiah’s readers thought they were going to get off with just the threat of becoming like Sodom and Gomorrah, they were wrong. Isaiah begins the next section by addressing them as “you rulers of Sodom.”  Their worst nightmare was more than a dream! It was already reality!

And their religious rituals were MEANINGLESS!  Worse, they were offensive—“my soul hates . . . “—God will not hear their many, many prayers because they left their prayer shawls on the pew and went out the door and did more evil.

Stop doing wrong, learn to do right!  What part of these seven words do we have trouble understanding???

Chapter 1:18-20 —  “If you are willing and obedient.”

We used to sing an old hymn based on verse 18 “Though Your Sins Be As Scarlet.” We don’t sing or talk much about our sins any more—too bad, because it is hard to understand that you are made white as snow unless you know what scarlet and crimson mean!

Chapter 1: 21-28 – “Zion will be redeemed with justice.”

Your beautiful little baby girl . . . has become a harlot. She has no hope within herself of ever breaking out of her filthy life—but the LORD ALMIGHTY loves her—and me—enough to purge us of evil and redeem us with justice.  Purging may be painful, but so was justice!

Chapter 1: 29-31 – “like an oak with fading leaves”

These last verses of Chapter 1 are addressed to those who continue to rebel. Ultimately, they will be broken and perish (v.28), but even before that they will be ashamed and disgraced.

A beautiful oak tree is a splendid tree.  We were recently in New Zealand and visited Hobbiton, one of the outdoor sets for Lord of the Rings and the coming The Hobbit movies. Bilbo’s hobbit home sits under a beautiful oak tree, as described by J.R.R. Tolkien, so Peter Jackson, the director, had to produce a hobbit hole with a beautiful oak tree above it for verity in his films. Everything was perfect about this particular site in New Zealand except no oak tree! Fortunately, they found a beautiful oak tree about five miles away, so they cut it down, stripped its leaves, carefully dismembered it into hundreds of fragments, transported it all to the set, then reassembled the oak tree with nuts and bolts.

Of course the beautiful oak tree had no leaves—because it was dead, so 250,000 artificial oak leaves were shipped in from Japan and carefully attached to the tree—individually—to make the tree appear to be alive.

The beautiful oak tree of LOTR rotted, however, and the leaves faded in the decade between LOTR and The Hobbit, so that they were removed and replaced with an artificial trunk/branches and new leaves for the second film.

Those who rebel and resist the love and the purging of the LORD ALMIGHTY are like dead oak trees, which sometimes can be bolted together and life faked for a while, but eventually will rot and fade because they are dead.

The mighty man will become tinder and his work a spark; both will burn together with no one to quench the fire.

Isaiah, you frighten me! 

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Are You Afraid To Listen For God?

Posted in Bible Study, Other, tagged , on June 1, 2012| 1 Comment »

Rick Atchley just finished an extraordinary series of teachings called Hearing God, in which he raised some of the hard questions with which the most serious Christians wrestle, like

  • Does God really speak to us today? And, if so, how?
  • How can I improve my hearing?
  • How should one recognize that it is God speaking?
  • What do I think when I hear nothing at all?
  • What keeps us from hearing God?

All six of these lessons are available to you at http://www.thehills.org/index.cfm/PageID/1523/index.html .

Fifty years ago, few people in our movement were very uncomfortable talking about hearing God’s voice.  We were pretty convinced that God spoke to  Abraham, Moses, and the prophets, but that after the cross, He lost his voice and  resorted to just writing His message down by means of the Holy Spirit. And once he put the last period on the Book of Revelation, He had no need to say anything else, so He has not been heard from since.

As is often the case, fear drove us to these theological conclusions.  If God continued to speak, then it might be possible that He

  • Might tell someone else something He hadn’t told us!
  • Might change the pattern that we had discovered in the New Testament!
  • Might talk to someone not in our fellowship, which would suggest His endorsement.

 

Of course, we protected ourselves from our fears with theological headphones—noise-cancelling headphones that let us hear only the sounds we wanted to hear. Because of our fears, many Christians only recognize God’s handwriting, not His voice.

 

Let me just say this: there are false prophets who claim to be the voice of God; there are ungodly voices that want to capture our hearts;  and that some have not only distorted His voice but even forged His handwriting, producing “new” messages from God.  These forgeries, both oral and written, began even during the first century, so from then until now, Christians have been warned:  Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1)

So what does the voice of God sound like?  I wouldn’t speak for anyone else, but in my own life His voice has always been recognizable, even when indescribable.  I know that doesn’t make any sense, so let me elaborate.

