Learning to Kneel-One

Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker;*

imageIf you have ever paddled the quiet waters of a remote lake, gently placing the blades into the water so as not to churn the stillness around you…

If you have ever chanced upon the grandeur of a mountain vista or a verdant valley or the deep crimson of a desert sunset and found yourself quietly absorbing the beauty…

If you have ever held a newborn, warm and taking his first few breaths, and had no words to utter…

… you are familiar with the feelings that overtake you as you truly enter the presence of the Living God.

Many a sanctuary this coming Sunday will be filled, not with awful, prayerful silence overwhelmed by the presence of God, but the noise of a hundred casual conversations that grow slowly louder as more of the brethren enter the room. Bibles will remain closed, guitars will be tuned, and children will play.

As if God will appear at the appointed hour, like the train from Bakersfield, and all we need to do is to be there to meet Him.

Reverence is the first lesson in learning to kneel. This requires a change of attitude and a soul attuned to the Omnipresent God rather than the culturally popular Compartmentalized God. My next post will begin here, unpacking the twin threads of omnipresence and reverence and noting how a heightened awareness of both can radically change our times of worship. This coming Sunday however, enter your sanctuary or meeting room and try sitting quietly, making yourself aware of His enveloping presence. Pray for the service. Pray for the visiting family sitting behind you. Pray a Psalm. See if others follow your lead as the moments tick by toward the first notes of a song. See if your preparation hasn’t brought minutely closer to the throne.

Grace and peace to you.

*Psalm 95:6

image Joshua Conley

Psalm 106 – How Quickly

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But they soon forgot what he had done and did not wait for his plan to unfold.

In the desert they gave in to their craving; in the wilderness they put God to the test. (Ps 106:13-14)

To read the Old Testament is to thumb through a catalog of mankind’s many failures. As much a diary as it is a mirror, the pages are rife with grotesque and subtle reminders of our own tendencies. In the two psalms that conclude Book IV of the psalter, the psalmists rehearse Israel’s repeated incidents of glorifying and celebrating God for his mighty deeds, followed by a meteoric descent into the waters of the Lethe.

Psalms 105 and 106 must be read together to gain the full impact of the psalmist’s purpose. Where 105 catalogs God’s unending faithfulness to the people who are called by His name, 106 reminds hearers of the incessant unfaithfulness. The juxtaposition of the two is jarring, and we cannot help but marvel at His Love and Israel’s failure.

And the myriad failures in our own lives.

Many times he delivered them, but they were bent on rebellion and they wasted away in their sin. (v43)

The Christian has little excuse for continued purposeful rebellion. The Spirit serves in His role as paraclete in countless ways, one being the early warning when our tendency toward corruption threatens to affect our behavior. We can avoid repeating the history of our family line by becoming more aware and responsive to His whispers, warning us off of unglorifying speech, thoughts and behaviors.

Save us, Lord our God, and gather us from the nations, that we may give thanks to your holy name and glory in your praise. (v47)

Save us, Lord our God, from ourselves and our bent toward failing you. Let us give thanks and praise for your redemption and your power to live out the new creation you’ve begun in us.

Grace and peace to you.

image DaveKav

Follow.Me

One.Life by Scot McKnight

imageThe time has come.

The kingdom of God has come near.

Repent and believe the good news!

Christians are well known for substituting legalism and activity for biblical discipleship of the kind that demands an investment of nothing less than your entire life. McKnight brings his always practical insight to bear on the question of what it should actually look like to walk in the Kingdom of Heaven that Christ announced.

At the core of One.Life is the notion of being all in. That is, life in Christ’s kingdom demands the full commitment of your one life. It was never intended to be a part-time or compartmentalized pursuit. To fully experience the full depth and breadth of the Spirit-enabled kingdom you must go beyond sampling it and make it your complete reality.

Scot touches on a wide variety of beliefs, thoughts and behaviors that generally form the contours of the Christian life, examining each in a kingdom light. In some ways, the book is The Jesus Creed part two. Where that volume helped us to flesh out what it meant to love God above all and love our neighbors as ourselves, One.Life challenges every area of life that we might be tempted to separate as outside of the kingdom.

One.Life is eminently practical on nearly every page. Professor McKnight has a lifetime of experience from which to share examples and the reader will find a variety of lives that mirror their own experiences from which lessons can be extracted. “…the Kingdom.Life only happens when you give yourself (your One.Life) to Jesus, and that means also to His kingdom dream and to those who are in that kingdom dream already.”

One.Life at Zondervan

I’m grateful to Zondervan who provided this copy for review.

Psalm 105–Don’t Know Much About History

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Give thanks to the Lord, call on his name; make known among the nations what he has done.

