pastorjohnb

Thoughts and musings on faith and our mighty God!

Tag Archives: Christ


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The Glorious Story

Reading: James 5: 7-10

“Be patient”.  That can be hard to do.  This is not so hard when life is good and you feel blessed.  Patience from a place of contentment is feasible.  But when life is hard and it seems to be one hardship after one setback after one more dose of bad news, patience can be hard to muster.  When one is struggling in life, patience is hard because hope is dim.  Many in our communities and probably some in our congregations are in a daily battle with life.  They do not know the hope and promise found in Jesus.

To the believers, James says, “Be patient and stand firm because the coming of the Lord is near”.  He goes on to remind us that the Judge is standing at the door.  The door to what?  Maybe the door to our hearts?  Maybe the door that opens to lead to His return?  We may not know the answers to these questions, but we do know that Jesus has already come.  As faithful followers we now prepare to celebrate the first coming of the baby Jesus.  We celebrate this because it leads to the life of Jesus, God in the flesh.  In life, Jesus taught us what it looks like to live God and to love neighbor.  This is the example we try to follow.  We also celebrate His life because it leads to Hid death and resurrection.  In the end, Jesus conquered the bonds of sin and death.  Through this victory Jesus gave us the gift of forgiveness that leads to eternal life.

It is with this knowledge that we enter Advent.  Knowing the rest of the glorious story.  It is with this story that we live now with the risen Savior.  He is our hope and promise now.  This brings patience in the trial now because we know the forever story.  We know Jesus will one day return and will restore all things.  We eagerly await this too.

Our quest is to share this story with another, so that they too may know the whole story.  Advent is a time when people are ripe to hear hope and promise.  It is in the air.  Who do you know that needs hope and promise amidst their struggles?  Share the glorious story with them today.


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Tears of Joy

Reading: Psalm 137: 1-6

Psalm 137 is also a song of lament.  The Israelites held captive in Babylon are strangers in a foreign land.  They miss Jerusalem, their homes, the temple.  The culture and the ways of the Babylonians are strange and often run counter to the faith in God that the Israelites practice.  On top of all this, the Israelites must endure taunts and torment from the Babylonians.  The Israelites are asked to sing the songs of God – the God who loves and saves them.  How ironic the twist as they live in exile.

We look at the news and see the things going on around us and we too lament.  As followers of Jesus Christ we are often “strangers in a foreign land”.  We miss the good old days when everyone knew God, when the churches were full, and when the name of God drew only respect.  The culture and ways of the world are strange and often run counter to our faith and to God’s ways.  And on top of all this, the calls of hypocrites, elitists, and judgmental ring out from those who stand against God and the church.  We often feel and act small for a people who worship the God of all creation.

Our sadness and tears for our world are much like the years shed by the Israelites.  We shed tears of alienation and rejection.  We too are reminded of our reality that we are in this world but not of it.  Our home is in heaven.  We, however, also shed tears of sadness and empathy.  We see so many who do not know Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and we are sad.  This great gift of salvation that we received from God is a gift for all people.  The sadness and empathy that wells up in us and knowing the gift of life that we have leads us out into the world to share Christ’s light and love.  As we bring Christ into the world, as we see others coming to know Christ, our tears will become tears of joy over another won for Christ.  We go forth knowing we serve and love a mighty God.  Thanks be to God.


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Called

Reading: 1 Timothy 1: 12-14

Paul reminds us today that God can use anybody to help build the kingdom.  Paul acknowledges that his past included blasphemy, persecution, and violence – all against the newly founded church that followed Jesus.  He was very zealous in his work against this new church.  Yet God, in a show of great mercy, claimed Paul for service in the kingdom.  In a flash all the zeal against Christ became zeal for Christ.

When we look at Paul’s past, we can see how God was at work preparing Paul for the role we know him in as one of the great missionaries and teachers if the early church.  Early on Saul, as the old Paul was known, was a star pupil.  He was very intelligence and quickly learned the Hebrew Bible inside and out.  He quickly rose through the religious ranks and became a very well respected Pharisee.  It was all of this past knowledge and practices that allowed Paul to so skillfully build His case for Christ and to defend it against attacks from non-believers and the Jewish authorities as well.