Recognizing the voice of God is easier when you are familiar with what He has said before. By His grace and mercy, we have a whole library of His conversations, His speeches, and His meditations.  If you want to recognize His voice, you will become intimately familiar with what it sounds like.

This familiarity is also your protection against false voices:  the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. 4 When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. 5 But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger’s voice” (John 10:3-5)

My other suggestion to you is to learn to be quiet and wait. 

First, be quiet!  In those times when you are keenly aware of your need to hear God’s voice, perhaps before a big crisis or at a crossroads, stop talking because it is almost impossible to talk and listen at the same time.  In place of talking, listen to what you know to be His voice by reading His message—even ones that you don’t think apply to your situation.  His Word is living and dynamic.  How often have I been surprised by some arbitrary reading that spoke directly to my need!

Secondly, and even harder sometimes, just wait!  If you haven’t heard His voice, don’t do anything until you have!  Don’t let your need to know, or your need for security, or your action plan or schedule dictate when God must speak—or else you’ll act without hearing His voice.  In my experience, It has never been a good idea to give God deadlines.

The last two weeks have been wild at LST. Major changes started happening with our staff: some needed to leave, others needed to shift, and perhaps we need to hire.  In addition, big financial decisions need to be made almost immediately to adjust our spending for the last half of our year to meet our budget, decisions that will mean some shifts in how we do core activities.  On top of all of that, our landlord walked in two weeks ago and said that they were closing our building down and we needed to move by August!

Two weeks ago, Sherrylee said, it feels like God’s asking us to reinvent the ministry! I heard that word as the voice of God. Rick said last week in his last lesson, “Until God speaks, you have not heard the last word,” and those were God’s voice for me.  Some of our staff members had wishes and desires that made the answers to personnel shift decisions pretty obvious to me—and they were God’s voices.

Regarding our new location and office space—His voice is not clear yet, so we are waiting to hear.  That doesn’t mean sitting around the office doing nothing. No, we are looking at properties almost every day and will continue until His answer is clear.

Don’t be afraid! You can recognize His voice. God gave you the headset (maybe heartset would be a better word) you needed when He gave you the gift of His Spirit.

Here’s the last word:  “ The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. 15 The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things . . . . (1 Corinthians 2:14-15).

 

 

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Guest Post: “Why Is Jesus Worthy” by Richard Oster, Jr.

Posted in Bible Study, Christian Missions, Other, Uncategorized, tagged , on March 27, 2012| Leave a Comment »

 Dr. Richard Oster, professor at Harding School of Theology, has a topic-specific blog called 7 Subversive Letters which opens the letters to the seven churches recorded in Revelation 1-3 in a very enlightening way.  These short writings hint at what is soon to become a book on the same topic.

I recommend to you both Dr. Oster and his blog.  I hope this taste will encourage you to investigate his writings further.

WHY IS JESUS WORTHY?

by Dr. Richard E. Oster, Jr.

I suppose that this question has more than one answer.  It is clear that John the prophet embraces the conviction that the Messiah Jesus is worthy. One of the best known and favorite perspectives on this topic is given in Revelation 5:12 where John relates Jesus’ worthiness to the fact that he was slain to redeem humankind: “Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” (Rev. 5:12).  Believers are probably attracted to this perspective because it reminds them of Christ’s sacrificial death and bloodshed on their behalf.

In our enthusiasm for this popular interpretation of Christ’s worthiness there is a related idea given by John that has sometimes been overlooked.  In Rev. 5:9 John writes, “You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation.” There are really two points in this verse; there is the traditional understanding focused upon Jesus’ vicarious death and secondly Jesus’ worthiness because of the global consequences of his death for the Christian mission.  In making this second point John tries to move the readers beyond two typical misunderstandings. The first of these tendencies is one that hides and secludes salvation from others because of feelings of nationalism or ethnocentrism.  The second misconception that John’s teaching combats is the idea that converts to Christianity are there to bolster the agenda, needs, programs, and budget of the church.  John’s emphasis is upon the fact that Christ’s role in the first instance is to purchase man and women “for God.”  The church never owns Christian converts; their only rightful owner is God.

