Praise the LORD!

Praise the LORD!

The translation of the familiar command "hallelujah" can often fall on dead ears, even for those that clearly love God and love to praise him.  Aren't there times in our lives when worshiping God, not just in song but in all aspects of our lives, just doesn't seem all that appetizing?  And if we just see the command to praise the LORD as an outward duty, then we may just go through the motions of "worship." So, when we are in a pit of despair, what is the answer?

I've thought these moments in life are similar to driving on a narrow, windy road on a foggy day.  You know those drives where it’s so foggy you can't see beyond the hood (or bonnet for my British friends) of your car.   All you want to do is stop, but you can't because there might be another car coming from behind that won't see you, but you are also frustrated because you need to be where you are going and want to go faster.  In this vortex of conflicting desires you slowly drive along, hands vice gripped to the wheel, as you stare at the white line on the road.

In the fog of life's circumstances and the often-conflicting desires we have, we can't see our ultimate destination, our good God. As heart-centered people we can't force ourselves to not have these desires. But the truth is that we can't just go through the motions of worship: God is not impressed with outward performance, but about why we do what we do. Faking praise and worship doesn't really work, actually God in Isaiah 1:14 says this kind of worship burdens him.

You may ask, "What do I do? I can't stop, but I can't go on?”

Well it's interesting what the psalmists do in a situation like this, they either ask God for a clearer view of him, or they offer a clearer view of him. They seem to think that the warmth of God's character could burn away the fog that we may see him more clearly.  If we could just get our eyes off the fog and place our gaze on the light of the sun so that the fog would just disappear.

Psalm 113 is one example of this call to worship aided with a warming view God.  It begins with a call to all worshipers to praise the name or character of the LORD, to praise his character for all eternity, and in all places of the earth.  But the psalmist doesn't stop there, he gives details of God's character that will naturally lead to praise.

The description begins with a declaration that Yahweh is above all powers and authorities. He is the most powerful and above all creation. The psalmist asks, "Who is like Yahweh our God?"  No one and no god is like him, no god has the power, the majesty of our God.  You can begin to see the fog fade way, yet this description of Yahweh isn't complete, there's more.  If it did stop at that moment, the all-powerful God is actually no different than any other god.

And to be honest, if we're facing the loss of a loved one or some of the darker moments of life, God's power isn't all that comforting in itself.  He's in control but isn't doing anything about it. Does he really care? Or is Yahweh like other gods, so distant and so consumed with himself that I need to work out my own issues to appease Him?

NO! The psalmist would answer, Yahweh in all his power and strength humbles himself to look upon and care for his creation (113:6).  The word translated by the NASB as "humbles" is used in other places to describe God dragging the proud and mighty down to the place of humiliation and abasement.  The psalmist calls us to worship Yahweh who abases himself so that he can take the lowly and lift them up to the place of nobility. God goes down and out for the social outcast so that they might dwell among the princes of his people.  Yahweh isn't some God who sits on high and doesn't care, but a God who leaves his place above the heavens to make the pauper a princess.

What's even more thrilling is that this picture of God's humility still isn't the clearest glimpse, there's more.  Jews sing this psalm before the Passover meal and its very likely that Jesus led the disciples in singing this song the night he was arrested.  That night when he would be accused and convicted of crimes he did not commit. And later the next day he would be humiliated and cursed, dead and naked, on the cross. The God on high, the one born in obscurity, the one who was called an illegitimate son (John 8:41), abased himself to lift up the lowly to the highest place of honor.  Jesus did not hold on to equality with his Father, but went to the darkest of pits for his enemies so that we may dwell with him on his throne.

The clearest view of God is Christ dead on the cross.  That is where the fog is gone and the road is seen.  The cross is the place where we see God caring for those in the dust heap, caring for the outcast, caring for those experiencing the brokenness of this life.  And when we see God like this, we know him best, and to know him is to love him, and to love him is to worship him with all our hearts.

So when you feel like the circumstances of your life are fogging your view of God, when you just don't feel like worshiping him, tell him.  Tell God, out loud, that you don't feel like worshiping him. Tell him you don't feel like reading his Bible. That you don't feel like rejoicing over all his good gifts, all that he's done for you, and that you need to see him.  Ask him to give you the want to, the desire to praise him. I believe he loves to answer those kinds of prayers.

Praise the LORD!

Our Jealous God

This entry repeats my Cor Deo posting. Please post any responses on that site (Click Here).

