Amazed

Psalm 19

The heavens declare the glory of God;
    the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
    night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
    no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
    their words to the ends of the world.

Sometimes I forget that it’s possible to be speechless. Amazed.  Astonished. Astounded.  Awestruck. Overwhelmed.  I get busy, distracted, focused, and when life is swirling around it’s hard to stop and be amazed.  But this morning looking back over the past several days I’m taking some time to be amazed. 

--Amazed at the beauty of the sunset after all the crazy storms on Monday.  “Pour forth speech” (See Psalm 19 above) seems like an understatement sometimes.  That night, after the incredible deluge of water from the sky had moved on and all the remained were the bright pink clouds, the heavens seemed to me to be screaming about the glory of God.

--Amazed at the way God works out circumstances to put people in front of us to say things that we need to hear.  Things didn't go the way I expected this weekend, and thank God that they didn't or I wouldn't have been able to hear from these people.

--Amazed at the perfection of the moment when the worship leader at the church we went to on Sunday started singing the chorus to this song (play youtube below) which is still ringing in my thoughts today.  Lord, I’m amazed by you.  Yes, I am amazed.  And I’m thankful to be reminded to be amazed.

Look at the nations and watch— and be utterly amazed. For I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told. (Habakkuk 1:5)

Be utterly amazed.  We can count on God to be amazing. He’s always amazing.  We’re just too busy to notice and be amazed.  And that’s one of the reasons I love this song.  It reminds us to stop and be amazed and humbled by God.

The people were amazed when they saw the mute speaking, the crippled made well, the lame walking and the blind seeing. And they praised the God of Israel.  (Matthew 15:31)

When people saw what Jesus was doing, they were amazed.  They’d never seen anything like this before.  And they recognized that God was doing something that was beyond belief.  They were seeing it with their own eyes, and so they praised God.   But some couldn’t see it because it was too far outside their understanding or expectation of God.  It wasn’t what they’d expected, and instead of being amazed they were dismayed and disgruntled.  How sad that they didn’t get to enjoy what God was doing.  Being amazed by God is a wonderful thing!

What is God doing right now?  Probably way more than I can comprehend or understand.  But I’ve gotten to see a bit of the evidence over the last few days, and this morning I’m thankful for some moments of amazement that’ve prompted me to praise God.  And I hope you are being amazed by God, too.

I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:16-19)

 

 

 

 

 

Journey

 

Sometimes on Tuesday mornings when I download the sermon recording from my little voice recorder and listen to the beginning and ending to make sure it’s ready to post on our church website, I think about all the things I could have said that I didn’t say.  Some sermons could easily be twice as long.  And some sermons, despite all the hours of thought and study and writing, are still not quite what I would have them be.  And as I listen to the one from last Sunday about Moses receiving his call at the burning bush (Exodus 3:1-15) and Jesus telling his disciples to take up their crosses and follow him (Matthew 16:21-28), I find myself thinking about one word I never said but which sums up what I was trying to say—journey.  I answered the question posed in the title, “What is our call?’ with a statement: To passionately give our all to follow Jesus in every part of our lives.  But it could have been just a word.  Journey. 

I mentioned that God promised Moses in Exodus 3:12 that God would be with Moses every step of the way.  This morning I’m remembering the conversation they had later on, in Exodus 33:1-17, when God has said it’s time to get moving but I won’t be going with you anymore because if I do I might destroy you.  And Moses pleads for God to go with them, and God relents and promises to continue to be present with them.  They were on a journey, and the journey would be pointless without God.

Remembering that episode makes it all the more clear why we needed Jesus to put an end to that dilemma once and for all.  God kept having to restrain himself from destroying Israel because they couldn’t help being who they were—“stiff-necked” people (Ex. 33:3), or as one translation puts it, “Impossible to deal with.”  And we too are stiff-necked and difficult, but because of Jesus we are ok to God.  Which is a good thing because we’re looking forward to spending eternity with God, and that would be the opposite of heaven if God was having to try to stop himself from destroying us every moment.  Spending eternity faced with the wrath of God would be . . . hell.