It has been easy for a complacent church at times to laud, magnify, and praise Christ for his redemptive work on the cross, but manifest less enthusiastic about a commitment to the style of globalism in missions contained in the words “from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Rev. 5:9b).  One does not need to have advanced theological training, or even know Greek and Hebrew, to realize the necessary connection in the heart of God between a believer’s embracing the personal benefits of salvation and then showing a commitment to the globalization of those benefits.

Living in an empire such as Rome’s, a believer would clearer and frequently see the signs of Roman colonialism in Roman artwork recorded on coins, in statues, and on major monuments.  Christians knew they lived in an Empire that controlled the lands and seas between the rivers Thames and Tigris.  When Rome thought of “tribes and languages and peoples and nations” they imagined more areas to conquer, to dominate, and to exploit for their resources, both human and material resources.  It was difficult in antiquity to surpass Rome’s activity in human trafficking.  John the prophet, in contradistinction to the prevailing regime, saw “every tribe and language and people and nation” as parts of God’s alienated, but beloved, creation, longing for a partial redemption in the present, and a complete restoration and redemption in the New Heaven and New Earth (Rev. 21-22).

You can read the complete series at 7 Subversive Letters

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Your Parents Are Heavy!

Posted in Bible Study, Family and Marriage, tagged , , , on September 26, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Tomorrow Sherrylee and I are driving about seven hours to Searcy, Arkansas, because her father Max Johnson and his wife Opal are being presented with a Christian Service Award from Harding University during their lectureship.

The presentation will probably last a total of five minutes, but good time management is not really a relevant issue here. Sharing special moments with those you love—at any cost—especially your parents—is what it is all about!

Have you ever noticed in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20) that “honor your father and your mother” is the first commandment which is about something other than the uniqueness and holiness of God?  Commentators often see a shift of direction in the fifth commandment, moving from God-centered commands to neighbor-centered .

Jesus probably saw it this way too as you can tell from his summary of the ten commands: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and, love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12).

I like to think about this fifth commandment as being the bridge between the two groupings.  After all, your parents are not really neighbors and they haven’t been divine since you were about ten years old.

Yet, in some ways they still have their feet on both of these banks. My mother is 88 years old and lives about five miles from Sherrylee and me—and so she is my neighbor.  And you can’t call God Father without thinking about your own father, can you?

So what does God mean when He commands us to honor our fathers and mothers?  And what does that look like for me when I’m thirty? Forty?  Fifty?  Sixty?  Or older?  (My mom just lost a friend of hers who was 107. She was being cared for by her 80-year-old daughter—or maybe it was her almost 60-year-old granddaughter—Mom wasn’t sure!).

Mom would laugh if I told her that the core meaning of the word God wrote on the table of stones is weighty. She is definitely not weighty! But the way the word is used has to do with something that is weighty with value. My mental image is of those balance scales that are still used in many countries to determine the value of something. The heavier the scales register, the more valuable the commodity.

The fifth commandment says that parents are to be considered precious, of extraordinary value, like a pair of huge diamonds that always drop their side of the scales to the bottom.

The Ten Commandments were not given to children; Jesus accused the Pharisees and teachers of the law of breaking the command of God to honor father and mother (Matthew 15:3ff).  We never outgrow the command to honor father and mother!

Jesus reprimanded the Pharisees for not using their money to take care of their parents.  I know a good man who was a corporate executive for a multinational firm for many years, who retired financially secured, but who spent all of his retirement taking care first of his wife’s parents, who lived into their nineties, and then his own until their deaths.  He honored his parents and hers at great personal cost—because they were weighty—precious jewels.

Jesus also quotes the command not to curse father or mother to the Pharisees, so I wonder if they were doing that too?   Could your parents frustrate you so much with their insecurities, with their lack of comprehension, with their lack of inhibition, with their legalism, with their insistence on their own way, could they make you want to curse??  Maybe the Pharisees and their parents weren’t so different from us after all???

Honoring father and mother has everything to do with honoring God!  To paraphrase the Apostle John, if we can’t honor our earthly father and mother, how can we truly honor our heavenly Father? (1 John 4:20)

And so we drive a total of 14 hours for a five-minute ceremony to honor Max and Opal—but we do it because they are precious to God and to us.  If our little trip were put in the balance scale on one side, it wouldn’t even register compared to the weighty people on the other side.

 

 

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Who Were the Seventy-Two?

