Creative Action
God is engaged in worldwide disarmament. All the ways in which men and women attempt to forcibly impose their wills on neighbors and enemies are thrown into the trash heap. Violence does not work. It never has worked. It never will work. Weapons are not functional.
The history of violence is a history of failures. There has never been a won war. There has never been a victorious battle. The use of force destroys the ever reality that is exercised in its behalf, whether honor, truth or justice. living in the kind of world in which we do and being the sinners we are, we somtimes cannot avoid violence. But even when it is inevitable it is not right. God dos not engage in it.
A steady, sustained look at God's works sees that our grantic, foolish arms build-up (whether personal or national, whether psychological or material) is being sujected to systematic and determined disarmament. Violent action is the antithesis of creative action. When we no longer have the will or the patience to be creative, we attempt to express our will by coercion. The lazy and the immature account for the most of the violence in the world. But however prevalent violence is, the person at prayer sees that is not the way most of the world, the world of Gos'd action, works. But it takes energy and maturity to see it and to sustain the vision.
Attention, all! See the marvels of God's!
He plants flowers and trees all over the earth,
Bans war from pole to pole,
breaks all the weapons of war across his knee.
PSALM 46:8-9
2009-02-02
2009-02-01
Living The Message Feb.1
The Works of the Lord
The next four days are reflections of Psalm 46.
two commands direct us from the small-minded world of self-help to the large world of God's help. First, "Come, behold the works of the LORD." Take a long, scrutinizing look at what God is doing. This requires patient attentiveness and energetic concentration. Every-body else is noisier than God. The headlines and neon lights and amplifying systems of the world announce human works. But what of Gog's works? They are unadvertised but also inescapable, if we simply look. They everywhere. They are marvelous. But God has no public relations agency. He mounts no publicity campaign to get our attention, He simply inviteds us to look. Prayer is looking at the works of the Lord.
Reach out and experince the breadth! Test its length!
Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights! Live full lives, full in the fullness of God.
Ephesians 3:18-19
The next four days are reflections of Psalm 46.
two commands direct us from the small-minded world of self-help to the large world of God's help. First, "Come, behold the works of the LORD." Take a long, scrutinizing look at what God is doing. This requires patient attentiveness and energetic concentration. Every-body else is noisier than God. The headlines and neon lights and amplifying systems of the world announce human works. But what of Gog's works? They are unadvertised but also inescapable, if we simply look. They everywhere. They are marvelous. But God has no public relations agency. He mounts no publicity campaign to get our attention, He simply inviteds us to look. Prayer is looking at the works of the Lord.
Reach out and experince the breadth! Test its length!
Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights! Live full lives, full in the fullness of God.
Ephesians 3:18-19
2009-01-23
Living the Message Jan. 16
Childlike Trust
Christian faith is not neurotic dependency but childlike trust. We don not have a God who forever indulge our whims but a God whom we trust with our destinies. The Christian is not a naive, innocent infant who has no identity apart from a feeling of being comforted and protected and catered to but a person who has discovered an identity that is given by God which can be enjoyed best and fully in a voluntary trust in God. We do not cling to God desperately out of fear and the panic of insecurity; we come to him freely in faith and love.
I look to you, heaven-dwelling God,
Look up to you for help.
Like servants, alert to their master's commands,
like a maiden attending her lady,
We're watching and waiting, hholding our breath,
awaiting your word of mercy.
PSALM 123:1-2
Christian faith is not neurotic dependency but childlike trust. We don not have a God who forever indulge our whims but a God whom we trust with our destinies. The Christian is not a naive, innocent infant who has no identity apart from a feeling of being comforted and protected and catered to but a person who has discovered an identity that is given by God which can be enjoyed best and fully in a voluntary trust in God. We do not cling to God desperately out of fear and the panic of insecurity; we come to him freely in faith and love.
I look to you, heaven-dwelling God,
Look up to you for help.
Like servants, alert to their master's commands,
like a maiden attending her lady,
We're watching and waiting, hholding our breath,
awaiting your word of mercy.
PSALM 123:1-2
2009-01-21
2009-01-20
Living the Message Jan. 15 (editing...)
Worship
When they said, "Let's go to the house of God,"
my heart leaped for joy.
And now we're here, oh Jerusalem,
inside Jerusalem's walls!
PSALM 122:1-2
When they said, "Let's go to the house of God,"
my heart leaped for joy.
And now we're here, oh Jerusalem,
inside Jerusalem's walls!
PSALM 122:1-2
Living the Message Jan. 14
Repentance
Among the more fascinating pages of American history are those that tell the stoies of the immigrants to these shores in the nineteenth century. Thousands upon thousands of people, whose lives in Europe had become mean and poor, persecuted and wretched, left.