For a while any time I read that God is jealous, whose "name is Jealous" (Ex. 34:14), it didn't sit well with me and left me confused.  How could God be jealous when jealousy is wrong? I always heard as a child it was wrong to be jealous of another's skills, friends, possessions, etc. and even the last Commandment says do not covet.  That's the issue isn't it, we often equate covetousness with jealousy, and that jealousy can only be a selfish desire?  The question then, is whether we can reconcile the tension between a God who is perfect, yet also jealous?

Typically you'll receive two answers.  First, some just explain this tension away by saying that God is God and he can have a double standard. Others will answer that God's nature allows him to have two seemingly contradictory attributes, i.e. God is loving but also just.  These answers actually don't help us, but rather blind us from one of the central messages of the Bible: the revelation of God's personality.

I discovered his personality when I just started to read the Bible, cover to cover, a couple times a year.  In the Bible I found he is a lover who does everything on account of love. Adam & Eve were made to be in an intelligent and loving relationship with their God who loves them.  Sadly, we know the story went wrong and that they rejected their purpose as the Son's bride, for the Father to be their Daddy, and for the Spirit to live in them. In Genesis 3 starts one of the main themes in the Bible: the continued rejection of God's heart and our love for anything but him--that is, the theme of whoredom.

The clearest picture of whoredom found in the Bible is in Ezekiel 16.  Here God speaks of his people as a newborn baby abandoned to die by exposure.  He tells us that he saw her, gave her life, and, above all, offered to her his heart. When she had grown into a woman, God made her his bride and clothed her so extravagantly that all the nations knew of her beauty. But instead of complete devotion to the one that loved her, she took what she had been given, and gave it to other lovers. The rejection of her husband doesn't stop here, but it's so heinous I'll let you read it for yourself.

So what's God's response to his "adulterous wife, who receives strangers instead of her husband!"?  He will judge her as any women who've committed adultery are judged--his "wrath and jealousy" will be upon her.

This shouldn't be a surprise to us. Any husband that loves his wife and discovers her in the act of adultery will be rightfully jealous and seek justice.  Any jilted spouse that loves their partner would angrily respond, "Why are you doing this? Don't you love me? Look how much I've loved you!" Isn't this a proper response to such a situation?

The Bible declares to us from Genesis to Revelation that "God is a jilted lover!" Its not that he's been wrathful and jealous for all eternity, instead, when his creation rejected his heart and continued to reject him, he became jealous. God is a lover who jealously pursues in order to win his creation's heart back from other lovers.

What's even more amazing about our jealous God is that his goal for judgment in Ezekiel 16 (stripping his bride of her renown, her beautiful clothes and jewelry, and leaving her naked, bare, and alone) is to make her stop playing the whore and to return to him.  God promises to atone for all that she has done and to establish a new covenant with her.  He promises a new covenant that we see later on in Ezekiel as God giving her a new heart and a new spirit, that his Spirit will be within her and she will walk in his ways and obey his instructions. In other places, we see God saying that he desires his people to call him "My Husband" not "My Lord" (Hosea 2), that God will celebrate over his people as a husband celebrates over his wife (Isaiah 62).

He's not like most husbands who have unfaithful wives and therefore seek divorce: no, he hates divorce. Rather, God the Father, out of a love for his Son and his creation, sent the Son to the far country to win and wash his bride.  The Son went out by a love for his Father and his bride, to win his Father more sons and daughters who are deeply loved by the Father. And the Spirit that unites the Father and the Son, the communicator and the koinonia of the Trinity, is given to us and unites us to the Son, our bridegroom.  This is our God whose name is Jealous!

Let me encourage you, jump in the Bible, read it in a month or two and discover that the jealousy of our God is winsome.

Why is Prayer Weird?

This entry repeats my Cor Deo posting. Please post any responses on that site (click here).

Prayer can often be strangely alien. If you think about it, prayer in our churches can be quite otherworldly. Prayer often seems to be inexplicably a-relational and bizarrely formulaic, which conflicts with the reality presented in the Bible.

In God’s story we find that prayer has depth, ceaseless frequency, and a naturalness many of us do not experience. Maybe before I offer some reasons why I think this is the case, let me give a brief description of what I’m referring to today.

The Inexplicable Prayer Meeting: In my experience, a weekly hour-long church prayer meeting consists of a 45-minute discussion about the week to harvest any medical prayer requests.  Once the harvesting is complete, the meeting ends with a 15-minute prayer time where each person takes a single turn to pray. When finished, we go home with some sense of accomplishment. We’ve ticked the box that so many Christians have no desire to tick.

But the strangeness of the meeting doesn’t end there. The actual prayer time is quite foreign. You might hear people speak in spooky voices that seem to take possession of warmhearted people.  Or you may even hear people pray in archaic language that anyone under the age of 150 can’t understand without some careful translation—as though God says, “I love it when you call me ‘Thou!”