Sing to Him, sing praise to Him; tell of all his wonderful acts. (Psalm 105:1-2)

The awe of the sovereign God of the universe is sufficient inspiration to invite the totality of our worship. He is the God of all creation, the giver of life and the sustainer of souls. Worship-worth/ship-should be the natural relationship between created and Creator.

Then the mind gets in the way…

The brain tells the heart to justify the worship. Give me a reason, it says. The psalmist knows this tendency well. To call Israel to worship he rehearses the glory of Yahweh’s interactions with His people.. Glory in his holy name…Remember the wonders he has done, his miracles, and the judgments he pronounced.

He remembers his covenant forever..He confirmed it to Jacob as a decree

They wandered from nation to nation…He allowed no one to oppress them

Have you spent the time allowing God to remind you of your history together? The wonders that He has worked in your life, the trials he has sustained you through, the love He blankets you with. The act of rehearsing your history may be a personal motivation that deepens your worship to depths you have yet to experience.

Praise the Lord. (v45)

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23 Nuggets

The Little Red Book of Wisdom by Mark DeMoss

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In a compact volume that begs to be reread and handed out to everyone you know, author Mark DeMoss collects twenty-three chapters of proverbial wisdom applicable to anyone with enough discipline to apply it. DeMoss highlights his own experiences but the lessons learned at the side of his father and through the lives of others form the fabric that knits it all together. This is a book you will give to your son or daughter, your associates while keeping one copy for yourself close by for regular refreshers. This would be an excellent companion to P.M. Forni’s Choosing Civility.

So many books in this category (Business and Economics) purport to teach wisdom but, more often than not, they disappoint. The critical difference between these and The Little Red Book of Wisdom is a lack of clear integrity. This is not to say that other business authors lack integrity but their focus on profit, growth and self-advancement shadow their wisdom. DeMoss approaches life differently, in the same vein as Truett Cathy, and he places God and Christian-rooted ethics first. The lessons that emerge from his experience can then be traced back to a singular source of truth.

While there are no chapters that you will be tempted to skip, there are many standouts in the book’s pages. Turning nearly to the end, I found the chapter having to do with deathbed regrets especially poignant. Mark points out the advantage of thinking early in life to avoid the regrets later in life that arise from unwise choices in youth. If my son can benefit from a single chapter, I hope it is this one as his whole life unfolds ahead of him.

Savor this book. You can read it quickly in a couple sittings but you will miss the benefits that come from letting his thoughts sink in and bang around a bit. Much like the book of Proverbs he references so often, small sips of wisdom are all the Spirit needs to embed in your character in order for your integrity to be polished and put on display for the world to see.

Thomas Nelson – The Little Red Book of Wisdom

I am grateful to Thomas Nelson for supplying this copy for review.

Psalm 104–The Beams of His Upper Chamber

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He wraps himself in light as with a garment; he stretches out the heavens like a tent and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters. (Psalm 104:2-3)

Feeling the rays of the sun upon our face is one of the simple joys we take for granted. The warmth that brings rejuvenation, a reminder that we are alive. It relaxes us and reminds us of our toil while inhabiting this mortal coil.

The fragility of our skin in the sun’s rays is also a reminder of the source of those rays. We cannot stay long in even the mildest weather as the unseen wavelengths do their work on us. As the beams of His upper chambers strike us our façade, no matter how thick, we are reminded of how His holiness envelopes us. We cannot hide our failings in the light and we are brought to confession and repentance.

Bathe in the light.

Grace and peace to you.

image Roger Foo

Psalm 103–So Great Is His Love

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The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love. (Ps 103:8)

Of all of the great promises in Scripture, this stands out for those who only see God in terms of His wrath. For many within His people and many more who still stand apart, the image of the Holy Father is not one of love, but one of a God of vengeance, sweeping His eyes east and west watching for any infraction that might be an opportunity to visit retribution upon their heads.

While we are wrong to discount His anger at the ways in which we treat one another upon His creation, we also err when we see His holiness only in terms of righteous wrath. God is patient, demanding holiness, but teaching rather than terminating. When you live with the constant fear of failure and its outcome, the fruit of joy is never harvested in your life. Many Christians have followed this path, living their entire lives with a very narrow understanding of God’s character.

For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. (vv 11-12)

This unmatched, vast and measureless forgiveness is one of the prime character traits of God. Far from the hair-trigger vengeful God of lore, He desires a loving relationship rooted in love much more. When we look to the cross, we don’t see charges waiting to held against us, we see a fresh start that is refreshed by our prayers of repentance and our journey toward greater and greater holiness.

