I’m fairly certain that I have posted on this one before but it is an absolute favourite of mine.
When I say favourite what I mean is that it has a heart impact on me.
Here Amos is pleading with a nation to return to their God, to live and act with righteousness, it rises and falls and they reaches this crescendo in the plea for the change in their lives to act like water rushing, powerful and unstoppable.
21 “I hate, I despise your religious festivals;
your assemblies are a stench to me.
22 Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,
I will have no regard for them.
23 Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
24 But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream!
Amos 5: 21-24
Scripture has the ability to bring hope or bring condemnation. It is a sword, a mighty weapon that I have seen wielded positively and negatively from the pulpit, in counselling and in daily life.
I hate, yes hate, when people use Scripture as a means to drag down, put down and destroy a person. I hate it when people use Scripture to sit in judgement of another person as if there isn’t a Redwood growing out of their right eyeball.
So, I wanted to get my blog on again and I need a fairly low impact trajectory because things in my life are just far too complicated at the moment so I have decided that I will post my favourite passages of Scripture. Sometimes it will just be a verse, sometimes there will be commentary but for the most part I’m just trying to re-develop the habit.
Happy reading.
Scripture the first:
1 “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. 2 For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
3 “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 4 How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. :
Matthew 7:1-5
The matter is quite
simple. The bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a
bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it
because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged
to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget
everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will
say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on
in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship.
Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend
itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good
Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless
scholarship, what would we do without you?
Soren Kierkegaard
You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life. (John 5:39-40)
This passage is a an unpolished jewel in Scripture. This is Jesus speaking and he is firing a warning shot across the bow for the religious elite of the time. Although that shot was aimed at people who lived over 2000 years ago it’s just as good a reminder for us.
There is a problem with reading the Bible that often goes unnoticed. We study diligently in order to gain insight but when we study we can easily miss the big picture, that the Bible is the testimony of God and should illuminate how God is working in the world around us.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s certainly important to read the Bible but HOW we read it is just as important.
Here are a couple of ways that we might be reading and looking for life but missing Jesus completely:
1. Reading to reinforce our preconceptions.
This is reading with a closed mind or reading just to back up our position in an argument. You really can read whatever you want in the Bible and that is because we bring along a lot of baggage in our reading, particularly political leanings. When we read to reinforce take a moment in prayer and ask God to reveal the truth despite your notions of what is right and to stop you from reading into the text what you want to see.
2. Thinking that what you read is applicable to people you know but not to you.
Jesus said, “Before you remove the spec of dust out of your brothers eye attend to yourself first and remove the log in your own eye.”
It’s a little too easy to read a passage of Scripture and think, “That’s Julius all over” and think that maybe, just perhaps God is speaking to you and your situation.
3. Thinking yourself better than the people in the story.
I love bagging the disciples out when I read the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus. Jesus and two spirits are having a chat on the top of a mountain and all these bumbling guys can ask is “Hey Jesus, you want us to go pitch some tents for the three of you?” All the while I might miss the obvious Spiritual realities surrounding me.
4. Reading for knowledge, not for application.
The Bible is a sword but it’s wielded most effectively in application to living not as an extension to our tongue. Plenty of people know how to use Scripture to cut another person down but why not build another person up by applying what we learn about the character of God and become more Christlike to others?
During my last series of sermons I’ve been asking the church “Are we relevant to God?” Our senior pastor asked me to continue on the series he started around how we can practically live our mission which is to:
- Worship Passionately
- Wrestle Tenaciously
- Witness Courageously
It seems to me that some churches put out mission statements that sound good but do very little to live up to them so I’m proud to be a part of a church that seeks to integrate what it says into what it does.
My portion of this series was to talk about being relevant to our community, (that comes under witnessing in the mission statement). But I took a step back to ask how we become relevant and that’s where my question comes from: are we relevant to God. The premise that I am working under for all things relating to church growth and development is that if you strive for it you will never achieve it, but if you seek to be that with God then you will overflow with it.
I’ve seen churches that try to be relevant but sell out. Churches that try seek community but miss the mark. It seems to me if you aim to create a church in a certain mold by just exerting external pressures you will fail.
So the crux of my question goes to the character of individuals in the church. If we seek to be relevant to our community by simply acting hip then we are going to loose. But if we cultivate lives that are relevant to God, by that I mean lives that are in relationship with God, then we will by happy accident find that we start to relate to our neighbors and our community because when we are relevant to God he begins to shape our character and actions (not the other way around) and we start to become Christlike in our communities.
There was a great Wall Street Journal article around this sort of thing during the week, heres a quote:
But are these gimmicks really going to bring young people back to church? Is this what people really come to church for? Maybe sex sermons and indie- rock worship music do help in getting people in the door, and maybe even in winning new converts. But what sort of Christianity are they being converted to?