I could go on, but you get the picture.  We don’t talk like this to our friends, family, or spouses, well anyone really, yet with God we do.  Then we wonder why we don’t pray. Prayer just doesn’t make any sense, it isn’t natural, and lets face it, God doesn’t seem to respond all that much.  We don’t pray, but when we have to, when it’s a must, we’ll dutifully break out our spooky voice and pray.

Some Inexplicable Advice:  If this is true, and prayer is a duty, we can’t possibly live up to Paul’s command to “pray without ceasing” (1Thess 5:17).  After all, do we do anything without ceasing? And if we do, it can’t possibly be prayer, can it? It’s just so strange to pray to God … that is, it would be if God hadn’t commanded it.

Leaders that offer instruction on prayer instinctively begin with the importance of prayer (feel the vice squeeze down?) followed by a list of advice in order to develop a habit of prayer.  Some advice may include:

• Much praying is not done because we don’t plan to pray, so plan it!
• Pray with some sort of structure like ACTS (Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication).
• Pray until you pray

I don’t say all this as if I haven’t struggled to pray or haven’t given and used such advice.  Not too long into my walk with Christ, I was told if I had difficulty praying to try to pray through ACTS.  At the time I thought it was great advice, “Finally,” I thought, “a way to make sure I say all the things I needed to say to God!” Yet after awhile I started to realize I was more concerned about order above anything else. My “conversation” with God was robotic and not truly conversing with and baring my heart to God.  Yet I didn’t know what else to do, talking with God just didn’t seem instinctive or easy.

When I finally got into the Bible consistently I discovered this entire struggle was absent. The Bible assumes prayer just happens. From Moses, to David, to Daniel, to Jesus through to the early church, prayer just happens in all circumstances, in every situation, without end.  Prayer just overflows from a relationship with God.  It is as if communication is the very essence of any relationship.

Why is Prayer so Sci-fi Weird? So far I’ve been slightly subtle, but the answer comes down to how you view God.   If we understand God to be the unmoved mover (the eternal monadic God that set everything in motion with a single decree), then there’s no place for prayer.  Prayer is as alien to God as it is to us. Prayer, in this reality, isn’t the communication innate to any relationship.  Instead it’s some kind of relational dissonance: a creature attempting to speak to a non-discursive deity.

God is a Communicative Spreading Goodness: But thankfully, God has been a Father-Son-Spirit God for all eternity.  God’s glory before the creation of the world was a loving communion (John 17).  That is, God’s essence is relationship bonded by communication and other-centered love.  The overflow of this reality was the motivation for creation. The Trinity desired to have a creation to share his communion, his goodness, and his ethos with his image (male-female person united in relationship).   You can imagine Adam and Eve talking with God in the cool of the day in the Garden because they just loved talking with one another.  You can picture them enjoying the presence and warmth of communion with the other.  This was the reality before death and hostility crept in when the image bearers rejected life with God by exploring the reality of making themselves god–the primary object of their affections and reference of reality.

But wait . . . what’s even more amazing is that this God invites us back to participate in his community again.  The Father, motivated by love for his creation, sent his Son to defeat death and make a way for life to return to his creation.  And this gift of grace is the communicative bond the Father and Son share–the person of the Holy Spirit.  Now as part of the Bride of Christ we have the pleasure to speak to our Bridegroom and our Father who poured their love upon us by the Holy Spirit.

Like everything else in Christianity, we tend to pile instructions on top of advice.  However, if we are missing out, the solution won’t come from better techniques, but from a clearer view of God.  And when we glimpse the communicative self-giving love of God, isn’t our response to communicate back?  That’s prayer and there’s nothing weird about that!

Love Speaks

This entry repeats my Cor Deo posting. Please post any responses on that site (click here).

In my first days as a Christian I had difficulty telling others about Jesus.  I was more concerned about rejection by others than my appreciation for him.  Also, at times I feared that I was ashamed or embarrassed to be associated with him. 

I had no problem having an intellectual discussion about the proof of the empty tomb, or the reliability of Scripture, or defending the faith. I actually thrived on these debates. But what did I accomplish?  Not much! I can't recall winning many souls, even if I won lots of arguments (at least I thought so). Yet when it came to describing the loveliness of my Saviour, I withered. 

I'm sure you've found yourself running back in your mind previous conversations with a friend or family member where you hesitated to bring up Jesus, even if it would have been unforced. Maybe at other times you did share something, yet it was out of a sense of guilt or pressure, since it’s our duty to evangelize. I've been there; usually in this situation I feared rejection so much I spoke nervously.  Again I probably don't have to tell you that this wasn't all that successful.

