Reflection

Know God rather than just feel His presence

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Uncomfortable but true and accurate thoughts posted by Chris Elrod earlier today:

This past weekend I was going through some old magazines and came across an interview with author Calvin Miller.  In the interview he alluded to the idea that most Christians were more interested in feeling God than really knowing God.  What floored me is that the interview was from the early 1980′s…yet his train of thought is even more relevant today than back then.  In 2011 the Church seems more fixated on “feeling the presence of God” than truly knowing God.  Church leaders seem more concerned with the worship experience on Sunday than the discipling and outreach Monday through Saturday.  Pastors seem to be spending more time worrying about creativity and relevance…than substance and depth.  In an of itself wanting to feel the the presence of God, being relevant, embracing creativity and striving for excellence are not bad things.  However, when they become the primary goal and constant priority…the Church is in danger.

I fear that we are getting people in the front door, baptized and plugged into “community”…yet never see them grow beyond spiritual infant status.  They forever suck on milk as stunted babies and never long for the solid spiritual food that the Father wants His children to desire.  They know the latest worship “hit” word-for-word…but never know the Word itself.  They can quote lines from the latest emergent guru’s book…but not a single line of Scripture from memory.  They know how to go through the motions of worship on Sunday…with hands raised upwards…but never discover that it is our eyes that should be focused to the Heavens.  They learn how to embrace the cultural relevance of this world…but the not the ability to flee from the things of this world in their own hearts.

True church is not solely about reaching people far from God or discipling those that have already come to Him.  True church is both…with equal importance.  It doesn’t mean that every church leader is called to reaching and discipling…but it does mean a healthy church has leaders that can guide people through both aspects.  It is great that people can feel God in churches throughout America each weekend…but if we as church leaders don’t teach them how to truly know God…the Church as we know it…is doomed.

This is just as relevant for the church here in the UK as it is for the church in the USA.

Wishing you a blessed Christmas….

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Shepherds-in-the-field

The last couple of months seem to have gone by as a bit of a blur, not much time to do anything outside of work, including, unfortunately, posting here on the Deliberate Disciple!  I have been away a few times, and when I have been at home I have found myself working long hours.  On top of everything, the recent snow has meant that most of the seasonal festivities at our church have been cancelled or postponed.

As a result, I find myself on Christmas Eve not feeling very Christmasy.  So I thought I would wish you all a blessed Christmas and take some time to allow myself to focus on this annual celebration of the incarnation of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus, the Christ.

I was in Newcastle shopping a few weekends ago and heard the Salvation Army Band playing Christmas carols – Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Joy to the World, O Come All Ye Faithful – and found myself in tears of wonder at the glory of God shown through the birth of His son!

The thing is, and this is what impacted me during my consumer-fest that Saturday afternoon, I think we get Christmas all wrong.  We spend so much time getting ready to celebrate, sorting out the party, that we miss the awe and wonder of the Christmas season.  We get things back-to-front.  We party at Christmas and we get all solemn and sad at Easter.

But think about it.

At Easter, we should be reflective, but isn’t it also a time when we should celebrate.  After all, Jesus died and rose again to give us life for eternity.  If that isn’t something to celebrate then I don’t know what is….

And yes, we should celebrate Christmas, but most of all we should worship and be in awe at what God has done for us in Jesus.

Light of Light.  King of Kings.

Becoming like you and me.

Word made flesh.

Emmanuel.  God with us. 

How wonderful is that?  No, literally, how full of wonder are you when you celebrate Jesus’ birthday?

Today is the day to get excited again about the true impact of Christmas, not just for now or this year but for eternity, and not just for you and yours but for all who believe.

Do you feel it?  Does it make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up?  Because it should!

“Joy to the world, the Lord is come.  Let earth receive her King.  Let every heart prepare Him room.  And Heaven and nature sing. And Heaven and nature sing.  And Heaven, and Heaven, and nature sing”.

Wake up and take notice of the birth of the King of Eternity who came in human form to die so you might live through Him.

That is incredible.  Unbelievable love.

Worthy of glory and thanks.

Worthy of our full attention.

Worthy of our worship.

So please be blessed this Christmas.  Enjoy the celebration and join in the party.  But don’t forget to focus on Jesus and worship Him with true awe and wonder.  He deserves it.

Bless you and yours.

Bored in church? It could be good for you….

