Psalm 86-90; Ephesians 1

I want to revisit a psalm I read yesterday morning, Psalm 81.8-16.  ”If only…”  That’s the heart song here.  ”If only you would listen to me, Israel!”  Later, it says: “How I wish my people would listen to me!  How I wish Israel would walk in my ways!  Then I would subdue their enemies in a second; I would turn my hand against their foes.  Those who hate the LORD would grovel before me, and their doom would last forever!  But I would feed you with the finest wheat.  I would satisfy you with honey from the rock.”

My prayer, America, is that we, in light of yet another terrorist attack, will respond appropriately.  An appropriate response cannot live in vengeance, for vengeance belongs to the Creator (Romans 12.19).  It takes more than human understanding to administer right judgment.  We are not the point here; God is.  We are not the main idea; God is.  We are not the purpose; God has God’s purpose.  Ours is to be faithful and follow.  When our brothers and sisters symbolically attack their own kind, be it airline jets through two of the most symbolic buildings on the most symbolic spot or dirty bombs blasting amid unexpected crowds on a most symbolic day at a most symbolic event at another symbolic place, our response should be to first listen.  Our safety, as we’ve seen again, cannot rest in the hands of human systems, by human means, and through human methods.  Our well-being rests in the LORD’s salvation–here now and the hereafter.  

Psalm 91:  ”Living in the Most High’s shelter, camping in the Almighty’s shade, I say to the LORD, ‘You are my refuge, my stronghold!  You are my God–the one I trust!’”

“God will save you from the hunter’s trap and from deadly sickness.  God will protect you with his pinions; you’ll find refuge under his wings.  His faithfulness is a protective shield.  Don’t be afraid of terrors at night, arrows that fly by daylight, or sickness that prowls in the dark, destruction that ravages at noontime.  Even if one thousand people fall dead next to you, ten thousand right beside you–it won’t happen to you.  Just look with your eyes, and you will see the wicked punished.  Because you’ve made the LORD my refuge, the Most High, your place of residence–no evil will happen to you; no disease will come close to your tent.  Because he will order his messengers to help you, to protect you wherever you go.  They will carry you with their own hands so you don’t bruise your foot on a stone.  You’ll march on top of lions and vipers; you’ll trample young lions and serpents underfoot.”

“God says, ‘Because you are devoted to me, I’ll rescue you.  I’ll protect you because you know my name.  Whenever you cry out to me, I’ll answer.  I’ll be with you in troubling times.  I’ll save you and glorify you.  I’ll fill you full with old age.  I’ll show you my salvation.”

God alone is our safety.  If we are not safe, then we must, once again, seek the only safety we have.  Dwelling on the whys and hows and even the whos won’t help.  Seeking God is the only next step.  Will we, America, understand that this time?

Psalm 66-70; Galatians 1

I’m struck, as I pray and read today, by the sense of urgency in God’s word.  What if we were to recapture that sense of urgency? We’re called to urgency, if for no other reason than the ongoing fact that we “are so quickly deserting the one who called us by the grace of Christ to follow another gospel”(Galatians 1.6).  The psalmist today, whether it’s just my reading or if indeed the mood is becoming more climactic in the approach of book two’s ending and book three’s beginning, seems more urgent.  The psalmist longs for “God of the Heavenly Forces,” especially in Psalm 69-70.  ”Save me,” “My eyes are exhausted with waiting for my God,” “Save me from the mud!” “Don’t let me be swept away by the floodwaters!” “Don’t let the abyss swallow me up!” Don’t let the pit close its mouth over me!” “Answer me, LORD” “Turn to me in your great compassion!” “Don’t hide your face from me,” “Answer me quickly!” “Come close to me!” “Redeem me!” “Save me because of my enemies!” “Let your salvation keep me safe, God!” “Hurry, God, to deliver me; hurry, LORD, to help me!” “Hurry to me, God!” “Oh, LORD, don’t delay!”