We’re not there yet, though, and in the meantime we’re on a journey through life, following Jesus, hopefully, and if we were to look back over that journey from the end, what would we notice? 

Jesus says in the end of Sunday’s reading from Matthew that he will come again and judge us according to our deeds.  That’s a challenging statement.  There’s an endless supply of God’s grace and forgiveness, and we can’t earn that by our deeds, but I wonder what Jesus might ask us in that day when we finally meet him face to face?

Will he be more concerned with our actions, our words, our thoughts, or all of them together?

What would we want to see looking back over our lives?

·         Did we accept Jesus’ offering to us of grace and forgiveness?

·         Did we share that grace and forgiveness with others through our words and actions?

·         Did we spend time talking to God?

·         Did we seek to grow in our understanding of his will through reading his word and studying it with other disciples?

·         Did we put honoring and enjoying and loving God above all else?

In other words, how did we spend the journey?  And if God’s presence had left us along the way, would we have noticed?  And would we, like Moses, have stopped and pleaded with God to be present with us again?

God has already promised to never leave us, and given us the Holy Spirit to fulfill that promise, but there are still times when it feels like he has left us alone.  Sometimes it takes me a few days to notice that I’m feeling alone, and that my morning times of talking to God have been just going through the motions.  And so sometimes I do plead with God.  Where are you?  What have I done that’s gotten in the way?  What did God say that I refused to listen to?

And today I know that there was a word being said that I didn’t pay attention to . . . journey.  Or maybe that word wasn’t for that day quite yet, but it is for today.  May God go with me into today  . . . and may he go with you, too.

Needing Grace

Sometimes a sermon just isn’t big enough.  Yesterday I preached about forgiveness.  That’s what I saw as the overwhelming theme in Genesis 45 where Joseph tells his brothers that he’s NOT angry about them selling him into slavery years before.  They have trouble believing him, and years later he has to tell them again that they are forgiven, and he says, “You meant it for evil but God used it for good” (Genesis 50:20).  I also talked about the forgiveness equations we find in Jesus’ words in Matthew.  Jesus tells Peter we are to forgive 70x7 times, which is hyperbole for an infinite number (Matthew 18:21), and he also teaches the disciples about prayer, saying that we need to forgive others as we ourselves are forgiven (Matthew 6:12-15).

I found a cool blog about 70x7 with lots of cool stories about forgiveness.  Check it out! 490 words.  Be sure to read why they chose this name.
I also talked about how we need to accept forgiveness.  This can be difficult if we think something is too big or too small to be forgiven, and that’s the problem Joseph’s brothers were having.  But I think I didn’t talk enough about how hard it is to give forgiveness sometimes.  And how with both sides of the equation—accepting and giving forgiveness—the whole thing starts with prayer.

And I wish I had been able to share this insight I found in one of the online commentaries, because it was an emotional day for some.  I hope for good reasons, feeling God's blessings, but even those blessings can be hard when they are stretching and growing us, or when we are feeling overwhelmed with our need and/or by God's grace.

“It is okay for us to be emotional about those moments in life when our situation overwhelms us. Joseph had been living with memories of violence done to him, mixed with his own feelings of sadness, anger, and homesickness. Joseph did not seek revenge, even though his authority would have allowed him to do so. He dreamed of forgiveness and reconciliation, and made it happen. Picture the worst that anyone has ever done to you. Now imagine extending forgiveness by telling that person that God was in the details, working through them to use you for his glory. How much more freeing would that be than simply holding their actions against them forever? That would be beyond forgiveness. That would be grace.”[1]

Grace.  It’s huge because it’s what the Gospel is all about.  Jesus didn’t come to rub our sin in, but to rub it out (John 3:17).  Easy to say, but not always so easy in the execution.  So I’m praying today for all those who are finding grace to be difficult, either in the giving or the accepting.  And I’m reminded once again how much this song is true.

May God bless your seeking him today and every day with the bountiful beauty of grace freely given and received.

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[1] From Ministry Matters Sermon Starters http://www.ministrymatters.com/all/entry/1445/sermon-starter-dreams-come-true