Storybook Bible Advent

Here is a great Advent blog by a missionary in Australia.  Thanks Paige for pointing us to Adriel!

Adriel's Blog

Un-Holiness and Grace

Everyone has wondered at some point how they can grow spiritually. 

                Perhaps you feel God’s absence.  “Where IS He when I am praying?  It seems that I am just praying to the wall.”  Perhaps you feel frustrated at God’s lack of action.  Haven’t seen a miracle like in Acts lately.  Relationship with your kids is still on the rocks and, boy, have you prayed a lot about that.

Or you don’t get a thing out of church.  Singing is ok.  Sermon is ok.  Fellowship is ok.  But you still go home not feeling like you had any experience with God or made any progress towards Him…and don’t’ know how to move.  Feeling isolated and lonely.  God should take care of that shouldn’t He?  He is for me, isn’t He?

                First, anyone who is actually engaged in their faith is always going through this.  And it will never end…sorry for that bit of bad news.  It is a peculiar thing about Christianity among all other religions, that as you grow in holiness, instead of felling better about yourself and more holy, you actually become increasingly aware of how great your sin is and how much distance your sin creates between you and God and between you and others.  In essence, you feel worse about yourself.  Not very encouraging I know.  “Hey come and join us at our church and you’ll feel worse and worse about yourself.”

                But therein lies the beauty of grace.  As you begin to more fully understand the depths of your sinfulness and the impossibility of you making things better, you begin to despair of yourself, others, the world and self-help.  As you grow into spiritual maturity, God reveals more and more the state you are in.  God does not do this to punish you or to rub it in, but He shows your sickness so you can be made increasingly holy….which makes you increasingly understand how really unholy you are and the process begins all over again.

                Now here is the payoff for this unseemly process:  As you enter more and more fully into what would appear a hopeless downward spiral of despair, you begin at the same time to uncover how much God must love you.  You begin to experience in a real and tangible way, the peace that God has promised.  You begin to have experiences of God that are so profound that words cannot adequately explain them.  You become less and less dependent on miracles and overt signs from God because you interiorly, as Charlie Walton used to say, “know in your knower”, that God IS actually for you and that He IS there listening to your prayers and that He IS working on your children. 

                I have talked with many of you who have had an extraordinary closeness to God at some point in your life.  Unfortunately, the result of this experience for many of you has been increased frustration, in some cases to the point of anger at the church or others or the leadership - sometimes ending in church hopping trying to duplicate that experience or even leaving Christ.  The problem is that God has allowed you to taste this experience not so you will have a 2 year old’s hunger for more but so that you will grow the tree that produces it.  He wants to develop in you and through you in those around you, the tree that the fruit comes from.  Water flowing from you.  John 4:14  Simply handing you another pear will not help you.  It will taste good but you will sit on your couch waiting for the next delivery instead of being in His story of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:16-20) which is His – and, in reality, your – deepest desire.

                So how can you get on this bandwagon of understanding your unholiness and therefore grace?

                First, accept that you are treasured by God.  God’s relationship with you is as intense as marriage. 

                Second, quit having an opinion/agenda.  Take a back seat.  Do what others tell you to do.  Offer your agenda-less service and then simply be humble and do what you are asked to do.  If you cannot do this with your spouse, with the people around you, you will not do it with God.  (1 John 4:19, Philippians 2)

                Third, evaluate everything you do by starting with Christ.  He is not first on your list.  He is the arbiter of the list.  Christ controls you at work.  Christ tells you how to act in your marriage.  Christ controls the course of your hobby.  God speaks to you about your ministry.

                Lastly, for this short note, show up… no matter what.  Don’t miss your 6:00am appointment with God each morning.  Be at church.  Meet with a discipler.  Take on a job at church (Walt has a list if you need direction.)  Say “God” to someone outside your church family every day.  You can do this….You want to do this.  This is what grace is about...the freedom to do what will fulfill you instead of being controlled by desires.

