psalmthing to chew on: psalm 25

me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, Israel… that is how psalm 25 reads to me – starts off really good and positive and kind of like the sunday picture of a christian – look at me God, everything is together, You are good, i can sing all the words in all the worship songs and even believe that i believe them and You’re great and thanks for all You’ve done and You’re control and You’ve done some great stuff in the past and everything you do is amazing and i’m done at church and i’m driving home and i reach verse 16 and my mask comes off and i have a fight with my wife and i can’t believe the weekend is finished and i have to go to work on monday and look at all these problems i have God and HELP ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

or something like that:

‘Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted. Relieve the troubles of my heart and free me from my anguish. Look on my affliction and my distress and take away all my sins. See how numerous are my enemies and how fiercely they hate me! Guard my life and rescue me; do not let me be put to shame, for I take refuge in you.’ [vs. 16-20]

and then he slips into his ‘pre-useless-sinner’ mode of hoping his ‘integrity and uprightness’ will rescue him and then quickly finishes off with a quick p.s. of ‘oh and please be nice to Israel, amen’

i really dig this psalm though cos as you read it, it is as if the layers are being peeled away and you get closer and closer to the real man and the heart of the issue and everything is not so rosy and happy and together… and YET he STILL continues to pray and cry out to God, because he knows…

and also maybe cos i can strongly relate many days here in the ‘hood… [and more days than not it's not the 'hood stuff that is causing the problem] – feeling lonely and afflicted but yet continuing to trust in God, because i know!

psalmthing to chew on: psalm 16

this psalm is filled with a number of deep thoughts worth reflecting on, but i will just pick a few:

‘I keep my eyes always on the LORD. With him at my right hand, I will not be shaken.’ [vs.8]

this is the first verse that really caught my attention and really just spoke to me about living a life close to God – john 15 shares the picture of the vine and the branches and encourages us to remain in Him – the idea of being filled with the Spirit [ephesians 5.18] where the original greek apparently is better translated as ‘be being filled with the Spirit’ as if it is telling us that it is a consistently happening activity – so every day inviting God, by His Spirit, to fill you and lead, guide, direct, empower… – and also a reminder to be deeply saturated in the word of God [the bible] which brings life [a truly underrated concept in today's church]

and another great reminder of this is hebrews 12 where we are encouraged to ‘fix our eyes upon Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith…’

verse 5 is an interesting one [which was not one of the initial things that jumped out at me, but only on this third reading] – ‘LORD, you alone are my portion and my cup; you make my lot secure.’

if only the church could live that way. the questions that accompany this verse are:

# what else am i making my portion? what are the things i allow to fill me instead of God in my day to day?
# what else is my cup? what are the things i invite to quench my thirst instead of the words and works of Jesus?
is God REALLY alone my portion and my cup? and if not, where might it be better for a 40 day lenting to be a day to day sacrifice or living differently?

psalmthing to chew on: psalm 7

i know it’s early days, but already this is proving to be an exciting exercise for me and one of the benefits of working through the psalms is discovering ‘new’ ones… i am not saying someone has been sneaking into my bible and adding in new psalms when i haven’t been looking but often when we read the bible we stick to the passages we know well and like and avoid the harder ones or even the books with weird sounding names we have to use the index to find…

so with psalms it is often 23 or my favourite 34 or 121 and 139. it is great to go through one by one because i will get to those psalms in turn, but i will also discover some classic gems along the way…

and on to psalm 7:

this feels similar to the point i made about psalm 5 where David is saying things i’m not convinced his life can back up… certainly things i’d be a lot more nervous to utter… in verses 8-9 he says, ‘Let the LORD judge the peoples. Vindicate me, LORD, according to my righteousness, according to my integrity, O Most High. Bring to an end the violence of the wicked and make the righteous secure — You, the righteous God who probes minds and hearts.’

