At the manger. At the cross. In His Kingdom.

This is an electronic version of the Christmas card we received this year from Make Way Partners, and I thought I’d pass it on to you.   Make Way Partners is actively working to end human trafficking in places like Sudan and Romania, and they are an organization that we as a family support.  In their own words, they are “going to the most vulnerable and least protected to end human trafficking – through prevention.

Christmas [is] changing the world: latest video from Advent Conspiracy

This video is “hot off the press,” and tells the brief story of a team from Living Water International drilling a well in the jungles of Peru by hand.  Not digging a well, drilling a well by hand.  They started work on December 8, 2009 and had clean water on December 12, 2009.  Yeah!!

Wanted: a reorganization of priorities for America’s professing Christians

Perhaps I should have said “Needed” instead of “Wanted.”  What I’m referring to is the hunger¹ and thirst² so many American Christians have for political power, cultural influence, and the staying-power of Christendom in general.  I was reading this morning from The Pleasures of God by John Piper, and in a chapter about missions, Piper quotes from Patrick Johnstone’s book The Church is Bigger than You Think:

In fact, there is little evidence in the Bible, as I see it, that before the coming of our Lord, there will be a powerful “Christendom” and a worldwide dominance of Christian influence.  Rather it seems to me that Patrick Johnstone’s vision is closer to the truth:

We are being compelled to return to a much more biblical and radical position — that of being a minority in the world but not of it. . . . The church deprived of political power is free from the burden of trying to use human power to dominate and influence the world. . . . Our reference point is not territorial or church growth aggrandizement, but building a kingdom that is not of this world, yet which will fill the earth as a contrasting alternative society.  We need to return to the concept of a pilgrim Church, the church that will be hated, rejected, despised, persecuted, yet be an incisive, decisive, victorious minority which one day soon, will be ready for its heavenly Bridegroom as the perfected Bride.

1.  Evangelical Christians and American Politics.  Austin Cline, Austin’s Atheism Blog.

2.  The Christian paradox: how a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong.  Bill McKibben, Harper’s Magazine, August 2005.  I highly recommend reading this essay. McKibben’s insights are profound, well-written, and I would argue, biblical.  Here are two excerpts to whet your appetite:

The apocalyptics, however, are the lesser problem. It is another competing (though sometimes overlapping) creed, this one straight from the sprawling megachurches of the new exurbs, that frightens me most. Its deviation is less obvious precisely because it looks so much like the rest of the culture. In fact, most of what gets preached in these palaces isn’t loony at all. It is disturbingly conventional. The pastors focus relentlessly on you and your individual needs. Their goal is to service consumers—not communities but individuals: “seekers” is the term of art, people who feel the need for some spirituality in their (or their children’s) lives but who aren’t tightly bound to any particular denomination or school of thought. The result is often a kind of soft-focus, comfortable, suburban faith.

American churches, by and large, have done a pretty good job of loving the neighbor in the next pew. A pastor can spend all Sunday talking about the Rapture Index, but if his congregation is thriving you can be assured he’s spending the other six days visiting people in the hospital, counseling couples, and sitting up with grieving widows. All this human connection is important. But if the theology makes it harder to love the neighbor a little farther away—particularly the poor and the weak—then it’s a problem. And the dominant theologies of the moment do just that. They undercut Jesus, muffle his hard words, deaden his call, and in the end silence him. In fact, the soft-focus consumer gospel of the suburban megachurches is a perfect match for emergent conservative economic notions about personal responsibility instead of collective action. Privatize Social Security? Keep health care for people who can afford it? File those under “God helps those who help themselves.”

Unplanned, inefficient detours of our lives

We receive a letter every month from Desiring God, and an offer for a free CD or sometimes a book.  The letters are written by Jon Bloom, the Executive Director of Desiring God, and I really look forward to reading them.  I’m not sure how to describe them – perhaps “historical narrative of a biblical passage with deep context”?  That’s probably a lame description, but you can read the archived editions and other posts by Jon on his author page at the Desiring God blog.  I also added his page to my blogroll so I don’t have to look too hard to find it.

Getting to the point – this month’s letter was titled “Joseph: (Un)planned Detours” and it’s not on the blog yet, but I think it will be soon, and I’d encourage you to keep watching his blog page so that when it is posted there you can read the whole thing.  The Joseph he’s writing about is the husband of Mary and the earthly “father” of Jesus.  Here are the closing paragraphs of the letter:

The Holy Family’s first few years were not tranquil.  They were filled with grueling travel during the hardest part of pregnancy, a birth in worse than a barn, no steady income, an assassination attempt, two desert crossings on foot with an infant, living in a foreign country, waiting on God for guidance and provisions just in the nick of time.  It was difficult, expensive, time-consuming, career-delaying and full of uncertainity.