Posted in Bible Study, Luke 10 Series, tagged , on September 2, 2011| 2 Comments »

Each time I choose to use Luke 10 as a sermon text, I learn something new.  Just last Sunday, I used it once again as my text for the Sunday sermon in Columbus, Georgia, and a couple of very important lessons and applications jumped out at me for the first time as I prepared.

Of course, Luke 10 is the chapter that describes the sending out of the seventy-two disciples:

 “1 After this the Lord appointed seventy-twoothers and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go.”

Who are these seventy-two people? In Chapter 9, Jesus sends out the Twelve and we know all their names! We even sing songs about them in Sunday school to help us remember their names. We call our sons Peter, John, James, Andrew, Philip, Bart, Tom, Matthew—not so much Thaddeus, but there was a time when even that was a popular name. But who are the seventy-two?

In Chapter 9, the Twelve go out with the same basic instructions and have a successful mission trip. Later in the same chapter, however, they start arguing about who will be the greatest in the kingdom. They had returned in triumph, but Jesus had almost immediately started talking about His death—which to them must have meant defeat, not triumph.

They meet the man with the demon-possessed son and apparently have lost either the power or the faith to cast out the demon because they fail in their attempts, according to the father’s report to Jesus (9:40) Maybe Jesus had talked too much about His death.

Perhaps it was this failure on their part that caused their jealousy first of each other, then of other people who were casting out demons in the name of Jesus but were not one of the Appointed Twelve! Jesus has to first remind them that not high position but humility is of value and then that their appointment did not make them greater than the unappointed who worked in His name.

Then those same Twelve walked with Jesus into an unbelieving Samaritan village and just wanted to nuke all the unbelievers! Jesus rebukes them again for not having learned that mercy triumphs over judgment!

Who are these seventy-two people in Luke 10 then? Perhaps they were some of the followers left over from the 5000 that Jesus fed near Bethsaida (9:10). I wonder what the Twelve thought when Jesus started choosing some of these “loaves and fishes” disciples!  I wonder if they thought they were being replaced?

 I wonder if they secretly were hoping that the seventy-two failed in their mission. Schadenfreude lies hidden in many of our hearts.

The Twelve had so much to learn! Yes, Peter had just made the Great Confession, and, yes, witnessing the Transfiguration was a life-changing event, but they still had much to learn about following Jesus.

I know who the seventy-two were! They were just no-name people like you and me! Their names never surface; never is anyone later identified as one of the Seventy-Two! We don’t know what happened to them after the great experience recorded in Luke 10. I’d like to think that they continued to follow Jesus and were part of the 120 in Jerusalem after the resurrection, or part of the 500 to whom Jesus appeared after His death!

But there is a lesson to be learned: Jesus was not looking for first-round draft picks that would become celebrities! He was looking for people who could deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow him.

He was looking for people who did not let anything come between them and following him. Perhaps he had been calling those in Luke 9 for this second mission team, when they turned him down to bury their fathers and say good-by to their families, or because Jesus didn’t really have the proper arrangements for housing made yet (9:57-62).

Jesus was not looking for superstars, but for regular people who would go out in His name—lacking support, warned of rejection, no promise of success! He found seventy-two No-Name Disciples who were not looking for power positions or name recognition, but who were willing to go where they were sent, to talk about the kingdom, and to use their gifts for the good of those they met.

I believe Jesus still uses no-name people for great service in His kingdom in greater numbers than the group of those whose names we recognize.

Not being appointed to The Twelve is no disadvantage. Those who are have perhaps greater struggles, greater challenges, and harder roads. Most of us should be delighted to be chosen to the No-Name group.

In fact, all of us should be thankful to be chosen at all!

 

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One One Nine: Word-less?

Posted in Bible Study, tagged , , on June 16, 2011| 2 Comments »

Enjoy this final guest post by Craig Altrock. My thanks to him for encouraging and inspiring us!

This is my last post in this series on Psalm 119.  The temptation is to keep writing, to keep producing more words about the Word.  But therein lays a fundamental impulse Psalm 119 pushes against underestimating the nature and significance of words.

 

I was struck early on in my 119 day journey through this psalm by the writer’s preoccupation with God’s word.  It’s not just that he felt Scripture was important.  No, when he thought of Scripture it made his mouth water and his tongue pant.  And while I wish my own response to God were so visceral, it does raise the issue of why one would be so passionate for ink and paper.

