From the Message Bible
Ezekiel 20: 13-17 "'But Israel rebelled against me in the desert. They didn't follow my statutes. They despised my laws for living well and obediently in the ways I had set out. And they totally desecrated my holy Sabbaths. I seriously considered unleashing my anger on them right there in the desert. But I thought better of it and acted out of who I was, not by what I felt, so that I might be honored and not blasphemed by the nations who had seen me bring them out. But I did lift my hand in a solemn oath there in the desert and promise them that I would not bring them into the country flowing with milk and honey that I had chosen for them, that jewel among all lands. I canceled my promise because they despised my laws for living obediently, wouldn't follow my statutes, and went ahead and desecrated my holy Sabbaths. They preferred living by their no-god idols. But I didn't go all the way: I didn't wipe them out, didn't finish them off in the desert.
When I read this passage the other day I had to read it again, then again, then again! God actually said, "But, I thought better of it..." HUH??? I understood that God wanted to squash Israel for their rebellion. He wanted to wipe them out, finish them off in the desert! They were bowing down to false Gods and showing some serious disrespect for God who had given them everything, but He thought better of it....WHY? Two reasons that really smacked me in the head.
Firstly, because he "acted out of who I was, not by what I felt". Who HE was, not what HE felt!! Holy Cow! You mean we shouldn't act on our emotions? We should stay in touch with who we are as Christians and stick to our Christian principles? Well, that sounds practically impossible, but in Christ anything is possible right? Right!
Secondly, God also didn't want HIS NAME to be tarnished. He wanted to be honored and not blasphemed by other nations.This is a great piece of advice! It occurred to me that when a brother or a sister in Christ turns their back on me, hurts me or my family and I want to wipe them out or I want to 'unleash my anger on them' just as God wanted to do, I should think better of it. Not for their good, but for my own and all the other people that are watching....and believe me they are watching!!
I should protect my witness by not letting go of angry words or by being mean spirited and in doing so I will be protecting my name as.......Christian! In doing so, the name Christian will be something to uphold and hopefully be respected, not mocked or laughed at.
Finally, God is awesome and this is yet another passage that has helped me deal with my feelings about people who have kicked me to the curb! Praise God that he is so loving with his wisdom and that he has given us the Holy Spirit to help us make it when we don't have the strength to make it on our own.
In Christ,
The Wife of A Pastor
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
The Urge to Follow Jesus
As I have stated I am reading through Bill Hull’s “The Complete Book of Discipleship”. He challenged my thinking in this section and I’m interested in what you think.
“First, if you don’t feel the urge to follow and become like Jesus, God isn’t at work in you. And if God isn’t at work in you, he’s not in you. You’ll know he’s at work and in you when he moves your will, and a moved person will always act. You can respond to God’s call only when he gives you the will to do so. When you hear the words of Jesus, “Follow me,” and the urge to obey rises up within you, then you can be assured that God is at work.
A practical point should be noted here. As a leader, when you call people to follow Jesus, don’t fret over those who say no. Far too many professing Christian have decided not to follow Jesus. They make this choice either because they never repented and turned to Christ in the first place or because they’ve been misled and think of discipleship as optional.”
Several statements really jump out at me, “a moved person will always act” and at the end when he is talking about Christians being mislead to think discipleship is “optional”.
Discipleship has been on my heart for some time now and I think in the church we have greatly missed this boat. I especially have been burdened since becoming a pastor, because I see evidence of it. In our services it seem the focus is on us and not on Christ. In our lives we are falling further away from the call to holiness, to be Christ like, to live our faith. This is all falls back on discipleship.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer said this “Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ” Bonhoeffer also said “Believing in Christ starts with self-denial, then answering his calling. That’s what it means to take up our cross. This journey of following Christ as his disciple is a lifelong one. Anything less is a Christless Christianity. Without the reality of following Jesus, Christianity is just a religious philosophy.”
-ps
“First, if you don’t feel the urge to follow and become like Jesus, God isn’t at work in you. And if God isn’t at work in you, he’s not in you. You’ll know he’s at work and in you when he moves your will, and a moved person will always act. You can respond to God’s call only when he gives you the will to do so. When you hear the words of Jesus, “Follow me,” and the urge to obey rises up within you, then you can be assured that God is at work.