Each of enters into God’s service in a similar way.  We too all come with our past sins and mistakes.  But we also come with we have done and experienced and learned in life.  The gifts and talents that God has blessed each of us with are a part of who we are as well.  Just like Paul, when we are called or led into service in some particular way, we are ready.  We are just who God has prepared us to be and needs us to be for that role.

Like so many before us, often we too ask, “Me?” as our initial response to God’s call.  We are usually skilled at saying “Well…”, “But…”, “When…”, and “No” also.  But God does not call us unless we have been equipped for the task at hand.  We may not know this or feel this way, but God knows better.  May we each obediently respond to God’s call in our lives so that we may say as Paul said, “I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has given me strength, that He considered me faithful, appointing me to service”.


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Cannot Be Shaken

Reading: Hebrews 12: 25-29

This passage in Hebrews was written in a time when following Christ could be very dangerous.  It could cost you your life.  While many of us do not face this danger today, in some parts of the world it is the reality.  Christians around the world die for their faith daily.  While most of us do not face this ultimate price, being a follower has a ‘cost’ to all believers.  This passage today is meant to encourage all believers and to remind us if the hope we have in Christ.

In following Christ, the cost can come in a number of ways.  It can be economic or social or relational.  As a Christian our choices and decisions can cost us popularity, status, position, or power.  It may cost us success as we choose to live following God’s ways.  We may choose to live less extravagantly as we choose to honor God first with our resources.  Our faith may cost us friendships, business partnerships, and even familial relationships as others choose to walk a worldly path.  There can be many costs.

Hebrews reminds us that we are one day “receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken”.  While in this earthly kingdom we face many ‘costs’.  They can shake us at times.  They can make us question and doubt.  We can also have our faith and our lives shaken by forces out of our control.  Economic downturns, violence and wars, disease, and death are just a few examples of things that can shake us.  Life and the circumstances that surround it and fragile and often we have little or no control over it.  Yet in the midst of this stands Jesus, our rock.  In the here and now, Jesus is our unshakable foundation.  As we lived out our blessed lives here on earth, we know beyond the shadow of a doubt, that Jesus awaits us in the heavens, the kingdom that cannot be shaken.


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Pruning

Reading: Isaiah 5: 1-4

In our passage today God laments, “What more could I have done for my vineyard”?  God thinks back to the fertile land flowing with milk and honey that was handed over to Israel.  God recalls the cities they did not built that were offered as dwelling places.  God remembers how a shield was kept about them, protecting them from their enemies.  God’s people, the vineyard so carefully tended, is now producing bad fruit.  The people had all they needed to produce good fruit but have instead turned away from God.  God looks and sees bloodshed instead of justice, heard cries of distress instead of righteousness.

The passage calls us to look at and reflect on our own lives.  God has also richly blessed us in so many ways.  God has built hedges of protection around us.  God has poured into our lives the example of Jesus found in the scriptures and has given us the gift of the Holy Spirit to lead and guide us.  God has given us all we need to go forth and produce a good crop.  So we must honestly ask ourselves if we are doing so.  Are we using all of God’s rich blessings to go out and produce a crop of justice and righteousness and love?

Too often we can be like the crop God finds in Israel.  The soil is good and the leaves are healthy.  But the fruit underneath is sour.  We go to church and maybe even read our Bibles every day.  Then we go to work and exploit those with less power or cut a corner or bend a law for our own gain.  Or maybe we say and do all the right things out in public but harbor an addiction within the secret places of our lives.  We somehow think God does not know, but the pruning shears are ready to go to work.