And it was God’s will.

The unplanned, inefficient detours of our lives are planned by God.  They are common for disciples, and they commonly don’t make sense in the moment.  But God’s ways are not our ways because our lives are about him, not about us.  He is orchestrating far more than we know in every unexpected event and delay.

So when you find yourself suddenly moving in a direction you had not planned, take heart, hold tight, and trust God’s navigation.

Holding tight and trying to trust God’s navigation, because it’s far better than mine.

The story of the thirsty – Advent Conspiracy 2009

What are YOU looking for?

These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.  For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.  If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return.  But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one.  Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.  Hebrews 11:13-16

Success is a hideous thing

Success is a hideous thing – according to Victor Hugo.  I’ve just started reading Les Misérables (unabridged, trans. from the French by Charles Wilbour), and Hugo uses the first fifty pages (Book First) to tell us about the bishop Monseigneur Myriel and his life, his approach to his calling as a bishop, and especially his selfless care for the poor.  Chapter (?) 12 deals with ambition and success, and I thought it to be profound and relevant to our day as well as his.  He’s dealing especially with the Roman Catholic Church, but what he wrote applies to Protestants/evangelicals, Orthodox, and others as well as Catholics.  In fact, I’ve personally known some “evangelicals” who fit right in with what he’s describing.  And to turn it inward, I wonder how well this has described me at different times in my life.

I’m going to quote all four paragraphs, and they aren’t exactly short.  He also uses some big words and has a challenging writing style, but it is worth working your way through it.

What was Paul (the apostle) thankful for?

I’m pretty sure Paul was thankful for lots of things.  Here’s one that he wrote about in Romans 7:21-8:2

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.  For I delight in the law of God in my inner being, but I see in my members [his body] another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.  Wretched man that I am!  Who will deliver me from this body of death?  Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.

Enter the story [this means you]

I don’t know if anyone else can relate to this, but writing original, compelling blog posts is proving difficult when I’m scrambling trying to figure out how to pay my bills and my neighbor’s bills (see previous post).  So for now, and if you’re not sharing my current economic situation, I urge you to watch this video from Living Water/Advent Conspiracy and think about helping someone whose troubles make mine look like a walk in the park!

Excuse me, Jesus, but who’s my neighbor?

I wrote about this on Facebook earlier this week and thought I’d include it here too.  What you see below are my Facebook status updates and comments, unedited.  Not a typical post, but hey, why not?

We’ve got this neighbor, 59-year old man, unemployed but trying to find work, has arthritis, out of money, hocked his car title at a pawn shop and needs between $300 – $400 to save his car. Anybody want to pitch-in and help?

As a follow-up to this thread for anyone else who’s watching this unfold, his name is Brian, and I’m going to suggest that he’s not going to be able to pay anyone back. But then Jesus said not to expect that to happen either.

We’re going to invite him to join us on Thanksgiving day for all he can eat, and even though this has been our worst economic year out of the past ten or so, we’re still going to help him keep his car.

And so I’ll ask again: anyone else want to help out?

Update to an earlier status: Our neighbor, Brian, just called to see if our church was going to be able to help him out. Told him I didn’t know yet, but a friend had heard about his plight here on facebook and donated to the cause, which brightened his day.

I also asked him to join us for Thanksgiving day dinner and he turned me down at first – said he didn’t want to impose his lifestyle on anyone or take their food away from them. I said that’s ridiculous and there will be plenty of food. He then said he hadn’t been invited to something like this for 20 years and started to get emotional…and then he finally agreed to come over.

Looking forward to it.

(If you’d like to help, let me know by commenting on this post.  If you don’t want the comment published, let me know that too.)

The incredible irony of Black Friday

Does it seem ironic to anyone else that the day after Thanksgiving is now known (in America at least) as Black Friday?  A day dedicated by many to the full expression of greed and materialism that our Christmas holiday has become.  Christmas – the holiday when we typically remember that Jesus was born.  In the fourth gospel the apostle John said this about Jesus, “In him was life, and the life was the light of men.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”  (John 1:4, 5)  This is the same Jesus whose light still shines today, even in the darkness of a land where days like Black Friday are among the “holiest” of days.  And the same Jesus who told us not to lay up treasures on earth, but in heaven.

Here’s an earth-shattering announcement: You don’t have to join in the commercialism that Christmas has become.  Watch the video again, and then decide to help someone who is far less fortunate than you are this Christmas season.  Someone, for example, who has to get their drinking water from a mudhole.