 I don’t think God calls us to a rushed life, but we are called to this sense of urgency and longing for God’s presence.  ”There’s no time like the present,” indeed, as the saying goes; but, the present belongs to our Lord, as does every moment.

“But me?  My prayer reaches you, LORD, at just the right time.  God, in your great and faithful love, answer me with your certain salvation!”(Psalm 69.13)

What do we do now, Lord?  You, our champion, have been humiliated beyond infamy.  Hope?  A sense of God’s promise?  Nah.  With you here, both hang dead upon this Pagan-made, executioner’s tool.  We thought you were the one.  Here you hang, our one true chance at redemption–our hope of rising from those centuries-old ashes.  But, nope: it’s over; it’s finished.  What did you mean, “It is finished”?

You’ve left us with only our devastation and this bewilderment.  It only hurts now when we remember all you taught us.  It’s all just too heartbreaking; we hurt too badly; we’re just so disappointed.

There’s nowhere to turn now, nothing a golden calf can do to help.  We’re in no mood to eat, drink, and merry-make.  All the ways of the nations in which we’ve dabbled, none are helpful here; all are too small.  We would bend our knees in worship, but they’re bent already in grief and humility.

It seems as though death, life’s one equalizer, that one-way ticket to Sheol, has bested you, our great hope at acquiring God’s favor again.  You merely suffer the fate of all the others we thought to be the messiah–that promised son of man.

But, weren’t you different?  What about the way we felt when fished filled our nets; when you spoke in such a way that we just had to come and see?  What about the great works we witnessed–miracles: multiples of bread and fish; the blind seeing, the lame walking; the ease of the dis-eased; demons cowering at the mere sound of your voice?

Yet, here you hang, no different than those other two criminals there beside you; no different than if I were hanging upon that cross.  How much more appropriate it would be were it I who was hanged.  Me: yes, God knows I’ve been tremendously unfaithful, that my wrongdoings are stacked higher than my head, they are a weight that’s way too heavy for me; that my wounds reek; they are all infected because of my stupidity; that I groan because of my miserable heart; yes, God knows I don’t even deserve to look heavenward.

But, you: no, you should be my judge.  Yet, it feels like you’re being judged in my place; no, you were perfect.  And, now, you have robbed me, Jesus: robbed me of my rightfully deserved death.  If you were alive, I could never again belong to myself but, rather, I would belong to you with body and soul in both life and death.

But, what now, Lord?  What now, my descended Savior?  Who are you?  Who am I?  Was it all in vain?

Psalm 25-30; 2 Corinthians 8

Today, in exercising my life of prayer, I’m both convicted and encouraged. Ministering in an affluent church comes with many perks but maybe, Spiritually speaking, even more challenges (Matt.19.24). I don’t know which is better known: Stan Lee’s quote from Uncle Ben Parker or Jesus in Luke12.48. But, either way, we must be SUPER careful when it comes to discerning what “responsibility” or what “much” means in both.

Enter my conviction. Trust is the theme of our prayer language. With trust comes a particular action: SEEKING. God’s children/Christians must seek the Lord. I’m Reformed and Presbyterian, but neither of those eliminates the command and prerequisite of seeking. Our prayer language is a seeking language. God’s children are (and are always to remain) needy. Ignore the Prosperity Gospel! It only makes prosperous preachers. The Church, in all its shapes and forms and situations, is to remain needy. WE ARE RECEIVERS first and foremost. That can never be forgotten. Thus, she–the Church–is to consist of the needy.

Yes: all of this means that YOU are to be needy. You and I are to always know ourselves as the very ones in need of God’s presence at each and every moment. We are not to prosper in material resources. God gives those merely so that others will be equal to us. In God’s kingdom, if you got it, it’s for everybody. The Church is to never outgrow or out-resource its various parts (2Cor.8.13-15).

Why? See, this is what matters in all this. We can never rest in ourselves, in our resources, in our abilities, or even in our hard work or dreams. We can only rest on the true Rock who is faithful and just. Our way is to always, at each and every moment, seek the presence of the LORD, who is our life, our joy, and our reason for being.