Maybe instead we are holding onto a sin we can’t quite give to God or we are nursing a grudge or hurt from long ago and we can’t quite offer forgiveness to another.  God calls aloud for us to give up all that holds us back, to release anything that separates us from God, and to lay it at the cross.  God invites us to do this so that we can walk in a right relationship with our Lord and Savior.  God desires to prune away all that keeps us from being all God intends us to be.  Pruning can be hard but the results are a healthier plant that produced a better crop.  May we be willing to lay down all that hinders and separates us from God so that we may walk humbly and faithfully with our Lord.


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In Spirit and Truth

Reading: Isaiah 1: 11-15

Isaiah writes to a people who are simply going through the motions with God.  They may be offering sacrifices and saying the corporate prayers but their hearts are far from God.  They may be doing all the ‘right’ things according to the Law, but they are far from the intent and reason for worship.  Their worship is not connecting them to God.  Since they are not connecting to God, they are not experiencing God’s presence in their lives.  They leave worship and leave God in the synagogue or temple.

In the New Testament, Jesus echoes Isaiah’s call.  Jesus calls on us to worship God in spirit and in truth.  Worshipping God in spirit involves us in connecting to God’s spirit in worship.  In worship we can connect to God in an intimate and personal way.  In doing so we come to know the Creator’s will and purpose for our lives.  We too often come to worship expecting to ‘get’ something.  Worship is about offering ourselves to God and allowing God to transform us into who we were created to be as a child of God.

When we worship in spirit then God’s truth will shape and form how we live.  When we worship in truth we are honest and open to what God speaks into our hearts and are willing to go where God leads.  The fruit of authentic and real worship is revealed in how God transforms us.  When we worship in truth we are led to repentance, to seeking to bring God’s love into the world, to do good in our world.  Through God’s transforming power we are conformed more and more into living as Christ lived in the world, bringing glory and honor to God in all we do.

When we worship in spirit and truth, we worship in a way that is open to God working in our lives.  We come to God with the desire to be transformed, filled up, and sent out into the world to live for God.  May we offer all we have and all we are to God in worship this day, allowing God’s spirit and truth to transform us into the likeness of Christ, bringing His light and love to the world in need.


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Presence

Reading: Psalm 107: 43

Today’s verse is a great reminder to do something we seldom do enough of: consider the great love of the Lord.  In the busyness of our lives we rarely slow down enough to pause and recognize God’s role and presence in our lives.  Thus we rarely slow down enough to offer our praise and thanksgiving for God’s activity and presence in our lives.  The less we do this, the less we seem to be thankful to have God in our lives.

When we are in touch with God’s activity in our lives, we are grateful for the many ways we experience that love and presence.  We are also more aware of the ways we can use God’s love to engage others through the use of the gifts and talents that God has uniquely blessed us each with.  This is our grateful response.  This engagement also keeps us focused on God and our faith.  The more we recognize and offer our thanks for God in our life, the more we become aware of it.  It is a good cycle.

As a church, we too can become so focused on what we are doing to involve new people or whatever we think God is calling us to that we forget God is involved as well.  As the body becomes more and more us-centered we slowly but gradually lose the sense of God leading and guiding the church.  On the other hand, there are churches who seek God’s presence, direction, will… almost constantly.  These churches very much have God at the center of all they do.  Looking in from the outside one can see how alive the Spirit of God is in that place and in those people.  It is a beautiful and wonderful thing.

As children of God, we too must seek God’s presence and be aware of God’s handprints in our lives.  Our grateful response is to offer God our thanksgiving and praise.  In doing so we too will exude the light and love of God and Christ in us.  We will be a living example of Christ to all we encounter.  May our joyful, Christ-centered lives witness to our faith and the hope we have in Him this day.


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Redemption 

Reading: Psalm 107: 1-9

Sometimes as Christians it can be easy to settle into a comfortable faith.  The further we get from that last big brush with grace, the less we remember what redemption feels like.  It is in those times that we really struggle and Christ sweeps in to our rescue that we feel the strongest expressions of grace and forgiveness and redemption.  Once we get past those times when struggles were common in our early walk of faith, we can slip into a sort of cruise control.  Then it can be easy to forget that others are still in a struggle.  We lose touch with what it feels like to be held captive to something.