 

With that in mind it strikes me that words are frequently and easily cheapened today:

  • Words exist everywhere!  Think of how many words you will come across today.  They flood your computer screen, they scream at you from your mobile device, they leer at you from the billboards, and they pull at you from your child’s school work.
  • Words are so often used with such little thought.  Ideally words are meant to capture ideas, to contain truth, and to give voice to emotion.  But draping the proper words over these realities can be a delicate and wearisome activity.  Because we lack the discipline to find the right word, we cast on our ideas the first word that comes to mind, like a worn out jacket from our closet. Subsequently our speech and writing is devalued because we’ve lost the restraint needed to hold our tongue or pen until the right words can be crafted. 

 

As we cheapen words it becomes too easy to disassociate what we say from who we are:

  • It doesn’t bother us to lie because the word (lie) didn’t’ mean that much to us anyway; it was just a word.  What we say doesn’t reflect who we are (so we think!).
  • We don’t express appreciation to another because we incorrectly assume our words are simply words. What we say doesn’t reflect who we are (so we think!).
  • We make promises we can’t keep because the promise was made with lips, not our full intention.  What we say doesn’t reflect who we are (so we think!).

 

But psalm 119 calls us back to the recognition that words are so intricately linked to the heart which gave them impulse and the lips from which they slipped that we can no sooner separate the two than we could the sun from its light.  The psalmist loved God’s word because he loved God.  The writer rightly believed that when God speaks He is sharing part of himself-truth, character, and heart.

 

I think it is for this reason the psalmist sought desperately for God’s word.  To know God’s word is to know God.  To speak Scripture out loud is to let the very character of God pass over your tongue.  To meditate on a verse is to invite God himself into the chair of the heart.   As the incarnation teaches us so many years later, to receive a Word from God was to receive God himself.

 

Let us not be guilty of worshiping a book.  However, by the same token let us also not be charged with treating Scripture as just a book.  May God’s word be for us like Lewis’ dusty wardrobe was for the Pevensie children –– a doorway to a realm where not only hope and wonder exist, but one where the Great Lion himself awaits our company.

 

“I lift up my hands to your commands, which I love…”

Psalm 119:48

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One One Nine: Word-Oriented Practices

Posted in Bible Study, tagged , , on June 14, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Be encouraged with this guest post from Craig Altrock, senior director of projects at Let’s Start Talking Ministry. 

What practices do you engage in regularly that connect you with God’s word?  This question floated to the surface as I explored Psalm 119 for 119 days.  On the one hand it’s true that a simple practice or discipline means nothing.  Pharisees consumed God’s word but somehow seemed to escape the nourishment it was meant to bring.  On the other hand, sometimes it is a discipline which fuels heart-felt passion for God.  I believe one of the reasons the psalmist had such a fire for God is that he engaged God’s word through a number of creative practices.

 

I noted these disciplines in a prior post, but I’ll list them again so we have them in front of us for this conversation.  Here are the practices the psalmist mentions concerning his engagement with Scripture:

  1. A regular ASSESSMENT of his own life in relation to the way of God.
  2. A VERBAL RESPONSE involving PRAISING God for his word, SINGING to God about his word, or actually RECITING out-loud God’s word.
  3. MEDITATION on God’s word.
  4. ASKING God to be the primary teacher of His word.
  5. REMINDING God about his word and asking him to act in accordance with it.
  6. PRACTICING the Daily Offices (conducting any and all of these other disciplines at set times of the day and night – even at midnight!).

 

Each of these topics is worthy of separate posts, but here are my thoughts about two of them.

 

The psalmist who writes Psalm 119 is verbally engaged with God’s word.   For example, while there may be a number of songs in his repertoire, he specifically mentions singing God’s own word; not singing about God’s word, but actually using God’s own word for lyrics (119:54, 172).  However, his recitations don’t stop with a song.  He intentionally and verbally speaks God’s word –“With my lips I recount all the words that come from your lips” (119:10).

 

In the days since I finished my 119 day experiment I’ve watched to see how often I, my Bible class, or even my church family actually spoke God’s word out-loud.  I didn’t keep any records of this informal survey but I was astounded at how infrequently Scripture floated off our tongues and across our lips.  We read it.  We heard it.  We even wrote it.  But speaking Scripture–that rarely happened.