So David is asking God to judge him according to “my righteousness” and “my integrity” – again, this must have supposedly been written before the whole Bathsheba incident when David would not have been clamoring for those to be the measure points. I know, for my life, as much as i strive for personal righteousness and integrity, that i often fall short. i miss the mark and get it wrong a lot of the time which negates my righteousness. and i have really strong feelings on things like pirating movies/music and telling ‘little white lies’ but am not as strict when it comes to breaking the speed limit or some other things like that so personal hypocrisy in what i stand for and how i live it out often does surface which takes out my integrity from time to time.

so i am not convinced i would want to appeal to God to judge me on the basis of those two things. reminds me of the definitions of mercy and justice: justice is getting what we deserve and mercy is not getting what we deserve and i generally am super amped to lean towards mercy [especially when it comes to parking tickets and speeding fines if i deserve either of those]

i think the last phrase of that verse sums it up – ‘the righteous God who probes minds and hearts’ – God knows. And knowing that God knows [as David gets a lot more familiar with after the Bathsheba incident] i am a lot quicker to meet Him in a place more reliant on His righteousness and integrity than my own.

then the second thing that stood out for me was the language used towards the end which is just some great and explicit imagery that conveys well what he is speaking about – ‘Whoever is pregnant with evil conceives trouble and gives birth to disillusionment. Whoever digs a hole and scoops it out falls into the pit they have made. The trouble they cause recoils on them; their violence comes down on their own heads.’ [16-18]

Reminiscent once more of the depiction of sin in James 1 – ‘When tempted, no one should say, “God is tempting me.” For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; 14 but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.’ [13-15]

And the message that is loud and clear is don’t give time to sin. The imagery of conception and birth refers to a pretty substantial time length – 9 months – and so the idea is that the person involved has entertained and nurtured temptation/sin until such time that it has become a destructive force. We need to kill sin at the root and deal with it as quickly as possible when it emerges or the effect it has on us will be devastating. Keep a short account with God – don’t go to sleep at nite with unconfessed sin lingering, because that way it is too easy for it to grow and give birth…

are you doing and being or just going and saying?

“Are you doing what Jesus did and taught?”

that line came up in the bible devotions this morning at the CCDA conference and it’s not like it’s anything new or particularly revolutionary, but it is a line i think must keep on being said and cried out and shouted and written down and sung about until more and more people take a moment to really hear it and digest it and pour their present life through the filter of it and go, ‘Hm. Wait. Maybe not. I should do something about that.’

or something.

the line is NOT ‘Are you going to church?’

it is NOT ‘Are you involved in some form of ministry?’

it is also NOT ‘Do you read your Bible and can you quote verses from memory and know all the words to the latest hit worship song?’

and there are probably a bunch of other things it is NOT.

but what it IS is ARE YOU DOING WHAT JESUS DID AND TAUGHT?

a good place to start is to head back to the gospels [matthew, mark, luke, john] in the second part of the bible and read once more the story of Jesus and pay careful attention to WHAT JESUS TAUGHT as well as take time to focus on HOW JESUS LIVED and then to stop, have a quick hammer time, and think to yourself, ‘Am I Really Living out What He Said and What He Did?’

like for real?

well, are you?

why camping is not better than Jesus

aka ‘the boy who cried wolfpocalypse’

as i sat in theatresports [improv comedy group i belong to] class last nite and people were joking about the whole rapture thing or lack of thing, it was a little frustrating to see how christians [to be seriously not confused with Christ-followers though] had once again managed to give the group a bad name… a laugh-out-loud point-and-mock bad name…

but this time it was a truly ridiculous premise – Harold Camping, a California preacher and registered loony toon claimed that the rapture would occur May 21, 2011 and that the world would be obliterated by a fireball October 21 [he is now claiming that he made a mistake - again, as he had predicted the end of the world in 1994 - and that the correct date is October 21 for the rapture - however he also says that he won't give away any of his possessions before October 21] and was left hiding out in a motel with his wife when nothing happened…

it’s not so much that he ‘just made a mistake’ – he was never even in the same playing fields as someone who could have possibly gotten it right…

in Matthew 24.36 Jesus says this, “No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”

so basically Jesus is saying that even He doesn’t know when the end is going to happen [difficult one maybe with our Jesus is God understanding, maybe He was simply talking about while He was living on earth as a human] and so no one else will. as in the days of Noah people will be going about their stuff – eating, drinking, watching bad movies – and then suddenly Boom, or maybe Whoosh!

what makes the whole thing a lot worse is that the big kook had a bunch of little kooks:

“Follower Jeff Hopkins also spent a good deal of his own retirement savings on gas money to power his car so people would see its ominous lighted sign showcasing Camping’s May 21 warning. As the appointed day drew nearer, Hopkins started making the 100-mile round trip from Long Island to New York City twice a day, spending at least $15 on gas each trip.