A practical point should be noted here. As a leader, when you call people to follow Jesus, don’t fret over those who say no. Far too many professing Christian have decided not to follow Jesus. They make this choice either because they never repented and turned to Christ in the first place or because they’ve been misled and think of discipleship as optional.”
Several statements really jump out at me, “a moved person will always act” and at the end when he is talking about Christians being mislead to think discipleship is “optional”.
Discipleship has been on my heart for some time now and I think in the church we have greatly missed this boat. I especially have been burdened since becoming a pastor, because I see evidence of it. In our services it seem the focus is on us and not on Christ. In our lives we are falling further away from the call to holiness, to be Christ like, to live our faith. This is all falls back on discipleship.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer said this “Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ” Bonhoeffer also said “Believing in Christ starts with self-denial, then answering his calling. That’s what it means to take up our cross. This journey of following Christ as his disciple is a lifelong one. Anything less is a Christless Christianity. Without the reality of following Jesus, Christianity is just a religious philosophy.”
-ps
Friday, July 4, 2008
Independence Day
Today is Independence Day. The Fourth of July in America has been and still is a very special day for us as a nation. It is the day we celebrate our Independence from Britain, we were no longer a 'colony', but a free nation. We choose to govern ourselves and we fought a long and bloody war to gain that freedom. Freedom came at a great price then and it still carries the same price tag, blood. Through the centuries our nation has had to defend our right to be free. We have fought for the freedom of others and we have even fought ourselves. Even today our young troops are fighting for freedom in a far away land. Someone always wants to take freedom away. Islamic forces want us to live and worship the way they believe to be best. Environmentalists want us to live and eat the way they believe is right. The list goes on and one.
Everywhere I turn it seems someone is after the freedom we posses. In my faith there are forces that also want to take away my freedom and enslave us. Satan the age old enemy of God wants me to live as a slave to my sin. He would love nothing more than for me to give up and just give in. In Romans 6 says I am dead to sin and alive in Christ. Paul also tells me the life I live I am to live by the spirit and not by the law. I am to live empowered by the dwelling of the Holy Spirit. I died with Christ and I will rise with Him in life. I have freedom, freedom from the bonds of sin, if I offer myself up to God, if I surrender control to the spirit. At first glance this too would seem to be a form of slavery, but in reality it is the ultimate freedom. Sin so dominates our lives we don't even realize it at times. Everything I see, think, feel is off the mark, just enough. I have an antenna on my roof that works by line of sight and the receiver is a mile away. If my antenna is off just an eighth of an inch, it would miss the receiver by a hundred feet. Even if we are off by a little in our lives, we miss God by a lot. So we need someone to line us up, to point the way. Jesus does just that, he lines us up and keeps us straight, if I let him. Once we are connected he changes us, he transforms us from the way we were to the way we will be, but we need to be connected. Freedom is in the change, God frees us from our former selves. He gives a new freedom from the burden of sin.
Freedom has a price and Christ paid the price for us. He shed his own blood so that we might have freedom from the bondage of sin. So this Fourth of July think about the freedom we have and give thanks to our Lord.
-ps
Thursday, July 3, 2008
New Ideas
I'm reading a book titled "The Complete Book of Discipleship", by Bill Hull. So far the book has been a very interest read and I love how he has gone back in history to see 'discipleship' has grown and evolved over the years. Being a history buff or a 'context' guy, the more I understand the past of something the better I grasp the concepts presented. He is a new idea I read. A young pastor looking at the church he was part of realized it needed a boost. It needed a new breath of life, it had grown cold and lacked zeal. So here is what he came up with:
- To encourage a more extensive use of the Word of God, it should be read and discussed in the collegia pietatis or small group.
- To encourage members to read the Scripture privately.
- To read books of the Bible from start to finish so they could be understood the way they were written.
- To conduct one's small group much like the Scripture instructed in 1 Corinthians 14:26-40.
- To minister to one another as believer-priest.
- To hold each other accountable to live out the truth of God's Word with integrity.
- To help each other keep their commitments to God.
- To conduct themselves well, even among those they disagreed with.
This young pastor name is Philip Spener and he lived from 1635-1705. He helped bring about reform in the Lutheran Church which after a hundred years after Luther, which had grown in orthodoxy, cold, detached, in need of resuscitation. You see there isn't anything new, Solomon was right. This list is still needed today.
