Category: Religion

Imagine a Dangerous Life of Worship

Can you remember the first time you started reading the Bible? There were a lot of weird names and miraculous things happening and, whether you finished a single book or the entire Bible, you probably had a pretty good handle of the story because you read most of the words. Now, think about the second, third, or twentieth time you read through a book of the Bible. You began to discover things that you didn’t see the previous times. If you are involved in a bible study, others around you point out things that they saw that are new to you and vice versa. This awakening comes with the expansion of our imagination, growth that is a product of our deepening relationship with the Author of the story. Mark Labberton talks about worship that broadens our imagination in chapter nine of The Dangerous Act of Worship. True worship fires our imagination and enables us to have a more expansive view of our roles in restoring that justice that God wants for His world.

Imagination here is not just fanciful musings on what could be. Worship that brings us closer to the King is worship that fills us with God’s dreams and it leads us to look at people and events and our lives in a different way, discovering things that were not there the last time we looked, just as when we read the Bible over and over again. This process is enabled by our realization that God has placed His repentant children in a new place where we live by His grace power rather than our own contrition and energy. Our participation is ignited through prayer and scripture reading that opens our eyes to those around us. We seek their benefit while trusting in the Father for our own. As our imagination expands in this way we begin to see how God has arranged our intertwining lives such that we can contribute to a restoration of justice in their lives. Worship expands beyond our hour on Sunday to become our lifestyle.

At Saddleback last Sunday, Pastor Rick Warren said it plainly, if you don’t have a dream – a God sized dream- you’re just marking time. What’s your dream?     

The Social Gospel Revisited

On the republication of Walter Rauschenbusch’s seminal book Christianity and the Social Crisis, OpinionJournal.com reminds us that the pursuite of social justice by the Church must be balanced. Without an equivalent emphasis on personal repentance and holiness, the social gospel fell dangerously close to other movements which thought that they could perfect humankind given the appropriate circumstances.

More on Rauschenbusch:

Wiki

Rauschenbusch Center

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Immigration and the Evangelical Mindset

Here is an article I wrote for Evangelicals for Social Action (link on my blogroll for further information) regarding the current division of the Evangelical community on the topic of illegal immigration.  

Balancing the Scales on a Theology of Immigration

The Bible is used as a bludgeon and a shield, but either extreme is improper when used in this debate. Read the piece and let me know what you think.

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Monday Not Funday

Mondays are never popular with people. The weekend is over and work begins again with the promised land of Friday five long days away. For the pastor, Monday is often a day off but for a host of reasons, there is very little joy in having reached our ‘weekend’. Monday is the day on which many pastors consider leaving their post. Monday is the day on which all of our fears, concerns, and doubts come crawling out of the woodwork and infest our depleted souls. Monday is definitely not a fun day.

The vocational pastor’s focus during the week is often looking forward to the big event of the week, the worship service or services. A message must be prepared and a worship service crafted around the big idea of the sermon. While there are other pastoral duties that are assumed during the week, the big event takes most of our energy. Anticipation builds as Sunday gets closer; is the sermon ready? Has the music been selected and rehearsed? Are the video feed, the worship software presentation, and the Sunday school ready to go? Finally, Sunday arrives and the big moment comes. God’s word is preached with all the power given by the Spirit. People are moved, lives are changed, men and women are transformed and through all of the changed people the world is shaken and all of its ills are ended.

And then Monday morning arrives. The pastor sits back, sipping their coffee and wondering if their work had any effect at all. We wonder why God has called us to this position. Week after week we pour our lives into loving our flocks and seeking to infuse their lives with God’s will. Did the message or music change anything at all? Are we as men and women of God inadequate to the task? Are we going to face the same problems in our folks that we did the week before? Thoughts like these and countless others swirl through our minds, discouraging us if things are going badly and stirring doubt where things are on an upward trend. Head in hands, the pastor looks forward to Tuesday.

Ahhh, Tuesday. A new week dawns and a new message invites us back into the Word. Hope springs anew that the message this week will be the one to help this person or initiate change in that person. I can’t wait until Sunday!

Anything For Love…But I Won’t Do That

The heart of Hosea is a heart that is broken over and over again by the prophetic commands of Almighty God. How does he endure the shame of marrying the prostitute Gomer? His love for God exceeds his love for his own reputation. How does Hosea bear the horror of the Lord naming his children Jezreel, You Are Not My Beloved, and You Are Not My People? His love for God exceeds his love for his pride. When God commands him to redeem Gomer who has found herself in bondage to another man, why doesn’t he leave her there? His love for God exceeds his feelings of betrayal. Hosea places God in His proper place in his priorities and, because of this, he never denies a command of God, no matter the personal cost. Will you do the same?