Praise the Lord, all his works everywhere in his dominion.

Praise the Lord, O my soul. (v22) 

Grace and peace to you.

image Ministerios Cash Luna

Fan or Follower?

Not a Fan by Kyle Idleman

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As a fan of the Colorado Rockies, I’ve learned to live with the feast and famine cycle of the team. When things are going well for the team, as they do for varying lengths of time, there’s nothing better than a game on the radio while working in the garden. On the other hand, as the Rox endure one of their all-too-frequent slumps, the ease with which I can go days without a thought about the team makes me wonder why I invested so much time in them in the first place. Fans come and go.

When author Kyle Idleman throws down the challenge-fan or follower-he sets our sights on something much more significant, Jesus Christ. One who defines the relationship with Him as one of being a fan finds that Jesus is great when things are going well. When life turns difficult, the relationship becomes much more tenuous. For the fan, turning to other sources for answers, comfort and guidance is easy. They’ll get back to Him when everything turns around.

For the follower, there is no option.

The follower sees the relationship in a much different way than the fan. Good times or bad, Jesus is their shepherd and all of their trust is vested in Him. Follower, Idleman rightly teaches, is the only correct attitude when it comes to Jesus, though he acknowledges that our churches are filled with fans. Through the pages of Not a Fan, he walks the reader through the nature of a biblical relationship with Christ, one in which He is Lord more than friend, Shepherd more than guidance counselor.

Idleman does an excellent job of providing the necessary reflective tools to enable the reader to judge the nature of their relationship with Christ. In chapters dealing with legalism, lack of personal relationship, commitment or the lack thereof, etc., he brings the reader face to face with the areas which tend to plague modern Christianity. Throughout, you are encouraged to DTR (define the relationship). Only when you have done so can you effectively understand the invitation to become a follower and all that that means that follows.

Not a Fan is a much-needed book in the Church today. Though there is a small-group or Sunday school curriculum associated with the book, I encourage individual believers to approach the book on their own first. Allow the Spirit to illuminate the specifics of your relationship with Christ in the quiet, free from the distraction of how He is influencing others in the group or class.

I’m grateful to Zondervan who provided this copy for review.

Not a Fan – Zondervan

www.notafan.com

Opening New Mission Fields

Damaris Zehner, carrying on Michael Spencer’s Internet Monk blog, wrote this about new mission opportunities…

Have you ever thought you might have a calling to missions?  I have a suggestion for you.

I won’t try to convince you that this new field is more deserving or better or more desperate than a hundred others.  All mission fields are important.  People might get competitive about missions, but how can God compete with himself?  He calls different people to different jobs, and it could be that one of you might find your calling here.

“Here” is in rural and small-town America.  But don’t come to do vacation Bible school or build a picnic shelter or even start a church.

Most small towns have a church and VBS, and we can build our own picnic shelter.  What we need is a grocery store.  A doctor’s office.  A hardware store.  A co-op to package and sell locally grown produce.  We need the necessities of life and meaningful employment in a place that feels like home.

 

My family and I live outside a town of a thousand people in western Indiana.  A hundred years ago our town still had a thousand people, but it also had a theater, a grocery store, a general store, two hotels, a high school, an elementary school, a grain terminal, a Carnegie library, and a hardware store.  The last four remain.  A few years ago the state tried to shut down the little library, but our petition drive was at least temporarily effective.  The grain terminal will stay in business, I guess, and so will the elementary school – although several nearby have shut and some children now spend an hour each way on the bus.  But our wonderful hardware store, that smells of old wood and nails and oil and paint, with the window display of 19th-century implements and the mannequin legs sticking out of the claw-footed bathtub – it may close when the proprietor gets old.

Read the entire post..

Psalm 102–Contrast

imageMy days are like the evening shadow; I wither away like grass.

But you, Lord, sit enthroned forever; your renown endures through all generations. Ps 102:11-12

Contrast; an easy concept to define and understand. Placing one thing aside another so that the differences become apparent. As the psalter continually reminds us, no greater contrast exists than the gulf between God and man.

Man…created in the very image of God, privileged to be imbued with His Spirit and yet starkly different. Given domain over the Earth as caretakers of creation, humanity aspires to go beyond, to grasp the divinity that belongs only to the Creator. Brokenness of character marks our souls forever.

In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands.

They will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like a garment. (vv 25-26)

We lament our condition, fragile and brief as it is in contrast to the eternal nature of God. Life passes by in an instant, sometimes filled with joy while other moments are marked by despair. Permanence is sought and found only in one place, at the base of the throne of God. Our quest for eternity is satisfied only here, hand and hand with the Creator of all.

Grace and peace to you.

image .indigo.