-ps
Sermon: A Changed Heart Mark 7:1-23
We have finished our VBS and what a challenging week it has been. We learned about “God’s unshakeable truth”. The motto for the week was ‘know the truth, speak the truth, and live the truth”. The kids learned it was important to know the truth, but it was also important to speak it and to live it.
It’s not enough to know the truth, there has to be action behind the truth. Truth needs to be played out in front of the world around us. Truth needs to seen and heard. But the only way that can happen is by having a changed heart. Let’s read Mark 7:1-23
Jesus has just feed the five thousand; he has healed the sick, walked on water, and set the captives free. People are talking about him everywhere and he has gained the attention of the religious leaders of his day. In fact we see they have sent out a party ‘to check things out’. The first thing the leaders observe is the disciples not washing their hands before eating. In Jesus’ day, there was an elaborate ceremony before eating.
These Jewish rituals where performed before each meal. Devout Jews would perform a short ceremony, washing their hands and arms in a specific way. The disciples did not have dirty hands, but they were simply not carrying out this traditional cleansing. Jesus understood exactly what they where accusing him of and it was not following tradition. The cleansing wasn’t in scripture it was tradition. So Jesus uncovers this entire line of thought and he challenges them on this because he knew where their hearts were, their hearts were in the traditions they followed and not in God.
Jesus accuses them of hypocrisy in v.7. They are saying they worship God, but in fact they are worshiping rules made by men. Hypocrisy can be defined as pretending to be something you are not and have no intention of being. Jesus called the Pharisees hypocrites because they worshiped God for the wrong reasons. Their worship was not motivated by love but by a desire to attain profit, to appear holy, and to increase their status.
We can become hypocrites when we pay more attention to reputation than to character, or carefully follow certain religious practices while allowing our hearts to remain distant from God, and lastly anytime we over emphasize others' sins, by emphasizing our own “virtues”.
In fact the Pharisee’s and zealot religious followers had used the excuse of giving to God to get out of their obligation to care for their own parents. They thought it was more important to put money in the Temple treasury than to help their needy mothers and fathers!
Jesus is identifying the real problem; the Pharisees and religious leaders had a ‘heart condition’. It’s not what goes into a man that makes him unclean, but what come out from his heart that makes him unclean, v.20-21.
Today
Looking at this passage I think it is easy to see, even today the church has a ‘heart condition.’ We have become so locked on to our traditions, our ‘Christian Culture” we have lost our ability to influence the culture around us. It has become ‘good enough’ to listen to Christian radio, go to a Christian bookstore, and attend church once a week. But slowly our hearts have changed. Christians no longer influence our culture because we know the truth, but we don’t speak the truth and we don’t live truth.
Because of this we have slowly watched our freedoms slip away. 36% of evangelicals think ‘homosexuality’ is alright and the number is much higher in other Christian denominations. This week we will celebrate our “Independence Day”, when we as a nation fought off the shackles of religious oppression, taxation without representation. We fought for the freedom of speech, freedom of religion, for the right to govern ourselves…without government dictating what we were to believe.
Yet today those very ideals are being threatened. This week I attended a meeting of local pastors in a conference call. All over the state of California pastors gathered in conference rooms to hear about the threat to traditional marriage. See this threat is more than a man marring a man, or women marring another woman. It’s about telling you what you are to accept as normal. It’s about telling you what is acceptable in church and what is not.
What are we to do?
I believe it all starts with our hearts, before we can start to influence our culture, our
friends and our families, we need a change of heart. Jesus says this in verse 21-23 “For from within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man "unclean.” Yet these are the very things are being reflected in churches today. We need to repent as Christians and start to live the way Christ intended us to live. We need to repent of not setting the example in marriage, we need to repent of pornography in our homes, we need to repent of greed and materialism, we need to repent of arrogance. The list is right in front of us, we need to start living the truth.
Freedom
Freedom isn’t free, it has a price. It is a price as Americans we are familiar with. We have watched generation after generations give their sons and daughters for the freedom of others. Our faith is not different, you where bought with a price. Christ gave his life for you; Christ lived and died, so that you might live. Christ came to heal the “broken hearted”, He wants to fix our heart condition. It starts with putting our faith in Him, trusting him to remove our sin. It starts by trusting him to come into our hearts and to change us from the inside out. Freedom start with Christ in us, freedom comes from Christ changing us, freedom come from the spirit living through us in our lives.