Stepping across the Jordan

Stepping into the kingdom of God is a scary thing.  Too scary for the Hebrew nation.  With our past and our fears and failures and our oppressors nipping at our heels the Red Sea opens up.  Then in a cleansing baptism, they are all washed away.  Grace has set us free.  Just travel across a short desert while we get some basic operating procedures and step into the kingdom.  It is not a sea step with threatening walls of water on each side and the army at our heals.  Just waltz on across the river.  Why is this so hard?  Why can't I, we, embrace this gift of grace and provision?  Why let fear and uncertainty create new oppressors?
This is the work now.  A labor of love.  To move into happiness.  Move into a land of honey.  Move into a house already built.  It takes a battle or two but battles God has won already.  Just go through the motions, Walt.  Claim the riches of Jericho - the walls are down already.  Walk with Gideon through the valley of the enemy conquered with clay pots.  Crest the hill with Hezekiah to find the enemy slain over night.  Go ahead and join Ezra.  Cyrus, unbidden, sends us to rebuild temple walls.  A kingdom for the taking.
Has the surety of desert so much more appeal than risk?  Is the memory of leeks so much more lovely than the hope of figs?  Let the waters cover the chariots of Egypt.  Let them drown the memory and security of servitude.  Let the mighty waters crush the way back home.  Let our new security be not in what we had or have but in who parts the second water.  You are not far from the kingdom.  Indeed.  Not far.

Puzzle

Community must be a “means”.  The rights, privileges, advantages of simple community life will not support community.  We will create the end by our pettiness and rivalry and selfishness and agendas.  We will alienate our loved ones and create alliances with those we dislike.  We will sabotage the entire mess if the goal is community.  Community, in order to be community and make it as a community, must be based on the missiology we are called into in Christ.  If we try to achieve community by living together and learning how to get along and sharing, it will always collapse upon itself.  It is the same as sadness or introversion or non-medical depression.  If we try to make things/ourselves better, happier, we will fail because we are looking at the problem for the answer.  We were designed to be outward focused.  The major result of the Garden fall was that we turned our focus inward, self looking at our own nakedness.  Adam’s first sentence after the fall has five “I’s” in it.  Five in one sentence.  Living in community was/is our design but not as an end but as a means to participation in God’s plan.  This is part of the genius of Michael Breen's 3DM www.weare3dm.com.  We all must be missional.

Community/belonging is like puzzle pieces.  We are meant to fit together to create a unified picture/story.

Each piece must be authentically that particular piece and not try to be something different than who they are -no covetousness.  Each piece must fit in with others and must be willing to fit together.  It must submit to the group.  It must move with the group.  Groups of puzzle pieces are not community.  Community is much easier if all pieces can see the outcome picture.  This is why not vision casting but vision revealing and buy in are critical.  Leaders are not the biggest pieces or even the vision caster but facilitators, helping all the pieces including themselves to discern the picture and come together in the right order/sequence/placement.  It can work but it is much harder if only a prophet has the picture but no one else can see it.  Much better for the prophet to teach.  It is not then required nor essential nor even desirable for the leader to have the puzzle picture in mind.  The leader only has to get everyone in on the game.

Fear

Augustine says that Peter's denial was not one of unbelief but of fear.  No surprise there.  Peter still believed that Jesus was who He said He was but Peter was so afraid of the consequences of that belief that he lied and denied Christ.
Our actions are based only partly on our belief.  Our actions are generally based on trust or fear.  Fear about what might happen or trust about what might happen.  Not trust that God will make everything go well but trust that God can make wine out of water, redemption out of a cross, something good out of suffering if need be.  We must not be afraid to suffer.  We must believe that God is a God who does not end all suffering but does use suffering. 