“I’ve been mocked and scoffed and cursed at and I’ve been through a lot with this lighted sign on top of my car,” said Hopkins, 52, a former television producer who lives in Great River, NY. “I was doing what I’ve been instructed to do through the Bible, but now I’ve been stymied. It’s like getting slapped in the face.” [http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_apocalypse_saturday]

The only problem with saying “I was doing what I’ve been instructed to do through the Bible” is that Jeff clearly missed the part of the Bible that said ‘what you are doing is futile because no one knows the day or the hour’ and this whole story demonstrates once again that when the bible is misused or abused it can lead to good people being manipulated to do stupid things.

and the danger of ONLY receiving your feeding from someone else… if you had only just read the gospels Jeff, you would have clearly and obviously known that you were following the wrong guy… a large percentage of the church has adopted the lazy culture of being spoonfed from the front [as opposed to reading and studying and knowing scripture for yourself, at the same time as receiving scripture from others who have studied it and speak it well] and because you don’t read the Bible for yourself you have to believe whatever gets dished out to you and to misquote Helen Zille completely, “you get the biblical teaching you deserve.”

as a Christ-follower, there is one aspect of this story that we can take seriously. no, we will never know the exact day or hour, but in terms of urgency, in terms of living the life-to-the-full that Jesus spoke of, in terms of making an impact on the world and living in obedience to God and what the Bible actually says, we should live each day as if we suspect the rapture could happen today. Plan as if you’re going to live 1000 years but live as if you’re going to die tomorrow, i think someone said. Something like that.

love God, love people, take care of those in need, leave the billboarding to someone else…

easter for dummies – part 2 – the save

so a quick recap then:

# everyone has sinned and as the bible says “fallen short of the glory (or high standard) of God”
# the wages/punishment/outcome of sin is death (both now in various areas, but also spiritually and eternally at the end)
# on Easter Friday, the man many believed had come to save the world is lying stretched out on a cross, dying an agonising death.

# one of the statements Jesus calls from the cross is “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”
# a second statement from the cross is where Jesus asks one of His followers John to look after His mother
# a third statement occurs when Jesus grants salvation to one of the thieves dying on the cross alongside Him, who acknowledges Him and Jesus tells him “this day you will be in paradise with Me.”

but this is where the twist occurs:

# Sunday arrives, the third day, a significant number to God as witnessed throughout the Bible and as spoken of by Jesus while He was alive and the women who are heading to the tomb to anoint the body with traditional herbs are surprised by an empty tomb and the news that Jesus is alive

# various of His followers witness Jesus alive over the next few days – He speaks to them, walks with them, even prepares a fish braai on the beach for some of them and finally He sends them off with a mission ["Go and make disciples of all mankind, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you."] and then, before their eyes, He is taken up to heaven.

# in John 3.16 Jesus has spoken one of the most well-known passages of scripture to Nicodemus the pharisee who visited Him at night – “For God so loved the world that He sent His only Son that whoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life.”

# and so yes, we all have sinned and are all due the penalty of death that is spoken of in the Bible. But God in His love has made a way [which still satisfies His justice] of coming Himself and taking on the punishment in our place [as evidenced throughout most of the Old Testament when an animal was sacrificed in the place of a person and why Jesus is referred to as the lamb of God, fulfilling that same duty] so that we do not have to die.

and so the bottom line of the Christ-following faith is this – God is offering a gift, the gift of life – when Jesus was here He spoke about bringing “abundant life” or “life to the full” which speaks both of life now on earth as well as life after our physical bodies die – and you either choose to receive it [acknowledge Jesus as God and bow your knee and life to Him] or reject it [and one day be turned away by God] – the choice is yours – it is a free gift on the one hand, but also a gift that costs everything [nothing you can do can earn you the gift, hence it's free, but God calls for you to follow Him with everything you have, and so it is costly]

the choice is yours. choose life.

