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five on Friday

from David Runcorn’s book, ‘Fear & Trust, ‘The primary but most demanding quality of a leader is to be a non-anxious presence’. Worth chewing on.

1 Supersimbo & DA Carson remind us, that we don’t drift toward holiness.
2 beware of the seductions of the local church: made in the image of what?
3 amidst our broken, curious and beautiful world: 50 things to help and make you smile!
4 Bill Hybels reflects on planting a church 37 years on from the Willow Creek launch.
5 Mary DeMuth’s, great article and artwork on untending. 

a burning yes!

In seeking God, we let go of the things that interfere with the life of God. That’s the theory at least! 

Psalm 16 v 11 is a gem:- “You will show me the path of life; in Your presence is fullness of joy; at Your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” Giving up the lesser in order to gain the greater does hurt sometimes. There’s no question that self-discipline can be quite uncomfortable, even painful. It does no good to deny the pain. But this pain we gladly accept if our hearts truly burn with the passion of what matters more to us than anything else in the world.

The ‘thou shalt nots’ that confront us are not arbitrary rules of a God who wishes to keep His creatures as unhappy as possible. There’s no inherent virtue in abstinence, for God does not expect us to give up things just for the sake of giving them up. Instead, there’s always some gift that God wants to place in our hands, a gift we’ll have no room to hold until we put down the load of lesser things we are presently holding. In persevering, we’ll see that God asked us to give up only those things that interfered with the exchange of authentic love.

Last summer revealed that gold medals aren’t won through self-indulgence. They’re won by years of focused training, the choice having been made to forgo other things that might have been enjoyed in order to single-mindedly pursue a dream. The athlete trains while wistfully watching others entertain themselves living for the moment; they live wisely for the goal.

Repeatedly scripture reminds us that hope has a purifying effect. “Everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure” 1 John 3 v 3. To the extent that our spiritual hope matters as much as we say it does, we’ll purge our lives of anything inconsistent with that hope, eager to abstain from things that even distract us from God. If we’ve paid the price to know what matters the most to us, and if we’ve realized that the only thing worth having is God Himself, then our daily choices will be much easier. The joy of the Lord will be our strength.

Or as the late Stephen Covey put it:-“We find ourselves able to say ‘No!’ to some things because there is a bigger ‘Yes!’ burning deep within us” 

a prayer

this is humbling stuff from +Ken Untener, written in honour of +Oscar Romero. It’s wisdom writing at it’s best!

It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work. Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the Church’s mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.
This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master, builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.

zest

Christian Dior advocate, “Zest is the secret of all beauty. There is no beauty that is attractive without zest!”

Zest is an undeniably attractive quality. I’d not go as far as Christian Dior for I can think of kinds of beauty that attract with serenity rather than with zest. But even so, zest gets a great amount of favourable publicity, and rightfully so.

Most dictionaries indicate that there are two basic meanings of the word ‘zest’ as we use it today. Both of these meanings are suggestive of good things when we speak of zest as a personal characteristic.

1. Intense flavour. Zestful flavours are those that have some zing to them. The word ‘zest’ comes from an obsolete French word for orange or lemon peel, and we still use this to refer to the outermost part of the rind of citrus goodness! As someone who loves to dabble with food at home, I love zest as an ingredient in a recipe. But I love it even more when I people who have an intense and distinctive flavour. People with zest tend to be those who’ve thought about life and taken a definite stand for some things as opposed to others.

2. Spirited enjoyment. People with zest also live with a liveliness and eagerness that is lacking in people who are more bland. There is ‘kick’ in their outlook and ‘gusto’ in their manner of living. That doesn’t mean that they’re unprincipled or wayward, rather that they appreciate that there is much in this world to relish, and they’ve determined to taste all of its tanginess.

Zest is not a prerequisite for beauty, and likewise, it may not be a personal characteristic for everyone. Yet I believe there is a sense in which every person should look at life in a zestful way. As Bertrand Russell said, “What hunger is in relation to food, zest is in relation to life.” Life is too interesting, and too important, for us not to live it with eagerness and enjoyment. I reckon we’d do a better job of living if we put a little more kick into our philosophy.

Henry Ward Beecher said it this way:- “Mirth is the sweet wine of human life. It should be offered sparkling with zestful life unto God.” Is this the radiant and distinctive quality of your faith?

five on Friday

……some brilliant words from one of my heroes: Dallas Willard. “If our theology fails to set a lovable God – radiant, happy, friendly, accessible, totally competant being – before people, we’ve gone wrong!”

1 Vision delayed: how are you with perseverance? Here’s a bit of Wilberforce!
2 Sally’s brilliant poem on holiness
3 What Coldplay can teach you and I about communication.
4 7 ways social media can help you and me: like really!
5 bad hermenutics and questionable communication are always worth a giggle! Watch!

looking back

It’s all of God’s grace that we have come this far in the journey of life. We are thankful for God’s patience with us, for we have been given much. We have the time needed to learn and to grow and to fill out into all of God’s best for us. 

But listen to what Jesus says so firmly:- “‘No one, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God’” Luke 9 v 62

We need to exercise caution in the way we engage with our past. We wouldn’t have done the things we used to do if they hadn’t been attractive to us, and we need not think that they couldn’t become attractive again if we gave them the opportunity. We may have grown stronger, but we’re far from invincible.

It would be impossible to forget completely the sins of our past. The memory of those things to keep us humble. Would you at least refuse to entertain hospitably those acts of selfishness, sin and struggle? Don’t look back longingly.

When we break with our sins, God calls us to do this decisively. It’s a strong thing that Jesus says when says if we ‘look back’ after putting our hands to the plow, we are ‘not fit for the kingdom of God.’ We do not properly honour Him as Lord if our choice to follow Him is not wholehearted.

The commitment to say ‘yes’ to Him must be accompanied by a ‘no’ to the sins that have previously separated us from Him. ‘No’ is a necessary part of repentance.

It’s a dangerous thing to replay the still-enjoyable aspects of sin-memory. Like Lot and his family who were told to leave Sodom, we need in the case of some things, to leave them alone for the rest of our lives. We can’t afford to have any fine print in our contract with God. By His grace, we’re able to close doors and not look back. 

As William Gurnall wrote:- “To forsake sin is to leave it without any thought of returning to it.” Looking back has many dangers: just ask Lots wife.

Capon on Preaching

I think good preachers should be like bad kids. They ought to be naughty enough to tiptoe up on dozing congregations, steal their bottles of religion pills…and flush them all down the drain.(!!) The church, by and large, has drugged itself into thinking that proper human behavior is the key to its relationship with God. What preachers need to do is force it to go cold turkey with nothing but the word of the cross–and then be brave enough to stick around while [the congregation] goes through the inevitable withdrawal symptoms.

But preachers can’t be that naughty or brave unless they’re free from their own need for the dope of acceptance. And they wont be free of their need until they can trust the God who has already accepted them, in advance and dead as door-nails, in Jesus. Ergo, the absolute indispensability of trust in Jesus’ passion. Unless the faith of preachers is in that alone–and not in any other person, ecclesiastical institution, theological system, moral prescription, or master recipe for human loveliness–they will be of very little use in the pulpit.

Robert Farrar Capon