Do you want to change to world? Do you want to see culture change, start by allowing Christ to live through you. Galatians 2:20 says this “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
-ps
It’s not enough to know the truth, there has to be action behind the truth. Truth needs to be played out in front of the world around us. Truth needs to seen and heard. But the only way that can happen is by having a changed heart. Let’s read Mark 7:1-23
Jesus has just feed the five thousand; he has healed the sick, walked on water, and set the captives free. People are talking about him everywhere and he has gained the attention of the religious leaders of his day. In fact we see they have sent out a party ‘to check things out’. The first thing the leaders observe is the disciples not washing their hands before eating. In Jesus’ day, there was an elaborate ceremony before eating.
These Jewish rituals where performed before each meal. Devout Jews would perform a short ceremony, washing their hands and arms in a specific way. The disciples did not have dirty hands, but they were simply not carrying out this traditional cleansing. Jesus understood exactly what they where accusing him of and it was not following tradition. The cleansing wasn’t in scripture it was tradition. So Jesus uncovers this entire line of thought and he challenges them on this because he knew where their hearts were, their hearts were in the traditions they followed and not in God.
Jesus accuses them of hypocrisy in v.7. They are saying they worship God, but in fact they are worshiping rules made by men. Hypocrisy can be defined as pretending to be something you are not and have no intention of being. Jesus called the Pharisees hypocrites because they worshiped God for the wrong reasons. Their worship was not motivated by love but by a desire to attain profit, to appear holy, and to increase their status.
We can become hypocrites when we pay more attention to reputation than to character, or carefully follow certain religious practices while allowing our hearts to remain distant from God, and lastly anytime we over emphasize others' sins, by emphasizing our own “virtues”.
In fact the Pharisee’s and zealot religious followers had used the excuse of giving to God to get out of their obligation to care for their own parents. They thought it was more important to put money in the Temple treasury than to help their needy mothers and fathers!
Jesus is identifying the real problem; the Pharisees and religious leaders had a ‘heart condition’. It’s not what goes into a man that makes him unclean, but what come out from his heart that makes him unclean, v.20-21.
Today
Looking at this passage I think it is easy to see, even today the church has a ‘heart condition.’ We have become so locked on to our traditions, our ‘Christian Culture” we have lost our ability to influence the culture around us. It has become ‘good enough’ to listen to Christian radio, go to a Christian bookstore, and attend church once a week. But slowly our hearts have changed. Christians no longer influence our culture because we know the truth, but we don’t speak the truth and we don’t live truth.
Because of this we have slowly watched our freedoms slip away. 36% of evangelicals think ‘homosexuality’ is alright and the number is much higher in other Christian denominations. This week we will celebrate our “Independence Day”, when we as a nation fought off the shackles of religious oppression, taxation without representation. We fought for the freedom of speech, freedom of religion, for the right to govern ourselves…without government dictating what we were to believe.
Yet today those very ideals are being threatened. This week I attended a meeting of local pastors in a conference call. All over the state of California pastors gathered in conference rooms to hear about the threat to traditional marriage. See this threat is more than a man marring a man, or women marring another woman. It’s about telling you what you are to accept as normal. It’s about telling you what is acceptable in church and what is not.
What are we to do?
I believe it all starts with our hearts, before we can start to influence our culture, our
friends and our families, we need a change of heart. Jesus says this in verse 21-23 “For from within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man "unclean.” Yet these are the very things are being reflected in churches today. We need to repent as Christians and start to live the way Christ intended us to live. We need to repent of not setting the example in marriage, we need to repent of pornography in our homes, we need to repent of greed and materialism, we need to repent of arrogance. The list is right in front of us, we need to start living the truth.
Freedom
Freedom isn’t free, it has a price. It is a price as Americans we are familiar with. We have watched generation after generations give their sons and daughters for the freedom of others. Our faith is not different, you where bought with a price. Christ gave his life for you; Christ lived and died, so that you might live. Christ came to heal the “broken hearted”, He wants to fix our heart condition. It starts with putting our faith in Him, trusting him to remove our sin. It starts by trusting him to come into our hearts and to change us from the inside out. Freedom start with Christ in us, freedom comes from Christ changing us, freedom come from the spirit living through us in our lives.
Do you want to change to world? Do you want to see culture change, start by allowing Christ to live through you. Galatians 2:20 says this “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
-ps
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