 

A second practice woven through this psalm is what many call the Daily Office.  For those of us who think “liturgy” sounds like a Hungarian dessert, this simply means praying at set times of the day (and often with the same set of prayers).  At one point the psalmist mentions praising God seven times a day (119:164), which evidently even involved waking at midnight (119:62).  I actually tried this for a while.  I set my phone to signal me at set times of the day so I would pray (to be honest, that midnight appointment slipped of my schedule pretty quickly!).

 

Can reciting Scripture out loud become dry?  Certainly.  Can praying at set times feel forced? Sure.  However, you have to wonder if it’s just a coincidence that the person who practiced these kinds of disciplines also confessed “I open my mouth and pant, longing for your commands” (119:131).

A group of us at my church organized a public reading of Scripture on Good Friday this year.  For almost an hour and a half a number of us shared in the out-loud reading of Matthew’s account of the Passion Week.  We worried people would get bored.  We fretted that we’d lose focus.  However, the #1 comment we heard afterwards was, “That was powerful.”

 

I wonder what kinds of thoughts and feelings you might experience if you picked one of these two disciplines and experimented with them this week.  Set your phone’s alarm to go off at 9 a.m., 3 p.m., and 6 p.m. At those hours this week stop and pray.  Or, pick a text like the Sermon on the Mount, find a quite place, and read a little of it out loud each day.  Post your reactions so we can learn together!

 

“I rise before dawn and cry for help; I have put my hope in your word”

Psalm 119:147

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One One Nine: Scripture as Path and Door

Posted in Bible Study, tagged , , on June 10, 2011| Leave a Comment »

This is the third in a series of guest posts by my friend and co-worker Craig Altrock. Craig and his wife Leslee have been active with LST  for 20 years now! 

 We are driven to act in accordance with the heartbeat of Scripture only in as much as we are led to THINK the right way about Scripture.  This became convincingly clear to me as I huddled around Psalm 119 for 119 days recently.   Like the luminous outline of a city at night, the importance of right thinking frames the psalm.  And, like the soil nourishing a plant, it is a way of thinking about Scripture that energizes this psalmist’s great love for God.

 

As I noted in my last post, here are six beliefs about Scripture which fuel the psalmist’s passion for it:

  1. It is a PATH toward joyful living, not a roadblock to your desires.
  2. It is a LIGHT to illuminate your way.
  3. It is a DOOR to freedom, not a sentence of imprisonment.
  4. It is a COMPANION that guides us toward heart-felt passion for God.
  5. It is a REFLECTION of God’s character.
  6. It is NOURISHMENT to sustain the journey.

 

While it’s tempting to spend a post on each one of these, I’ll pick just two.

 

The Path— Scripture for this psalmist is not simply an instruction manual on how one is made right with God, as though that act were somehow unconnected to the rest of the way we live.  For many people Scripture is the place we turn when we have “spiritual” questions. It’s the shelf on which we find the ingredients for knowing God better.  It’s the pantry where we keep all things related to “my spiritual life.”

 

But, when you conjure up images connected to the word path you get a different idea altogether.  When you are bombarded with daily advice on how you should live, Scripture silences those voices and provides the one true way of living. Scripture isn’t just a rest stop, it’s the road!  It isn’t just a road sign, it’s the entire map! Scripture is meant to guide us into healthy, joyful, fruitful ways of engaging each other and God – the road-surface of life!

 

The Door— This image isn’t actually used in Psalm 119, but it comes closest to what I think is one of the most significant ways of thinking in the psalm –freedom.  It is to the detriment of countless numbers of would-be disciples that they have somehow come to understand Scripture as something which confines us.  For too many, the pages of Scripture morph all too quickly into the bars of a cell.  Their belief is that all the fun is “out there” so why would I want to get trapped in the confines of God’s law?

 

But not so the psalmist.  I love 119:32, 45;  “I run in the path of your commands, for you have set my heart free…I will walk about in freedom, for I have sought out your precepts.”

 

Freedom is not something we discover the farther we remove ourselves from Scripture.  Instead it is an experience we uncover as more and more of our life comes into alignment with God’s way.

 

Well, there’s so much more to say.  However, better than my trying to capture the right words to communicate these critical thoughts is YOU planting these seeds in your mind and letting the Spirit nourish them through prayer and meditation.

 

Which image speaks most powerfully to you?  Which one seems harder to connect with?  Pick one this week to mediate on and let us know what God does in you through that exercise.

 

“The unfolding of your words gives light; it gives understanding to the simple.”

Psalm 119:130

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