/ Martin / 2 Comments

Tallis2

Great article by David Fitch on his Reclaiming the Mission blog about finding space in our busy lives to meet with God:

Recently, I was meeting in the corner booth (of the local McDonald’s) with the men in my triad (spiritual formation group) and we were talking about our Sunday morning gathering. I said “one of the best things our gathering can do for people is bore the hell out of em.” Sorry if this seems counter intuitive but I nonetheless believe it is true – literally true. Let me explain……

It is stunning to me how many many people I encounter in a month who cannot even acquire even a modicum of mind space cleared of societal clutter to meet God.  We live in a society where God is being organized out of our life experience (and this is most certainly true of our young people). If we don’t have the means to discipline our lives from societal noise, real living with God, listening and responding to his voice is lost from our horizon. God becomes an item to believe, an obligation to take care alongside the many others. And then, and I am dead serious here, other demons take over our lives. Our loneliness/our emptiness becomes filled by multivarious forms of fake pornogaphic substitutes. Demons take over. I see it everywhere.

In the midst of this, sometimes the best place (the only place) I can point people to is the gathering on Sunday morning. Go to the gathering. Not to get pumped up and inspired. Not to take some notes on the three things you can do to improve your Christian life. NO! Go to the gathering to shut down from all the noise – to submit yourself to Christ – the practice of confession – the listening to the Word – the submission to the receiving of the gift for life at the Table – to then once you have seen God again, praise Him as the one true source of your life in Jesus Christ……

The challenge at Advent is not to have a show that will entertain everyone into romanticizing Jesus….Instead, the challenge at Advent is to learn how to wait for Him. Learn patience and wait.

I like this – and think there is a wonderful truth in it that we need to hear!

Slow down

Make space

Be still

The problem is not that we don’t have enough time but that we don’t have the right priorities.

We are so busy, and through our busy-ness we want God to bless us….and yet what He deserves is our attention and our obedience!

If God is distant and low on your ‘To Do’ list at the moment, then maybe a good place to find Him anew is by deliberately standing back during your Sunday morning services this Advent – be silent – and just bask in the atmosphere as a way of finding Him near and close at hand.

Emmanuel – God really is with you – all you have to do is create some space to find Him.

How about being bored and having a go?  In the long term you will be glad you did…and it might end up being good for you 🙂

Read the full article here.

 

Why, God, Why? Suffering & God’s Glory

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Suffering_jesus

Encouraging thoughts from Jeremy Berg on the glorifying of God through suffering:

When bad things happen in this world, and unjust suffering befalls the innocent, we often jump to the ‘Why’ question first.  The disciples lived in a world where it was popular to believe that disease, birth defects, and other forms of suffering were punishment for sin — either the person suffering or his parents.

Today, many assume the same thing: This suffering must somehow be God’s punishment. But this is not the kind of God revealed to us in Jesus Christ.  In this story, Jesus is asked why this man is blind – why, why, why?  Good question, yes; but wrong focus as far as Jesus is concerned.

Jesus doesn’t answer the ‘why’ question.  He instead focuses on what possible good, if any, can be made of this unfortunate situation.  The Bible teaches a different world view than the one of Karma or angry vindictive gods sending disease to punish sin……

We can bring … much glory to God when … in the crucible of suffering and pain, we continue to trust God and commend ourselves to his mercy.  For we serve a God whose greatest moment of glory and deepest display of love came during the most horrific moment of suffering of all — the Cross.

For those who are currently in the dark place of pain and suffering, remember that’s where God is able to meet us most powerfully and intimately.

He posts a great quote from Douglas John Hall which is worth repeating:

“The theology of Bethlehem and Golgotha—that is, of the enfleshment and the cross-bearing of the divine Word—directs us from the lonely and morbid contemplation of our own real suffering to the suffering of God in solidarity with us. Because God is “with us,” our suffering, though abysmally real, is given both a new perspective and a new meaning—and the prospect of transformation. Not through power but through participation; not through might but through self-emptying, “weak” love is the burden of human suffering engaged by the God of this faith tradition. Engaged is, I think, the right word. It implies that God meets, takes on, takes into God’s own being, the burden of our suffering, not by a show of force which could destroy the sinner with the sin, but by assuming a solidary responsibility for the contradictory and confused admixture that is our life” (God & Human Suffering: An Exercise in the Theology of the Cross, 113).

I love the thought that transformation of character takes place because God ‘engages’ with us in our suffering – how wonderful is that!