Psalm 16-20; 2 Cor. 6

I was reading from Eugene Peterson’s Under the Unpredictable Plant the other day.  In it, he makes the case for God’s people living a life of prayer.  Such a life begins with a worshiping community each week (or at some point during the week).  Then there’s the daily practice of praying the psalms (5/day gets one through the book in about a month).  Lastly, there’s the important element of prayers remembered during the hours of any given day.

We’re truly who and what God made us to be when we worship–specifically, when we worship together with other God-made folk.  To do so each week is a waste of time, indeed, but a waste of time that is warranted and commanded by God.  There we meet the risen Christ as we once again hear the gospel of his death and resurrection and as our faith in the God who raised Christ from the dead is renewed and strengthened.

Praying the psalms, then, is where we learn to speak “prayer.”  All of us cooed at our mother’s breast (or at the formula’s bottle).  It wasn’t until we were with other humans long enough that we learned to express our needs in words, in a language.  The psalms teach us the language of human speech towards God.  Most every human emotion is contained within these prayers.  Peterson makes the case that the psalms in scripture are the precise way we talk to God.  Most every patriarch, matriarch, prophet, and even the Savior prayed them.

Prayers remembered is where the rubber meets the road.  I encounter a situation in my life of prayer; I have been given a language to express precisely what could/should be offered to God; and, it is spoken, experienced, and lived out in this life of prayer of mine.

Want to live a life of prayer?  Pray Psalms!  Five psalms a day will cycle you through this better-than-Rosetta-Stone prayer language class each month.  I like to throw in another chapter of another scripture book per day, too.  That way, this life of prayer will come by experience and have the authority and integrity of scripture upon which to stand.

Today, I end this post in thanksgiving, as I move through the rest of this day having learned from my prayer language class the joy of the good news that our God is a God in which we can confidently find refuge: rock-like, nurturing, and protective against even life’s greatest impossibilities.

I love to see the land come alive again in spring.  Winter, it seems, was there to quell the adolescent urges of earth.  Spring thinks it’s always spring, needing the nurture of a nature mother, mature in the ways of living—in the ways of the glorious—to caress and discipline its dire need to be known in the eyes, in the noses, in the ears, on the tongues, and in the sensation of living skin populating such a lively planet.  Beauty abounds in spring; and, precisely because of beauty’s abundance, winter must come to teach us, to remind us, that we are alive and that the world is indeed a beautiful place.  Without death, we cannot know life (1 Corinthians 15.35-50).

Easter people, as the earth blossoms and blatantly reveals its beauty once again, walk upon this earth as resurrection people—regardless of the season in your life—with a faith in full bloom in the God who raised Jesus from the dead.  And, may your flowering joy and glory in the God of new life and re-creation honestly draw souls who will drink of that same eternal nectar and who just might get some gospel pollen on their feet, partaking in the kingdom growth that is God’s work all around us.

Remember Martin from a previous post on MinistryDaily.com?  Check this out!

From Martin Boroson:

One of my dreams is to introduce One-Moment Meditation in workplaces–
to relieve stress and help organizations function more mindfully.

Well, the Wisdom 2.0 Conference was created by some leaders at Google
and Twitter to explore ideas just like this … and I have been selected as
a finalist to give a workshop at their next conference.

I am really thrilled about this … but I need your help … because a public vote 
will now decide which five finalists get to deliver a workshop.

So my request is …

Will you vote for me? 

This just requires two quick clicks:

1. Go to this Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/wisdom2conference/app_197602066931325

2. Look for my blurb, “How to Meditate in a Moment,”
and then click on the white “vote” box next to that title.

The deadline for this is Sunday  …

But it would be extra helpful if you would vote by Saturday.

There are so many people could benefit from “taking a moment” at work. And
I am convinced that this presentation will spread the word about One-Moment Meditation in a really significant way.

Thank you so much for your help.