...we exist for the praise of God's glory - Eph 1:11

Our occupation is to praise God.  It is not propriety or social action.  It is not to make money.  It is not to be happy.  It is not to provide for our families.  Our occupation is to praise God.  We must do that at all costs.  In doing that, the poor may be fed and our behavior perhaps redeemed.  Our families provided for.  Our happiness, and perhaps even with money, may settle in our hands.  Yet we must never be deterred if all else is lost.  We must never let up.  We must never lose our focus.  We must never give in to anything but that which praises God. Not for what He gives us or does for us but praise for who He is.  If you desire to be in God's will and be a part of His plan, simply spend time praising Him and you are there.  It really is that simple.
God, you are..........

God, you are the harbor.  Safety in the storm and a place for refitting.  A place for caulking my leaking seams and cleaning my hull.  A place of mending sails.  A place for fresh meals and supplies for the journey.  A place not home but preparation.  The place for new charts and orders.
God, you are the keel.  You steady my course and right me when I yaw.
God, you are the rudder, guiding me on my course through doldrums and gale.
You, Father, are the wind in my sails.  My energy.
God, you are the captain, of course. 
You are Polaris and sextant.  The truth and the way to find it.

And you are God, without me.  You are.  You remain.  I am a speck yet you love me the more.  I rebel and You call me back.
You are the God of lithium before there was "electricity".  You are God before.  You are God after.
You are the God Who plans and the God who redeems and re-plans.  Grace.

Hands and Feet Un-nailed

I have a bonsai plant that I nurtured for several years.  Its nurture wasn’t particularly hard but it did mean I had to pay attention to the water level and pruning and bugs and weeds.  I keep several bonsais.  They remind me of the mountains but mainly I keep them because they teach me.  They teach me to be patient and remind me that caring is not hard but takes a steady hand over time.  I can train an oak bough to bend if I do so gently.  And though I can persuade an oak branch to bend, I can never make it into a willow.  My long work on this particular bonsai was for naught when I neglected it for a couple of weeks this fall and never saw the spider mites that took it over.  Nurture is a long work, however easy it is – “Oh, look at them. They are such nice kids,” did not happen over night.  “Why in the world would he do that?” also has a history.

                I hate to bring up what are now, for some, fading memories of the terrible December day in Connecticut but, truly, it is essential that I do.  The world is not learning and we Christians are not standing up with the answer.  Amidst the endless calls for justice – a place for blame - and the tired pleas once again for gun control and more police in schools, we must reconsider our lives of independence and power and immediacy as those 15 families are forever reconsidering their lives without ones held so dear. 

                The world has cried out that if there is a God then He certainly does not love us any more.  Or, if there could be a God, truly God – big and strong - then evil would not happen.  He must not exist.  What the world (and many of us if the truth be told) wants is a genie-god to fix evil but leave us alone. 

                What the world does not want to hear is that the answer to the terrible crimes we have witnessed in the last few years is the same answer to our own lack of faith and the answer to the diminishing following of Jesus Christ and the answer to our children leaving the faith, following the world.  The answer is not a big dramatic heave-ho as we all are apt to do and which feels good and productive and for which we can hold our breath long enough to do before we get back to life.  The answer, rather, must be a “long obedience in the same direction” as Peterson has titled his book.   The answer is to show up not incidentally but every day for a lifetime.  There is no answer truly for anything except to sit daily with God.  To be with Him long enough every day for His presence to wash away the defilement of our own nature and to dissolve the filth that clings to our hearts from our TV and movie driven culture.  The answer is to sit with God long enough every day so that the corruption tugging on us from the world, bidding us to be like the world is but a pestering snag.  The answer is listening and hearing from God His plan… for today… for you.  Then taking that plan to the street. 

                The answer is someone simply embracing their God-job in the life of a man named Adam Lanza.  This is the answer for December 14ths.  The answer is us.  We are Luther’s “little Christ’s.  You do so, so much.  Yet we must show up even more dedicatedly in God’s presence every single day and then be in the world, as we are told to be, in a long obedience as Christ’s feet and hands no longer nailed to the cross.