In his book, “The Courage to Be Protestant,” David Wells writes:”The born-again, marketing church has calculated that unless it makes deep, serious cultural adaptations, it will go out of business, especially with the younger generations. What it has not considered carefully enough is that it may well be putting itself out of business with God.
Have a link 
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704111704575355311122648100.html?mod=wsj_share_facebook
I just finished reading an article in the New York Times that really resonates with the me. During my sermon this week I was speaking on Spiritual Practices dividing them into three categories: internal, external and corporate.
One of the external spiritual practices was simplicity, that is, living in a way that is intentional in the non-accumulation of stuff. Both my wife and I have made deliberate efforts in the last year or so to de-clutter our lives, to stop buying the useless and the inane (with varying levels of success) and have felt the better for it.
A popular holiday spot for us is a little caravan at Nelsons Bay 3 hours north of Sydney. We spend a week or so at a time there and never notice the absense of a big T.V, the DVD collection or all the other “things” that lay around the apartment. In those times we know what it is to live simply and we are endeavoring to let simplicity fill not just our holiday times but also the rest of our lives.
Here is a quick snip from the article:
Mr. Belic says his documentary shows that “the one single trait that’s common among every single person who is happy is strong relationships.”
Buying luxury goods, conversely, tends to be an endless cycle of one-upmanship, in which the neighbors have a fancy new car and — bingo! — now you want one, too, scholars say. A study published in June in Psychological Science by Ms. Dunn and others found that wealth interfered with people’s ability to savor positive emotions and experiences, because having an embarrassment of riches reduced the ability to reap enjoyment from life’s smaller everyday pleasures, like eating a chocolate bar.
And a link
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/business/08consume.html?pagewanted=1&_r=4&emc=eta1
The church must be
reminded that it is not the master or the servant
of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It
must
be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its
tool. If the
church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will
become an
irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual
authority.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to
Love, 1963.
We are susceptible to heretical teachings because,
in one form or another, they nurture and reflect the way that we would
have it be, rather than the way God has provided, which is infinitely
better for us. As they lead us into the blind alleys of self-indulgence
and escape from life, heresies pander to the most unworthy tendencies of
the human heart.
Bishop C. FitzSimmons Allison
Phil Yancey wrote a final column for Christianity Today that has been resonating with my pondering of late.
Those who know me well know that I spend a good deal of my time on the issues of form and structure of church. Not something I write on much because to be honest, it’s quite boring most of the time.
The tradition of church I am involved with and ordained into is part of the “Stone-Campbell” movement. The movement was originally about church unity and finding form and expression of church in New Testament principals and experience. It’s a worthy goal however we can easily get caught up in silly questions like “Should we have musical instruments in church?” and it really starts to miss the point.
Getting back to my pondering…
Like I said, I research a lot of form and structure questions because I believe that context is important to the shape of a local congregation and can not be externally imposed by either a church governing body or by society and culture at large and the latter does seem to be playing a leading role in how we structure our churches.
So my thoughts are, what if everything we do in church is counter-productive to the gospel? How often do we sit down and ask the hard questions like this? Is having a building productive or counter-productive? Is music productive or counter-productive? Is prayer time productive or counter-productive? Is meeting productive or counter-productive? Are small groups productive or counter-productive? Is feeding the local homeless productive or counter-productive? Is not feeding the local homeless productive or counter-productive? And so on.
There are two questions that come out of this. 1. What would happen if we just did the opposite of everything we are currently doing? 2. Are there some elements of our practice (in our particular contexts) that should just be rid of?
In one church I worked with they took the first approach uncritically and without thought. They saw the decline in their church and said to themselves “what we are doing isn’t working so let’s do the opposite”, but it all ended up being superficial. They changed the music, painted the hall, even changed the communion plates but it was at it’s core the same place.
When we set about to change things do we ever really deeply examine ourselves and our church community to see beyond the superficial? I’m not saying you should stop feeding the homeless if that’s what your church does, but there may well come a time where doing so is counter-productive to the mission of the gospel in your church. Hard to believe, but it’s true. Just because you can do something does not mean that it is the right thing to do.
(This is a bit of hyperbole but I really want to make the point clear that just because something is good, that does not necessarily make it the mission of your local church, all of these things need to be approached with prayer and discernment.)
Simply cutting programs is not the answer to indiscriminate change. Just because the visitation program has been running for 50 years does not make it an antiquated or useless endeavor.
Getting back to the point once more…
Have you had an honest assessment of the health of your church and it’s activities in sharing the gospel?
Let me suggest these questions to gauge the health of your church:
* Is it growing? Growth is not the best indicator of health but an unhealthy body doesn’t grow.
* Are your programs understaffed? Are you just spreading a congregation too thin?
* Are you scared of asking somebody outside your church to evaluate it’s health?
* Pastor are you scared of your congregation?
* Congregation, do you look for an excuse to not be involved in the life of your church, be it Sunday or any other day?
* Are you spreading the gospel?