‘Then Jesus said, “If anyone would follow Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me.” [luke 9.23]

he’s not heavy, he’s my [klein] brother…

i have a cool friend called kleinfrans [he's not] who is a really rad man, and he has a brain and thinkx about things and i think has some good stuff to say [and him and his rad wife michelle took us to play mashie golf, twice!] and so i wanted to stick up some links to the last three cool things he blogged about:

http://ishouldwritemore.wordpress.com/2011/03/04/is-hell-real

http://ishouldwritemore.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/zuckerberg-zombies

http://ishouldwritemore.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/the-book-you-believe-in

enjoy, comment, engage…

go to hell ha ha ha

just watching the rob bell furore that has swept up has once again brought something to the fore which i think needs comment and some thort by people who claim to be Jesus-followers…

one of the accusations that has been made against rob bell is that he is a universalist which as i understand it is someone who believes that everyone is going to end up in heaven, and by definition no one ends up in hell.

i don’t know if rob bell is a universalist. people have seemed to infer that from the questions he asks in the promo video for his latest book: ‘Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.’ But according to the one article i read, it says, “after all, on page 72 he actually states, “Do I believe in a literal hell? Of course.” [really good article response to the rob bell stuff here]

but that is not my concern. if he believes that then i definitely would take a stand against the belief because i think the Bible is largely clear on that matter and a lot of Jesus’ teaching and parables seem to deal with who will make it and who won’t.

what concerns me is how amped so many christians seem to be to point people towards hell. my friend Ant Martin mentioned to me how many people have responded to the Rob Bell video by making statements like “reality check, Ghandi’s in hell..” i mean, firstly spell his name right, it’s Gandhi… the question Rob Bell asks in his video is, “Gandhi’s in hell? Really? You know that for sure?” and people divebombed him…

as far as i understand it, it is through faith in Jesus Christ that we receive forgiveness of our sins and are made righteous to be able to live eternally with God (which does begin now) – the thief on the cross next to Jesus receives salvation even though he has done nothing in his life to deserve it, but he acknowledges who Jesus is and Jesus welcomes him to paradise. i don’t know if Gandhi turned to Jesus for forgiveness. But i don’t know that he didn’t. What i do know is that Gandhi loved Jesus and wasdn’t so fond of His followers who didn’t seem to display the same kind of life that Jesus spoke about and lived. But i don’t know the state of Gandhi’s heart at the time of his death and whether or not he was in relationship with God and so for people to say he is definitely in hell seems like a foolish, immature, arrogant and presumptious statement to make [unless you have some evidence i don't]

and as i said it concerns me greatly that people claiming to be Christ followers are almost excited to point out that someone is going to hell – whether it’s Gandhi or homosexuals or abortion clinic owners or Saddam Hussein or Hitler, it doesn’t matter – hell is a place that was designed for the devil and his angels [Matthew 25.41] and it is always a complete tragedy when any person ends up there.

if it is true that Gandhi is headed towards hell, that should break us.

what is the greatest commandment? to love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul and strength and to love your neighbour as yourself. Gandhi is my neighbour [Luke 10.25-37] and my attitude to him has to be one of love. and to anyone else, no matter who they are or what they have done.

maybe if we, as Jesus followers, had a better response to people heading towards hell, we would live differently while they are alive, and in our space, and living next door to us, and help direct them towards a Jesus-filled eternity which starts right now – a life that is symbolised by the fruit of the spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control) and by loving God and loving people and looking after those in need.

and be absolutely shattered every single time someone dies without coming into a saving relationship with Jesus Christ.