Warmly,

Marty

Psalm 116

 Thanksgiving for Recovery from Illness

¹ I love the Lord, because he has heard
my voice and my supplications.
² Because he inclined his ear to me,
therefore I will call on him as long as I live.
³ The snares of death encompassed me;
the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me;
I suffered distress and anguish.
⁴ Then I called on the name of the Lord:
‘O Lord, I pray, save my life!’ 
⁵ Gracious is the Lord, and righteous;
our God is merciful.
⁶ The Lord protects the simple;
when I was brought low, he saved me.
⁷ Return, O my soul, to your rest,
for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you.
⁸ For you have delivered my soul from death,
my eyes from tears,
my feet from stumbling.
⁹ I walk before the Lord
in the land of the living.
¹⁰ I kept my faith, even when I said,
‘I am greatly afflicted’;
¹¹ I said in my consternation,
‘Everyone is a liar.’
¹² What shall I return to the Lord
for all his bounty to me?
¹³ I will lift up the cup of salvation
and call on the name of the Lord,
¹⁴ I will pay my vows to the Lord
in the presence of all his people.
¹⁵ Precious in the sight of the Lord
is the death of his faithful ones.
¹⁶ O Lord, I am your servant;
I am your servant, the child of your serving-maid.
You have loosed my bonds.
¹⁷ I will offer to you a thanksgiving sacrifice
and call on the name of the Lord.
¹⁸ I will pay my vows to the Lord
in the presence of all his people,
¹⁹ in the courts of the house of the Lord,
in your midst, O Jerusalem.
Praise the Lord!

Do you long for that “simple” relationship with God?  I know I do.  The psalmist captures it big time here.  We see a point in the life of this psalmist in that dark valley, the land of Sheol, where death is as much welcomed as the next breath.  Yet, there’s faith: faith amid the cry for help.  Actually, the sense is that the capacity to recognize helplessness came from faith.  This faith increases, as we can tell from the introduction, because this psalmist “simply” knows that God hears; and, because of this, the psalmist freely loves the Lord!

My favorite line in this psalm is repeated in verses 14 and 18: “I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people.”  This is terribly difficult for those of us who are of the more people-please’r types.  Remember how this willingness to live out these vows before others came about for this psalmist.  There was death.  That’s right!  Check out verse 15.  This isn’t some general statement.  I think this psalmist really experienced a death of sorts when, in verse 4, the plead for salvation came.  It was honest; it was all the psalmist had left, for he was broken beyond repair.

When you and I find ourselves broken beyond repair, when our tour of Sheol brings us to the breaking point of indifference between taking our next breath or simply expiring, then faith works itself out in us, wells up those fountains of the Holy Spirit that reach to eternity (John 4.14), and the Spirit then groans (Romans 8.26) with profundity, “O Lord, I pray, save my life!”

Maybe then we’ve become “simple” (v.6).  Maybe then we “walk in the land of the living” (v.9) Maybe then we’ve been loosed from the snares (v.3) and we are free to “lift up the cup of salvation” (v.13) in our soul’s rest (v.7).  Maybe then we begin living out Christ’s true call to “come and see” (John 1.35-39), to simply follow (Mark 1.16-20)–and nothing more or less–in Christ’s true body, the Church, before God’s people (v.14, 18)–free to live as children (Matthew 18.3) with God as our Father and the Church as our Mother (v.16).

I remember a commercial back in the day that was advertising some kind of pimple product (Stridex Pads?).  There was a moment when a student in a school cafeteria, while speaking with some friends, says, “Well, my dad’s a dermatologist, and he says…”  At that moment, the whole lunchroom gets quiet and stares at the girl speaking, like the answer to all they’ve been searching for in the quest to eliminate acne was about to be revealed.

That’s sort of how I felt when I saw that Christopher Michael Langan was to appear as a guest on Coast to Coast AM.  Nobody’s perfect; and, I totally buy into one of my friend’s philosophies positing that we can never think our way to the truth.  However, Langan’s CTMU is pretty dang amazing.

I find Chris fascinating and worth sharing with the world.

This should be required reading for any and all ministers in any and all capacities.  What if the church were encouraged to master the moment?  This is worth considering!

The book: