Happy Songs

Last Sunday I was doing the things I usually do before church to get things ready for worship.  Some of those things are pretty ordinary and anyone could do them, such as turning the heat up and starting the coffee.  I just happen to be at church and so I do them.  Other tasks are more particular to my role in leading worship, and I do them as part of being conscientious about my role in our congregation. 

One of the most essential of these tasks is to take a few minutes and read aloud all of the parts of the worship service that are written down.  Some parts of worship are written out and other parts I do more extemporaneously   I learned, the hard way, that reading these parts aloud before worship prevents me from being surprised at how they sound during worship.  It is one thing to read a sentence in my mind and think it sounds fine, and another thing to read it aloud and understand that it needs to be read in a certain way, or with a change to the wording.

Last Sunday I was doing just that and reading Psalm 100, which as written in the Good News Translation, was our call to worship.  It begins,

"Sing to the Lord, all the world.

Worship the Lord with joy;

come before him with happy songs!"

"Come before him with happy songs" made me quite literally laugh out loud.  Having two additional youngsters in our home for the past two months has brought a number of changes to the ways things get done each morning.  We are still sorting things out, which is particularly noticeable to me on a Sunday morning, when "going to work" means something quite different from simply walking from our bedroom downstairs to my home office. 

As I was at church preparing I knew that the three children at home were giving Robin a bit more chaos than usual, even for a Sunday.   Reading that phrase, "come before him with happy songs," reminded me that despite the chaos and the unsettled routines, our purpose that morning was to gather to worship God.  As we worship we try to set aside the cares and worries of the moment and turn our attention to God, remembering who He is and what He has done, looking forward to the future glory He has promised.  

All three of the children in our home are delightful in their own ways, and one the things they have in common are that they are each learning to love and worship God.   The chaos is but for a moment and one day the happy songs of worship we sing here will be sung for eternity.  Amen.

Offended?

When you think about Jesus, what kinds of things come to mind?  Do you think of someone who is always kind and ready to be with people?  The kind of person who is able to accept any person, no matter what they might look like or act like?  The person whose patience with others never runs out, no matter how annoying they might be?  The person who always has just the right words to say, and always says them in the right way for the maximum effect?  Words of comfort?  Words of peace?  Words of hope?  Words of love?

Those images, frankly, are ones that we would all probably agree with.  They describe the Jesus we would love to spend time with, love to talk with.  They are also images that you could also find widely scattered throughout the four Gospels.  But if you looked a bit more closely at the Gospels, to see Jesus as He describes Himself, you would also find something very different. 

You would find the Jesus who gets under peoples skin.  The Jesus who gets in your face.  The Jesus you might wish would just go away and leave you alone.

That's what I noticed when I was reading from Luke and saw these words in Luke 7:23:

 "And blessed the one who is not offended by me."

Jesus is offensive?  Can't be!

And yet it is true.  Jesus himself says that there are people who find him to be quite offensive.  People who perhaps feel insulted at the words he would say to them.  People who would turn their backs and cover their ears if Jesus were to speak to them.  They are offended because, in Jesus' own words from Luke 5:32, he says of his particular task,

"I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance."

There is the problem in a nutshell.  Jesus refuses to let us set the standard for our righteousness, or our ability to come before God in peace.  He reminds us that God has set the standards for our righteousness and that when we violate those standards we need to admit, to God, our error, and to seek His forgiveness.  There is no other way. 

To hear that call to repentance, to believe it, and to act on it by seeking God's mercy, is to not be offended by Jesus.  And the blessing from God that follows as we seek Him is glorious in ways that we can barely imagine. 

May you hear the words of Jesus and see yourself as you truly are, a sinner in need of a Savior.  Of all the things that we can think of when we think of Jesus, the one that is the most precious, that is most essential, is that He, alone, is our Savior, and in that we rejoice.  Amen.

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Anonymous Names?

One of the places my Bible reading plan took me was to this week was the book of First Chronicles.  If a person who was generally familiar with the Bible was asked what part is the most tedious reading it is quite likely that the opening chapters of First Chronicles would be on top of the list. 

First Chronicles begins with nine chapters that are basically lists of names.  Name after name after name, literally hundreds of them.  They are not at random, for they are arranged to show various family relationships, and very occasionally there is a tidbit of other information mixed in.  But for the most part they are just names, and for a good many of them they are found nowhere else in the Bible.

I'll confess that I have never studied the early chapters of First Chronicles, and so I don’t have any kind of ready explanation for why the lists of names are there.  If you are interested in what might be gained from them I happened upon this useful article just this week.

One thing I do know is that these names matter to God.  I don’t believe that there are any extraneous words in the Bible.  While there may be many things I don’t understand, I believe that the entirety of God's word matters to God.

Last week I wrote about the complexities of praying for certain parts of my family.  I made mention of some lists of names that Robin and I pray through, although I didn't mention that those lists are memorized, and not written down.  The names of Chronicles, and something that happened when I was running this week, reminded me of another list I pray through. 

That list has the similarity with Chronicles of appearing to be simply a collection of single names.  While the lists of Chronicles are connected together by family relationship, this particular list of mine is connected differently.  It is people whom I know, or know of, in this community with substance abuse issues. 

Many of the people on that list I've met, and some I see somewhat regularly.  Others I see at random times.  I may see them often for a while, and then not see them for a long while.  And those times I see them often are as likely to be on one side of their struggle as the other. 

So I was out running and I crossed paths with one of those persons for the first time in quite a while.  He was walking in the opposite direction, I greeted him by name and wished him a good day.  He said some words of greeting in return.  And as I continued, I wondered how he has been doing.  I got a clue close to noon, as I happened to cross paths with him again.  No conversation besides "Hi," but he looked sober and that was good to see.  

My list, like the lists in Chronicles, can appear to be somewhat anonymous, but I believe that each are lists of names of people whom matter to God.  And so I'll continue to pray through my list, try to be helpful and encouraging when I cross paths with those people, and trust in God to bring forth a good result.

It's Complicated

It's complicated.

"What's complicated?" you ask.

Given the era that we live and the many demands of modern life, nearly everything is complicated to some degree.  But this isn't a rant about modern life and a desire to return to simpler times, as appealing as that may some times be.

What is complicated today, in ways that I could not have conceived of at the beginning of 2017, are relationships within my family and the consequent ways that Robin I feel led to pray for our family.

Each night we read from the Bible, aloud, and then pray together.  If you divided our prayer time in two, in the first part we pray for our family and in the second we pray for a variety of other things, such as the needs of people within our congregation and our community, and people and circumstances outside of our immediate family.  If we consider the aspect of praying for our family we could divide that into four groups, being Robin and I, our children, our grandchildren, and our parents. 

Praying for ourselves and our parents is perhaps the simplest, as there are just two of us and we have two parents each.  To the parent group we also include two others in our family of that generation that are dear in particular ways.  That part is not particularly complicated.

But when we get to our children, things get a bit more tangled.  Two children each from our first marriages, plus one fiancé, plus the daughter we adopted.  This is perhaps more complex, but not quite complicated.  This is, however, where "complicated" takes off, like a rocket!

Early in our marriage we also prayed for certain people connected to our children, such as spouses and significant others who were the parents of our grandchildren.  Without getting specifically into the "how's" and "why's" I'll just say that at the beginning of the summer of 2017 in the level of "our children" there were 16 additional people to the six already mentioned.  And in the group of our grandchildren there were 26 children.

Several of our grandchildren have been in foster care and we met the foster parents over the summer, adding them and their children to our lists.  And then in September we took two children in for foster care, adding them, their siblings and their parents to our lists.  And so as Thanksgiving draws near the list of our children has 27 names and the list of our grandchildren has 32 children.  The best way I can describe the connection of those relationships to someone who is hearing about it for the first time is "It's complicated!"

I suspect that it's a collection of relationships that is far from the norm by just about any conceivable standard.  At no point in my life before the age of 50 could I have possibly imagined that one day the collection of people I think of as "my family" would look like this.  But it does, and these are the people Robin and I feel led to pray for each day.

The relationships that bind our family may be complicated.  And, like any family, the distance, physically and emotionally, between us and each of them, has wide variations.  But each day we bring each of them to the Lord.  In some case we know their needs well but in many we don't.  But we know that God is good, that He answers prayer in His timing and in ways that are always for the best.  

Our family may be complicated, but in the eyes of the Lord, the needs of the various members are not, so that at day's end, in all things, family and otherwise, we trust in the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Promise

I am preaching my way through the Old Testament prophet Amos, and, quite frankly, enjoying myself.  Each week I am digging into one the much less-known books of the Bible and trying to understand it in such a way that it shapes my life and the life of my congregation.   This morning was the fourth sermon from Amos, being all of chapter 3.  I'm planning three more sermons before Advent and then setting Amos aside until after Christmas, when there will be seven sermons to get to the end of the book.

And in a surprising way, I am enjoying myself.  Amos is not exactly a prophet bringing glad tidings to God's people.  He can tend to sound pretty gloomy, and frankly harsh, from one chapter to the next.  And it takes some work to be able to make a connection from Amos to Jesus each week.  So what makes it fun?

The fun for me last week was in reaching a point where I thought I understood the meaning of the passage as it reached its original audience, and also with valid application today.  Kind of like digging something out of a hole in the ground, a hole that took a lot of work to make, and then cleaning that thing off to find something of unexpected beauty.  That metaphor works for preaching in a general sense, but it has been particularly pleasant to see it work out in Amos, at least so far.

This morning I talked about how God's chosen people had been given responsibility to live in ways that pleased Him, and how in their failure to do so they were being called to accountability.  I showed how the text made it clear that there was a cause-and-effect relationship in play, where their sinfulness was the cause of the effect of their receiving God's judgment.  I showed how God was being merciful in giving them a warning that judgment was on the way.  I talked about how the sinfulness of God's people was so evident that even their pagan neighbors could see it.  And the last part the text showed us was that everything that they might have thought would give them safety would be shown to be false, when it came to God delivering His promised judgment. 

In a nutshell, God had given His children His rules for their good and, ultimately, for His glory.  Their failure to listen to God, or to His prophets, would result in their being held accountable.  You could say that Amos is reminding the people that their deal with God is to do things His way, or else pay the price. 

The interesting thing is that while Amos is being very direct as a messenger from God, there is a gap in history between delivering the news of coming judgment and the moment when that judgment actually comes.  Unsaid is that in that time gap lies the opportunity to repent of sin and trust in God, which was the basic call of Jesus shortly after His baptism.  In Mark 1:15, He says:

"The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand;

repent and believe in the gospel."

We live in an age where it can seem that every time we turn on the news we are greeted with something that defies our comprehension.  Sometime between the end of worship today and my beginning to write this post I learned of the tragic shooting at a church in Texas this morning.  Mass shootings and other acts of terror seem to happen with such frequency that we can become numb to them.  See the headline, skim the story, and then move onto whatever is next.  All we can know for certain in the shooting is that the world is a very fallen place, and that no place is exempt from being a place where sin will appear in all it's ugliness.  

But I read something else before beginning to write today, from the letter to the Hebrews, which includes this phrase from chapter 4, verse 1:

"…while the  promise of entering His rest still stands…"

The ring in the picture is on my wife's hand, and there is a  matching one on my hand.  Those rings represent promises that we made to each other ten years ago.  The prophetic words of Amos and the letter to the Hebrews remind us that there is a much better promise awaiting us as we turn to God and receive what He holds out in Jesus, and that there is still time right now to receive that promise and enter God's rest. 

Today is the time to embrace the promise, and to receive the unfailing, everlasting hope within it, hope that only comes through faith in Jesus. 

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.