[and spending less time involved in random online judgemental railings against what someone might be saying in some book we haven't and probably aren't going to read because of what we thort they might have said in their promotional video and book blurb]

stop cheating on Him

i had this epiphony in the shower the other day – if the only Bible’ing and praying you do is at your church gathering on a sunday once a week, then you don’t have a relationship with God, you have a relationship with church.

and i think that’s how a lot of people live – their spiritual life is their relationship with the meeting on a sunday

it becomes a little bit memento meets inception with a sprinkling of the matrix once you start arguing that ‘i am the church, how can i have a relationship with myself?’ but i think if you give it just a moment you will see what i mean, and then the next step is to ask whether or not it is you, and then if so, to stop it.

because it is destructive. to you. to the church. if you are not being actively in relationship with God every day every day, then when you meet together as the church on a sunday, you will not be equipped to bring a word of encouragement or challenge or a psalm or prayer or prophecy or ministry to other people and that, after all, is what church is meant to be all about – meeting together to equip, strengthen, motivate, heal, encourage for the purpose of heading out and being church for the rest of the week to those who will never set foot in one

i think it’s an even bigger danger for those in so-called fulltime ministry because you can feel like your focused ministry time (leading a cell, heading up a worship team, preaching, sunday school etc.) is your relationshipping with God, when it’s not

so this is for me. and for you. and especially during holiday time when so many of us go on holiday from God. just stop it. return to your first love. remain in Him. be still and know that He is God.

do it. just.

a simple cartoon of the bible story of church

imagine this in badly drawn stick figures if you will:

God and man (as in mankind/people) in harmonious relationship walking together in the garden, the place of creation, unified in relationship, God somehow receiving something from this engagement with His creation.

something happens – man decides to choose self over obedience to God and relationship breaks down – we have the word ‘sin’ but really it is simply an indication of relationship gone wrong, breakdown of engagement, distance and an obstacle or barrier between man and God.

man is banished from the place of creation and heads out by himself, left to his own devices (which quickly leads to murder) and God sets in place His plan of restoring the way things were in the beginning.

Round [1] – God appears to individuals and start to show them a blueprint of the way things are meant to be – God calls a man and then a nation, Israel, and says, “you will be a blessing to other nations.”

Round [2] – God shows up from time to time in different manners and disguises to an individual and they pass on the messages He speaks.

Round [3] – God moves into a tent – well not quite, but the people are struggling with such an abstract picture of God and so as Israel wanders around the desert, God allows His presence to settle in the tabernacle, in the holy of holies chamber and communicates through the priests, and particularly the high priest on one special day every year.

Round [4] – the people settle, eventually making it to the promised land (after much trial and disobedience and grace on God’s part as time and time again they continue to choose their way over His, but He remains faithful to the restoration process) and so God settles (well, not really) and makes the building of the temple His place of encounter with the people, still through the chosen order of the priests.

Round [5] – a lot of time has passed and it has been a while since God appeared directly to anyone, altho the messages of the prophets, talking of a time in the near future when He will come and bring justice and mercy once again and they hold tightly to that. suddenly, God arrives on the scene – having sent messengers who are for the most part ignored, ridiculed and executed, He decides that a personal visit is in order and so Jesus shows up [God, and yet Son of God] and once more walks among the people – He declares that God is wanting an intimate relationship, using terms like ‘abba’ (daddy) and ‘Father’ to address God directly – and then dies in an act that somehow destroys the sin, obstacle, barrier that has stopped man from really getting close to God.

Round [6] – as Jesus is leaving, He speaks of His Holy Spirit who will come and live in those who choose to die to their own lives (wants, greeds, agendas) and follow Him and His ways – a few weeks later, as the followers of Jesus are hanging out together, this happens dramatically and like a cloud of fire the Spirit settles on them and they (and 3000 other people who happened to be in the vicinity) are transformed forever.

this is obviously a very simplistic way of telling the Bible story, but i was just struck once more this morning at our church gathering how it went from a place of intimacy and engagement to a place of separation and that there was the process of God speaking through a man – to the tent – to the temple – to God coming down – to us becoming the temple and having God live in us, preparing us for another day when it will be returned to the way it was.

This excites me.