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September 29 - November 3, 2017
life is created and shaped by God and that the life of faith is a daily exploration of the constant and countless ways in which God’s grace and love are experienced.
Faith is not a precarious affair of chance escape from satanic assaults. It is the solid, massive, secure experience of God, who keeps all evil from getting inside us, who guards our life, who guards us when we leave and when we return, who guards us now, who guards us always.
For the sake of the house of our God, GOD, I’ll do my very best for you.
listen (with a straight face) and go home and pray that person will one day find the one sufficient reason for going to church, which is God.
Psalm 121 is the psalm of trust—a demonstration of how faith resists patent-medicine remedies to trials and tribulations and determinedly trusts God to work out his will and “guard you from every evil” in the midst of difficulty.
much of what we commonly describe as Christian behavior is not volitional at all—it is enforced. But worship is not forced. Everyone who worships does so because he or she wants to.
worship gives us a workable structure for life; worship nurtures our need to be in relationship with God; worship centers our attention on the decisions of God.
How do we get that framework, that sense of solid structure so that we know where we stand and are therefore able to do our work easily and without anxiety?
Week by week we enter the place compactly built, “to which the tribes ascend,” and get a working definition for life: the way God created us, the ways he leads us. We know where we stand.
Feelings are important in many areas but completely unreliable in matters of faith. Paul Scherer is laconic: “The Bible wastes very little time on the way we feel.”1
We think that if we don’t feel something there can be no authenticity in doing it. But the wisdom of God says something different: that we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much quicker than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting.
Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship.
The biblical word judgment means “the decisive word by which God straightens things out and puts things right.”
In the call to worship we hear God’s first word to us; in the benediction we hear God’s last word to us; in the Scripture lessons we hear God speaking to our faith-parents; in the sermon we hear that word reexpressed to us; in the hymns, which are all to a greater or lesser extent paraphrases of Scripture, the Word of God makes our prayers articulate.
Every time we worship our minds are informed, our memories refreshed with the judgments of God, we are familiarized with what God says, what he has decided, the ways he is working out our salvation.
Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God—it whets our appetite.
It overflows the hour and permeates the week.
Worship initiates an extended, daily participation in peace and prosperity so that we share in our daily rounds what God initiates and continues in Jesus Christ.
In general terms, service is a willing, working, and doing in which a person acts not according to his own purposes or plans but with a view to the purpose of another person and according to the need, disposition, and direction of others.
God did not become a servant so that we could order him around but so that we could join him in a redemptive life.
If God is God at all, he must know more about our needs than we do; if God is God at all, he must be more in touch with the reality of our thoughts, our emotions, our bodies than we are; if God is God at all, he must have a more comprehensive grasp of the interrelations in our families and communities and nations than we do.
He does not treat us according to our deserts, but according to his plan.
He is a potter working with the clay of our lives, forming and reforming until, finally, he has shaped a redeemed life, a vessel fit for the kingdom.
Servitude is specific in its expectation, and what it expects is mercy.
Freedom is on everyone’s lips. Freedom is announced and celebrated. But not many feel or act free. Evidence? We live in a nation of complainers and a society of addicts.
The promises and fulfillments of freedom are antiphonal throughout Scripture.
I have never yet heard a servant Christian complain of the oppressiveness of his servitude. I have never yet heard a servant Christian rail against the restrictions of her service. A servant Christian is the freest person on earth.
The proper work for the Christian is witness, not apology, and Psalm 124 is an excellent model.
There are no easy tasks in the Christian way; there are only tasks that can be done faithfully or erratically, with joy or with resentment.
What is hazardous in my life is my work as a Christian.
daring to believe that failing in love is better than succeeding in pride.
Christians are not pious pretenders in the midst of a decadent culture; Christians are robust witnesses to the God who is our help.
links the God who created heaven and earth to the God who helps us personally. It takes the majesty of the One who pulled a universe into order and beauty, and finds this same God involved in the local troubles of a quite ordinary person.
Psalm 124 is a magnification of the items of life that are thought to be unpleasant, best kept under cover, best surrounded with silence lest they clutter our lives with unpleasantness:
Faith develops out of the most difficult aspects of our existence, not the easiest.
It is Christ, not culture, that defines our lives. It is the help we experience, not the hazards we risk, that shapes our days.
The tug of gravity is constant.
I can be moved by nearly anything: sadness, joy, success, failure. I’m a thermometer and go up and down with the weather.
Danger and oppression are never too much for faith. They were not too much for Job, they were not too much for Jeremiah, and they were not too much for Jesus. Evil is always temporary. “The worst does not last.”
Discipleship is not a contract in which if we break our part of the agreement he is free to break his; it is a covenant in which he establishes the conditions and guarantees the results.
Defection requires a deliberate, sustained and determined act of rejection.
We are secure not because we are sure of ourselves but because we trust that God is sure of us.
When mountain climbers are in dangerous terrain, on the face of a cliff or the slopes of a glacier, they rope themselves together. Sometimes one of them slips and falls—backslides. But not everyone falls at once, and so those who are still on their feet are able to keep the backslider from falling away completely.
One of the delightful discoveries along the way of Christian discipleship is how much enjoyment there is, how much laughter you hear, how much sheer fun you find.
Joy is characteristic of Christian pilgrimage.
It is the second in Paul’s list of the fruits of the Spirit (Gal 5:22-23). It is the first of Jesus’ signs in the Gospel of John (turning water into wine).
The same thing can be said of much of the Bible: its smiles carry more meaning than its sermons.
Joy is not a requirement of Christian discipleship, it is a consequence.
It is not what we have to acquire in order to experience life in Christ; it is what comes to us when we are walking in the way of faith and obedience.
The enormous entertainment industry in America is a sign of the depletion of joy in our culture.