Why are we like this? I know we could explore all the psychological reasons for the fear of rejection, but I don't think that's the most significant issue.  I believe the hesitancy has its origins in the Gospel we embrace.

You might object, "Wait, you can't possibly conclude that there's a deficiency in the Gospel?"  No, I agree, there's no issue with the Gospel, but only the one we've believed, the one that is so often presented. 

How frequently have we heard the Gospel presented as an eternal fire insurance policy, with the possibility of having an eternal holiday living in our own heavenly mansion on a street of gold?  I can't count how many times I've heard that we've all sinned, that God has destined us to hell, but to avoid this all you have to do is believe that Jesus died and rose again so you could enter the pearly gates. 

Now I'm not denying the truth in this statement, however it’s got a big problem.  In this presentation Jesus is the tool—a get-out-jail-free card.  The real goal is the avoidance of punishment and/or gaining our heavenly reward.  We, in our self-interest, come to use Jesus for his benefits.

Let me present this truth in a more positive picture.  A few years ago, I had to be away from my wife and 18-month-old daughter for five weeks.  I missed them more than I can express. Every new word my daughter learned that I didn't get to hear was like a red-hot dagger to my heart.  And in my love for them I couldn't stop thinking and talking about them.  At times I didn't fear quietness, but that my new friends would tire of my constant description of them.  At the end of the first week they all knew my wife's and daughter's favorite things, knew when they would join me, and they knew so much about them that when my wife and daughter arrived my friends felt like they already knew them.

I discovered the obvious. Love isn't ashamed of the one we love. Love isn't shy to declare itself. Love doesn't drearily talk with words filled with fear and nervousness. Actually, love unabashedly speaks with eloquence of the one we love. 

Love doesn't stop speaking either. Love is loquacious—that is, it abounds in praises and descriptions of the loveliness of the one who has won our heart.  Everyone loves to speak of their passions: their new love interest, the team they support, their favorite movie, or the great book that's hooked their attention. Fill in the blank and you'll get it. This is the disposition of love.  

It's no different for our Saviour. Jesus isn't the get-out-of-jail-free card. He isn't the means to an end.  Rather he is the goal, the prize, the means and the end. He is heaven. When we make the declaration of the Gospel about the benefits of Jesus (benefits that are true but not the point) rather than a description of his beauty, we set up the possibility of people believing for self-concerned reasons.  Not only is it dangerous because it produces a false faith, but this Gospel doesn't lead to the love that opens our hearts and our voices to others about our Friend. 

So how do we overcome our quietness?  Cast the eyes of your heart on the Founder and Perfecter of our faith.  The beautiful one that humbled himself and died for us that he might win our hearts and our devotion.  Look to the God who gave up eternity to serve us because he loved us, even while we were his enemies.

Read the Bible thru at a fast pace and discover the story of our God that abounds in steadfast love and faithfulness. A good God who is so delightful you'll desire for him to be the greatest object of your affections. In its pages you'll find our Bridegroom who gave all his heart and soul to woo and wash his bride. A Father who gave his Son that he might have sons and daughters to love as he loves his eternal Son. 

Set your gaze on him and make him the ambition of your heart, and amazingly you'll naturally tell others about him in such a winsome way that they'll want to know him as you do.

Introduction to the "Honey-Combe"

You may have noticed that the spelling of "honey-combe" is different. The spelling derives from the title of a printed sermon series by John Eaton (1575-1631) The Honey-Combe of Free Justification by Christ Alone.  Eaton wanted the title Honey-combe to serve as a metaphor for his idea of how to communicate his views on the freeness of grace.  Procuring the sweet taste of free-grace commences with “sweet, powerful, forceable Scriptures, as the flowers containing the honey.”  Next the “bees of the Lord’s garden”—the “learned Writer’s”—who “have by faith, sucked and gathered out of the said flowers of Scriptures” and with each “Orthodox and Protestant author” making his own “cellulam” of honey. From this “coherence” of testimony from Scripture and the authorities Eaton built a whole Honey-combe of Free Justification.  

Like Eaton, I intend to join the "bees of the Lord's garden" in order to communicate the sweet taste of God's goodness. I'll do this by exploring the big questions of life: Who is God? How do we relate to him? What is sin? What is grace? And how does this all work out in our lives? By looking to Scripture and those worker-bees that have gone before us, I believe we'll encounter the steadfast love and faithfulness of our Triune God. 

I'm confident these efforts will help us respond to the God who is love and is one in love. Whose love spilled over into creation where the very purpose of humanity was to be in relationship with God through the Spirit.  

This is the sweet honeycomb of God’s goodness!