Read Jeremy’s full article here

Photo by Thomas Quine

Mark Sayers: God’s subversive cell – the family

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Brilliant reflection by Mark Sayers:

What is uncool? Families! Nothing is as Unhip as a Honda Odyssey. Yet strangely despite our misgivings about family, the bible positions the family against the power of Empires and Nations as a subversive cell of change, a small grouping that contains the seeds of God’s redemptive action in the world.

I love the idea of the family as a subversive cell for God – making us realise that everything is not about us, and being the catalyst for change in a culture and/ or community.  If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense because so often broken communities are preceded or accompanied by an attack on the family, or the breaking up of family units into disparate, isolated individuals trying to get by on their own.

Dismantling the ‘cathedral of the self’

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Durham_cathedral_inside

In a recent post on his blog, ‘The Flaying of the Missional Church Upon The Cathedrals of the Self‘, Mark Sayers’ leaves a challenge to the missional church movement, namely:

The church moves into the cafe, the pub, the home, and the sporting club in the name of mission and as a protest against attractional concepts of Church. Yet the individual sense of entitlement is never truly challenged, there will be much focus on the immanent Jesus who is our friend, yet little emphasis on the transcendent ‘otherness’ of God who reminds us of our falleness and cosmic smallness. The huge danger is that whilst the incarnational, missional approach rejects the idea of the medieval cathedral, the cathedral of the self is never truly dismantled.

As he explains earlier in the post:

The individual now operates as a kind of personal cathedral. Social media arms and aids the growing sense of entitlement in the contemporary therapeutic self. The individual creates a facade that will shock and awe. An exterior that will garner respect and acknowledgement. If the medieval cathedral was an attempt to connect with a palpable sense of the transcendent, the contemporary self attempts also attempts to create a sense of transcendence through the correct assemblage of consumer experiences.
The difference between this and the medieval vision is that the contemporary cathedral of the self is religion free, instead it seeks to eek out transcendence in what David Brooks calls a ‘low-ceilinged world’. Instead of plainchant, stained glass windows and the drama of the liturgy, the modern self attempt to find transcendence in budgets breaks on the beach in Thailand, 3D movies, killer Ipad apps, and in the torque of a SUV.
The cathedrals of the 21st century self like their medieval counterparts demand that you come to them. They demand to be taken seriously. They insist on being the only show in town. Therein lies the danger for the missional church. The missional church which attempts to incarnate, which tries to ‘go to’; can find itself shifting from an attractional mode of church, to becoming enslaved to an attractional view of the self. Incarnation can quickly degenerate into syncretism for the missional operator who is unaware of the cathedral of the self.
Many missional leaders who have critiqued the therapeutic and individualist tendencies of the contemporary church growth movement, can easily and naively find themselves serving an even more pernicious expression of the therapeutic self as Church is completely taken to and rearranged around the habits, locales, tastes and wants of the individual in the name of incarnational mission.

This is well observed and to the point – just because a congregation has moved out into community and no longer meets in a church building doesn’t mean that they have moved away from an attractional construct of church.  They might consider themselves ‘incarnate’, meeting together amongst the people group that they feel called to reach, and yet still live ‘enslaved to the attractional view of the self’ because they haven’t come to terms with the transcendent otherness of God, the King who should be feared and obeyed above all else, and truly recognised their eternal dependence upon Him rather than on disposable and transitory, worldly pleasures.

I think this is a real problem for the church in its contemporary context – or should I make it more personal and admit that it is a real problem for me in my personal context.  Is Jesus really Lord and King of every area of my life?  Have I truly experienced first hand the fear of God that is the beginning of wisdom (Ps 111:10)?

I have just been watching the first of the Francis Chan BASIC series – amazingly entitled ‘Fear God’.  I intend to review it more fully over the next few days, but it has really hit home to me how much I need to get to a proper understanding of the fear of God – and put my understanding of the ‘immanent Jesus who is my friend’ into it’s correct context.

Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost in their book ReJesus encourage the viewing of discipleship from a Hebraic perspective, focussing on the concepts of orthodoxy, orthopraxy and orthopathy – right thinking, right acting and right feeling.  It occurs to me now upon reflection, and after reading Mark’s post, that none of these adequately incorporate our response and attitude towards the holiness of God.  Maybe another should be added – how about ‘orthodikasy’ (yep, I just made it up but it sort of works) – which I will define as our ‘right standing’ before God.  I think this would complement the Hirsch-Frost Hebraic framework – and acknowledges the need for a proper understanding of the otherness of God in the missional context.