Killing Me With Words

If someone is attacking your reputation and character, you come back with all guns blazing, right? Proverbs 22:1 says “A good name is more desirable than great riches; to be esteemed is better than silver or gold.”  When your good name is the subject of a smear, you should go out of your way to correct those who mention it, shouldn’t you?

Interesting questions and currently, a subject of great struggle for me. If the character assassination were limited to me personally it would be much easier to deal with but my reputation affects my church and my family as well. Its seems as though I’m letting them down when I don’t confront the incorrect stories but, at the same time, so many before me have managed to ‘turn the other cheek.’

Turning a desire for retribution away is made possible only by spiritual maturity and trust. The question I must ask myself when I feel the anger welling up at the perpetrators is where do I put my trust? Is my faith in my own abilities to correct the situation or in God’s ability to work good from bad? I pray the second but must work with diligence to control the first.

Ecclesiastes wrote (7:1) that “a good name is better than fine perfume, and the day of death better than the day of birth.”  Reading on in the passage, he explains this to mean that we learn more from hard times than from good times. This is certainly a truth but that doesn’t make it any easier. The broken parts in me still long to right the situation.

Here is a great post on reputation.

Love, Acceptance & Forgiveness Unless You’re a…

Out of Ur publishes a dilemma faced by a congregation choosing to welcome a child molester into their body or banish him to the hinterlands.  The question that swirls around this instance and the countless others that the Church faces every day is just how far Christ expects us to extend our love, acceptance, and forgiveness. But then, if we have to ask it appears that we missed the point of His life and death and life.

A profound change came over the direction of my ministry when a young homeless man became a part of church that I belonged to. He was tolerated by some, shunned by others, and loved by few. It was hinted that I devoted a little too much effort to ministering to him. Love, accept, forgive became endure, tolerate, and watch. I can envision the reception that the child molester is facing in that body.

Did Jesus give us the option to turn away from repentant sinners? Is there a sliding scale on which our sins are judged, some being acceptable and others not? The answer to both of these is no. However distasteful we find the sin, our call is to view the sinner in his new light, pushing his previous sin as far away as the east is from the west. What are those who run away going to do when they encounter this man in heaven?

 

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The Dangerous Act of Worship: The Real Battle

We’ve all heard of the ‘worship wars’ and maybe even participated in the battles. Often, the skirmishes have centered around guitars versus the organ, hymns over the praise chorus, or even robes being more godly than the polo shirt. All of this, Labberton continues in The Dangerous Act of Worship, serves as distraction from the real battle within the body, the ease with which we forget our neighbor. The fracas over our personal preferences becomes somnolent, inducing a deep sleep that avoids God’s call for His people to seek justice in the lives with which theirs intersect.

Mark laments the ease with which the Church has forgotten her vocation. We have fallen asleep to the needs of our neighbor and, as we have turned inward within our fortress sanctuaries, we have forgotten that “our suffering world longs for signs of God on the earth.” He puts this omission in sharp relief by reminding us that Jesus’ command in Mark 12:29-31

(These) commands set the agenda for lifestyles of worship. No allegiance of love is ever to be greater than our allegiance to God. In God’s being and purpose, these are not rival allegiances. Love for God comes first and leads us to love our neighbor. In fact, failing to love our neighbor throws serious doubt on whether we are loving God.

We are challenged to expand our notion of worship from that hour on Sunday morning to include every twenty four hour in which we draw breath. Worship that loves God includes love for all of His creation and Creations. If our worship is limited to the verses of How Great Thou Art without recognizing the human-greatness in God’s eyes of our neighbor, we are slumbering. Worship that experiences the heart of God feels the burden he carries for our fellow man and woman who are suffering injustice in the world He made. Only when we awaken to this, are we fully engaged in worship.

What do you think?

 

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Interracial Marriage is a Sin?

According to these guys and their horrible misappropriation of the Bible. Hey guys, can you turn to Galatians 3:26-28? What is it going to look like in heaven boys, especially at the gathering described in Revelation 7:9? Is everybody going to be separated by skin color?

Lord, forgive me a sinner….

 

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