To learn more about the Advent Conspiracy, click here.

Paul in Athens; you, me and Halloween

Had a conversation yesterday with a friend about Christianity and Halloween, and what the Christian response to or involvement with Halloween should be.  In other words, should we acknowledge its legitimacy, engage in its festivities, and dress up in costumes and go door-to-door in search of free candy?  As I understood him, his reasoning for partaking in Halloween was to be involved with our culture and its people and use that as a platform for the gospel.  That – and acquiring a year’s supply of Reeses peanut butter cups!  Now that is potentially legitimate, although we should, at a minimum, ponder how far we can engage in the culture before our Christianity is compromised and we blend in so well that our pagan friends and neighbors see no difference between us and them, between our lives and their lives.

I’ll come right out and say it that my position in this discussion is that Halloween is a pagan festival (holiday, celebration, etc.) and that Christ-followers probably should not engage in its festivities, however “innocent” those festivities may seem to be.  Later in the day the thought occurred to me that when Paul was in Athens (Acts 17:16 – 34) he didn’t join in with what the Athenians were doing.  Rather, he saw that their “city was full of idols,” and “his spirit was provoked within him.”  Provoked?  Yeah, he was not happy.  And he did not join them in what they were doing.

So what did he do?

Jesus Saves from the American Dream

DWYL (Don’t Waste Your Life) has a collection of eight wallpapers such as this one that are available as free downloads.  Check them out and use them as a reminder of what your life is for.  Click here or on the picture above to go to the download site.

If there had been television in 1517

 

This comic showed up on one of our tests in The History of Western Christianity back in Bible college.  Thanks Dr. Bierma – this is classic!

30 Years as a Pastor

Today’s post from Justin Taylor at Between Two Worlds is a well-written testimony to the grace of God in one man’s life.  Click through to see a photo of Piper from 30 years ago — stay there and read the post.  30 Years Ago Today: How God Called John Piper to Become a Pastor

Hors d’oeuvres anyone?

I’m reading Peace Like a River by Leif Enger again, this time taking it slower and savoring as I read.  And it’s worthy of savoring.  Here’s a taste:

Cresting a long hill we stopped a moment while Fry [a horse] blew and stooped and clipped at the snow as though for browse.  I let go of Davy to sit straight.  I can’t describe what we saw.  Here was the whole dizzying sky bowled up over us.  We were inside the sky.  It didn’t make the stars any closer, only clearer.  They burned yellow and white, and some of them changed to blue or a cold green or orange — Swede should’ve been there, she’d have had words.  She’d have known that orange to be volcanic or forgestruck or a pinprick between our blackened world and one the color of sunsets.  I thought of God making it all, picking up handfuls of whatever material, iron and other stuff, rolling it in His fingers like nubby wheat.  The picture I had was of God taking these rough pellets by the handful and casting them gently, like a man planting.  Look at the Milky Way.  It has that pattern, doesn’t it, of having been cast there by the back-and-forward sweep of His arm?

These are for Andy

My friend Andy stopped by the blog the other day and did some reading.  Later he told me that he’d like to see some more pictures here, so these are for him.  Of course, if it’s pictures you’re after and not so much reading you could always visit the other blog, though I’m a couple months behind on updating that one.

Most of my library

“Night” by Elie Wiesel

Invested a couple hours this afternoon and read Night by Elie Wiesel.  I can’t remember if I read this book in a high school or college Literature class.  If I didn’t it should have been in the curriculum.

Night is an open door into the Holocaust through the eyes, no, through the very life of one of its survivors.  It is a perspective of that “event” I have not encountered until now.  Perhaps not many who lived through it as prisoners in concentration camps could find the words to describe their experience.  Perhaps not many wanted to.  But Wiesel has and Night is his story.  If you haven’t read it, do.

How about an excerpt?  How to choose?  To reach in and pull out a piece of one man’s experience of the darkness that is evil and place it onto a blog page.  Nevertheless, here is my selection:

;)

We need more Aquilas and Priscillas

One of these days I’m planning to write a few blog posts about ‘work’ and the biblical way to think about it.  This is not that day, though perhaps this coming winter I’ll find the time to tackle that task.  In the meantime this post will have to do.

So what do you do when you seem to have a compelling desire to be actively involved in Christian ministry and it seems that one of your spiritual gifts is in the area of teaching but God hasn’t seen fit to place you in an “official” capacity in a church or other Christian ministry?  And what if you also have a God-given entrepreneurial spirit and drive.