They had gotten reports of a land where the environment was a challenge instead of an oppression. The stories continue to be told in many families, keeping alive the memory of the event that made an American out of what was a German or an Italian or a Scot.
My grandfather left Norway eighty years ago in the middle of a famine. His wife and ten children remained behind until he could return and get them. He came to Pittsburgh and worked in the steel mills for two years until he had enough money to go back and get his family. When he returned with them he didn't stay in Pittsburgh although it had served his purposes well enough the first time, but he traveled to Montana, plunging into new land, looking for a better place.
In all these immigrant stories there are mixed parts of escape and adventure; the escape from an unpleasant situational the adventure of a far better way of life, free for new things, open for growth and creativity. Every Christian has some variation on this immigrant plot to tell.
"Woe is me, that I sojourn in Meshech, that I dwell among the tents of Kedar! Too long have I had my dwelling among those who hate peace." But we don't have to live there any longer. Repentance, the first word in Christian immigration, set us on the way to traveling in the light. It is a rejection that is also an acceptance, a leaving that develops into an arriving, a no to the world is a yes to God.
I'm doomed to live in Meshech,
cursed with a home in Kedar,
My whole life lived camping
among quarreling neighbors.
PSALM 120:5-6
Among the more fascinating pages of American history are those that tell the stoies of the immigrants to these shores in the nineteenth century. Thousands upon thousands of people, whose lives in Europe had become mean and poor, persecuted and wretched, left.
They had gotten reports of a land where the environment was a challenge instead of an oppression. The stories continue to be told in many families, keeping alive the memory of the event that made an American out of what was a German or an Italian or a Scot.
My grandfather left Norway eighty years ago in the middle of a famine. His wife and ten children remained behind until he could return and get them. He came to Pittsburgh and worked in the steel mills for two years until he had enough money to go back and get his family. When he returned with them he didn't stay in Pittsburgh although it had served his purposes well enough the first time, but he traveled to Montana, plunging into new land, looking for a better place.
In all these immigrant stories there are mixed parts of escape and adventure; the escape from an unpleasant situational the adventure of a far better way of life, free for new things, open for growth and creativity. Every Christian has some variation on this immigrant plot to tell.
"Woe is me, that I sojourn in Meshech, that I dwell among the tents of Kedar! Too long have I had my dwelling among those who hate peace." But we don't have to live there any longer. Repentance, the first word in Christian immigration, set us on the way to traveling in the light. It is a rejection that is also an acceptance, a leaving that develops into an arriving, a no to the world is a yes to God.
I'm doomed to live in Meshech,
cursed with a home in Kedar,
My whole life lived camping
among quarreling neighbors.
PSALM 120:5-6
2009-01-19
Living the Message Jan. 13
Dissatisfaction
People submerged in a culture swarming with lies and malice feel like they are drowning in it; they can trust nothing they hear, depends on on one they meet. Such dissatisfaction with the world as it is preparation for traveling in the way of Christian discipleship.
The dissatisfaction, coupled with a longing for peace and truth, can set us on a pilgrim of wholeness in God.
A person has to be thoroughly disgusted with the way things are to find the motivation to set out on the Christian way. As long as we think that the next election might eliminate crime and establish justice or another scientific breakthrough might save the environment or another pay raise might push us over the edge of anxiety into a life of tranquility, we are not likely to risk the arduous uncertainties of the life of faith. A person has to get fed up with the ways of the world before he, before she, acquires an appetite for the world of grace.
Psalm 120 is the song of a person, song with the lies and crippled with the hate, a perosn doubled up in pain over what is going on in the world. But it is not a mere outcry, it is pain that penetrates through despair and stimulated a new beginning--a journey to God which becomes a life of peace.
"Deliver me from the liars, GOD!
They smile so sweetly but lie through their teeth."
PSALM 120:2
People submerged in a culture swarming with lies and malice feel like they are drowning in it; they can trust nothing they hear, depends on on one they meet. Such dissatisfaction with the world as it is preparation for traveling in the way of Christian discipleship.
The dissatisfaction, coupled with a longing for peace and truth, can set us on a pilgrim of wholeness in God.
A person has to be thoroughly disgusted with the way things are to find the motivation to set out on the Christian way. As long as we think that the next election might eliminate crime and establish justice or another scientific breakthrough might save the environment or another pay raise might push us over the edge of anxiety into a life of tranquility, we are not likely to risk the arduous uncertainties of the life of faith. A person has to get fed up with the ways of the world before he, before she, acquires an appetite for the world of grace.
Psalm 120 is the song of a person, song with the lies and crippled with the hate, a perosn doubled up in pain over what is going on in the world. But it is not a mere outcry, it is pain that penetrates through despair and stimulated a new beginning--a journey to God which becomes a life of peace.
"Deliver me from the liars, GOD!
They smile so sweetly but lie through their teeth."
PSALM 120:2
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