Don't Forget Who You Are!

Now therefore, if you will indeed hear my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all the peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.[1]

 We are so used to hearing the message of Grace preached fully and completely that it may be difficult to hear Yahweh God putting conditions on how we come to be treasured and holy. The “if” statement bothers us tremendously. However, if you would, take a moment to look at it with me.

 What is it that God is asking of the Israelites? The “hear my voice” statement carries a meaning beyond just being able to replicate a message that has entered our ear canal. Yes, this one does carry the double sense of obedience (hear & keep).

 What do we get in return? God is a poor negotiator. Our gift for listening to his pleas to turn from death and accept life is to get exactly what he promises and more! You will be treasured among all people. You will be a kingdom of priests. You will be declared holy. We always get far more than God asks us to give.

 We are the wayward child bent on self-destruction. Our Heavenly Father pleads with us to stop killing ourselves one piece at a time. He wants to restore us to life and health and wholeness, but he cannot do it when we stuff our fingers in our ears as soon as we hear his invitation.

 “Listen to me!” God pleads with you and me. So often, we run the other way, our hands over our ears blabbering nonsense syllables. All the time we are running away from and denying our treasured status.

 The good news is that God runs really fast, faster than you or ever can. He catches us, passes us, and puts himself directly in our path, face at our level and repeats the message louder.

We dodge him! The good news is that God is persistent. He will try again. Fortunately, so will he. In fact, I would say that God will even station himself ahead of our flight path and stick out his foot to trip us, waiting for us to take our hands away from our ears to stop our fall so he can repeat his message to us again. He will never give up. Listen to him and be blessed.

Pastor Craig

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[1] Exodus 19: 5ff

Tagging

Conservative-Liberal:

These two words are getting a lot of press these days, most of it bad. Conservatives are reactionary, calling “us” back to traditional values, some of which we are more than happy to leave behind. Hear conservative, think closed minded, inflexible, harsh, lacking in grace and compassion, fundamentalist.

Liberals are clueless, calling us to jump boldly into the dark with no idea as to what is out there. Hear liberal, think groundless, lack of structure, no moorings, not based on fact, absence of rules, without reason or rational thought.

I know that each of those terms have other meanings as well, fortunately, most of them less inflammatory. However, in our current political, socio-economic, and religious context, the terms themselves are akin to racial slurs, something used to brand a person in a particular context without getting to know anything whatsoever about them.

I would like to propose a new phrase. One we all know. One we can all agree on, conservative and liberal. One that is Gospel based.

Protestant Liberality – When we use the phrase, let’s get past our idea of tithes and offerings though. Let’s use it in the context of grace, missions, being open and humble. In so doing, we make our space a place for people to ask questions. We recognize that some of those questions will have no answers. We promise that we will listen before we answer. We promise that our answer will be filled with the same grace we experienced first in Jesus Christ.

Most people are looking for a place to ask questions, a place they can rest comfortably even if they do not get all the answers, learn new questions, and still be accepted by others within the faith community. Liberality recognizes the gap between what we, humanly, can know and the reality of our God. We recognize our knowing as coming up short, that while we are fully known, in this life we cannot know fully. 

Our journey of faith takes us to the borders of knowing where we look across the gap in hopes of seeing something of God. This is what Moses experienced when he asked permission to gaze upon God’s glory, only to be granted the slightest glimpse of his Creator’s back. That gaze empowered his faith anew, connecting head, heart, and hands in ministry to the people of Israel.

Just think what might happen if we put aside all our ready-made answers for just a moment, recognizing our inability to define God as we would like and our necessity to know him as he is.

 Pastor Craig

Becoming

Experience: that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.

Franklin P. Jones

 

I am writing this short article shortly after Easter. The events surrounding Easter are believed to have followed approximately three years of intense contact with Jesus by the twelve disciples. These men had been witnesses to the miracles, they heard the teaching, they had been privileged to interpretations of the parables that many others had not fully understood, and they had seen the risen Christ.

In our times of doubt, difficulty, or despair we often find ourselves wishing we could stand in the presence of our Lord in the same way the early disciples did. We imagine how much stronger our faith would be if we could witness the same miracles. We marvel at the wisdom and boldness of Peter, John, Timothy, Paul, Silas, James, and others. However, when we read through the New Testament the lives of these men are not always what we would expect. Their lives still seem to be mixtures of death and life. There seems to have been a time when Peter and Paul may not have been on the best terms. Paul parted ways with his first missionary partner over a disagreement concerning whether John Mark should travel with them or not. Peter had doubts and moments of his legendary impulsiveness from time to time. Yes, they are indeed changed men, but they are far from perfected. They were living through that marvelous thing called experience. In the Christian walk, add in the Holy Spirit and we might even refer to it as sanctification, that process of becoming more like Christ as we journey along in faith.

It turns out that our faith journey is exactly that, a journey. Jesus repeated his call to “Follow me!” many times to those first disciples. It was not a one-time offer. It wasn’t a completed work when Matthew left his tax collecting booth, or when Peter, James, and John left their nets and their boats. Those acts of leaving where more like the one step of backing out of the driveway at the beginning of a cross country vacation. There is still a whole big, long adventure ahead of us.

 In one sense, a Christian is not something you became through a call to faith in Jesus Christ. It is something you are becoming. This becoming is a process that will take your whole life, a time filled with tremendous leaps forward, other times when you feel is if you have gone back to the beginning and are starting all over, and still other times when it seems as if you have been marching in place for a very long time. However you look at it, following Christ is the EXPERIENCE of a lifetime and for a lifetime.

Pastor Craig