I suppose you could do what I’ve done and start a construction company (9 years running next month) and just recently, a website design, development, and hosting company.  Coupled with those ventures you could also start (plant) a church (which I haven’t done) or get involved in a church plant that’s only a couple years old (which I/we have done).

The more things change…nah, things don’t change

Most of Nehemiah chapter nine is a prayer of confession that’s worth reading and thinking about.

Things really haven’t changed all that much — God is still “ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love,” not forsaking his people.  And people?  “[T]hey ate and were filled and became fat and delighted themselves in [God's] great goodness.  Nevertheless, they were disobedient and rebelled against [God] and cast [his] law behind their back and killed [his] prophets, who had warned them in order to turn them back to [him], and they committed great blasphemies.”

Nah, things don’t change.

The apostle Paul, the church in Colossae, and the rest of us

Andy, our pastor, is out of town this weekend for the state swim meet and he asked me to preach in his place.  I said I would, Lord willing (!), and as far as I know I’ll be preaching page one of Colossians.  Page one in my Bible is Colossians 1:1 through 2:5, and that amounts to the “indicative” part of the letter — the part where Paul tells us “what is.”  In 2:6 he starts with a “therefore” and so begins the “imperative” part of the letter, telling us “what should be” because of “what is.”

What drew me to page one is the way that Paul seems to weave the gospel through that whole section – starting with the effect of the gospel in the lives of the believers in Colossae, then on to the heart of the gospel in the supremacy of Jesus Christ in creating all things and in saving people like you and me who were hostile towards God, and finally to the continuation of the gospel in time and the world through the proclaiming of Christ by people like Paul and so many others after him.

So I was reading through the chapter on Colossians in An Introduction to the New Testament by Don Carson, Doug Moo and Leon Morris, and it seemed to me that their summary paragraphs were worth repeating here:

Time to wake up, American Christians

Some things need to be repeated often until Jesus returns and this world as we know it comes to an end and evil is no more.  Until then, the incredible need for ministries like Make Way Partners is one of those things.  Click on the newsletter image to go to the full PDF version, read it, and then decide to make a difference before it’s too late for you and for those you could have helped.

And you know, you may not fully agree with some of the theology of the people behind Make Way Partners or other similar ministries — I don’t, and I tend to be a “truth” guy.  But the 9-year-old orphan that we’ve “adopted” and are supporting monthly isn’t very concerned about our theology.  What’s important to her at this point is that she has food to eat, a bed to sleep in, she’s no longer in danger of being killed by wild dogs while she’s sleeping on the ground or in a tree, and the likelihood of her being captured and forced into the horrors of slavery is almost gone.  Do I care about her spiritual life?  Definitely, and our family prays regularly that she will come to believe the gospel and know Jesus Christ as he is revealed in the truth of Scripture.

Jesus, who refers to himself as “the way, the truth and the life” in John 14:6, said in Matthew 25 that “he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.  For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’. . . ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’

Yeah, time to wake up.

July 2009 Make Way Partners newsletter

More of “The Pleasures of God” in creation

I finished reading chapter three of The Pleasures of God this morning while sitting in a familiar place, and the chapter is called “The Pleasure of God in His Creation.”  It’s all good, but here are some really good portions.  The italics are Piper’s emphasis, not mine.

The message of creation is this: there is a great God of glory and power and generosity behind all this awesome universe; you belong to him; he is patient with you in sustaining your rebellious life; turn and bank your hope on him and delight yourself in him, not his handiwork. Day pours forth the “speech” of that message to all that will listen in the day, speaking with blindingly bright sun and blue sky and clouds and untold shapes and colors of all things visible.  Night pours forth the “knowledge” of the same message to all who will listen at night, speaking with great dark voids and summer moons and countless stars and strange sounds and cool breezes and northern lights.  Day and night are saying one thing: God is glorious!  God is glorious!  God is glorious!

This is the most basic reason that God delights in his creation.  In creation he sees the reflection of his own glory.  This is why he is not an idolater when he has pleasure in the work of his hands.

A few pages further in he writes this about the parts of creation that we as humans aren’t even aware of yet:

This is what moves the psalmist in Psalm 148:7, “Praise the LORD you sea monsters and all deeps!”  He doesn’t even know what is in all the deeps of the sea!  So the praise of the deeps is not merely what they can testify to man.  Creation praises God by simply being what it was created to be in all its incredible variety.  And since most of the creation is beyond the awareness of mankind (in the reaches of space, and in the heights of mountains and at the bottom of the sea) it wasn’t created merely to serve purposes that have to do with us.  It was created for the enjoyment of God.

Clay pots

I am constantly amazed that the one and only sovereign God who created the universe bothers to use clay pots like you and me to help each other along the way of life.