There are many people that struggle in life.  The battle may be with things such as drugs and alcohol.  It may be pornography.  It may be abuse.  It may be due to forces such as injustice or oppression.  It may be cultural or economic.  When we ourselves forget what redemption and that taste of freedom was like, we can lose our drive to help others find freedom from whatever is holding them captive.

The true freedom we find in Christ is the only real freedom from all that binds and holds humanity captive.  In our struggles we may succeed in the battle for a short time when we fight it on our own.  But Satan always regains a foothold when we try to do it alone because in us there is weakness.  It is only when we call on the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ that can find redemption from all that binds us.  It is by His strength alone that we have a chance in this battle.  But all who do not know Christ cannot call on His name.

As faithful disciples of Jesus Christ it is our call and charge to make the good news known to all people.  It is our call to share Christ with who struggle with the powers of this world so that all may come to know the redeeming and freeing power of Christ.  Only in Christ is true freedom found.  May we share Jesus and His redeeming love this day with all who are held captive to sin so that Christ may set them free.


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Giving Self to God

Reading: Colossians 2: 6-19

We often try to fill our lives with so many things and activities that we think will bring us joy, happiness, contentment, peace.  We chase after things that appear to be just what we need to get us to that ‘place’ where we think all will be ‘good’.  As we pursue these things of the world we come to realize soon enough that they do not really satisfy.

In other seasons of life we fill our lives with so many things and activities that we do not seem to have time for Christ.  So many things simply consume our time and leave us exhausted and with little energy to pour into our relationship with Christ.  What little we have left that we do offer to Christ is a pittance of what it should be.  As we get completely run down we realize our need for Christ and our need to re-prioritize our lives.

In each day we have a finite amount of time and energy.  Christ needs to be the center of our lives if we are truly to find content and satisfied lives.  He is the big item that must first be given time and energy each day.  When Christ is our core and foundation, all else will fall into line, all else will be taken care of.  Our gift of our presence must be the first thing we give to Christ each day.  In this way we demonstrate our love for Him by giving Him our best and we also show our trust in Christ that all else will be cared for throughout the day.  Each day may be begin by dedicated ourselves to God, by giving Him the best moments of our day, and we will find the joy, happiness, contentment, peace we desire.


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In Christ Alone

Reading: Colossians 2: 6-19

In order to both stay strong and to grow in our faith, we must be well connected to Christ.  We accomplish this by being in a close personal relationship with Him.  As God incarnate, Christ came to earth and lived among us so that we could better relate to Him and could better connect to His example and teachings.

Today’s reading gives us three ways to see our connection to Christ.  The first is that of a tree.  Christ is the soil that nourishes our faith and allows us to grow in Him.  We, like a tree, need to sink down deep roots.  The winds of life will try and blow us this way and that.  If we are not deeply rooted in Christ, we can be easily swayed and perhaps could even topple over.  When we are deeply rooted, we can pull from deep within ourselves to withstand what life brings.

The second metaphor is that of a house.  In this example, Christ is our strong foundation.  Christ and His teachings are the solid rock upon which we build our lives.  The solid foundation of our faith keeps us anchored when the storms of life come.  The trials and struggles will surely come.  But when we are rock solid in our faith and our foundation is built on Christ alone, then we can handle the things that happen that will test our faith.

Christ as the head is the third way we need to connect to Him.  In our own bodies the brain controls everything.  The brain controls all function and thought.  The brain is the complete control center.  We do not do anything without impulses, thoughts, and decisions passing through our brains.  In our lives, Christ needs to function in the same way.  All we do and say and think needs to come through Christ dwelling in us.  All must be filtered through the ‘what would Jesus do’ question.

Each day we need to be in the Word, to spend time in prayer, and to reflect on God’s will and direction for our lives.  Each day we need to take His teachings and go forth to be the light and love our world so needs.  Each day may we be firmly rooted in Christ, standing strong upon the foundation He provides, so that we may humbly and faithfully be His hands and feet in the world.