For the past few months I’ve been writing about my upcoming mission trip to Swaziland. I’ve prayed, researched the country, prayed, researched the organization we’ll be working with, prayed, attended team meetings, prayed, worked long hours in our church cafe to help raise the needed funds, prayed, and prayed. Now the time has come to raise up a support team. Yes, I need to send out a letter asking people to pray for me and to give financially toward the trip expenses.
Faith & God
Always Ask
“I don’t need to pray about that. The answer is obvious. “
We’re all used to asking God about things we’re unsure of.
- Should I move across the country to pursue a relationship?
- Should I volunteer to help that homeless family?
- Should I repair that aging appliance—or spring for a new one?
But what about times when we already know the answer, or think we do?
Pretend They’re Wild Animals?
I love taking pictures of God’s creation. Soaring mountains, flower-bedecked meadows, the year’s first crocus, a Gray Jay landing on a boulder—they all remind me of the Lord who created them, and I love to capture his fingerprints in pixels. In fact, you might say it consumes me.
I remember a birding trip one cold February. It was a whopping eleven degrees with freezing fog. Everyone else was in the warm house drinking tea and watching the feeders through the windows. I was out in the yard snapping photos, oblivious to the cold.
Resurrection Sunday
Easter is my favorite day of the year—Resurrection Sunday, the reason for my faith in Jesus and my hope of heaven. While Christmas is buried under tons of tradition, Easter has escaped relatively unscathed. Perhaps that’s why I like it best.
Sure, Easter gets mingled with the renewal of springtime. When I was small, my secular parents observed this holiest of days with jelly beans and marshmallow peeps, a chocolate bunny and perhaps an Easter egg hunt. But there are still ways to focus on the significance of the resurrection. When I became a Christian at age 18, I started attending the sunrise service held on our college campus. I can still imagine every detail of the warm spring sunshine (it was California), green leaves, singing birds. We sat on the dew-covered grass and listened to a pastor from a local church praise God for the resurrection. And we sang:
Hear the bells ringing. They’re singing that you can be born again. Hear the bells ringing. They’re singing Christ is risen from the dead.
When Not to Believe the Bible
True or false: We can always know God’s will by reading the Bible.
True! you say. Of course that’s true. After all, doesn’t 2 Timothy 3:16 say that “[a]ll Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness”? Even more significantly, didn’t Jesus quote scripture?
Yes, he did, and that’s what’s getting me all befuddled. But maybe I’m jumping ahead of myself.
Spring for an Easter Garden
Celebrate Easter. Celebrate spring. Sometimes it seems as if there’s a tension between the two. The stores advertise cute little lambs and chicks, jelly beans and hollow chocolate rabbits. Us more spiritual types prefer to concentrate on the resurrection.
Spring and Easter do not need to compete for our attention. Budding plants, baby animals—they should all remind us of the new life possible because Jesus died and rose again. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that the renewal of life and the resurrection of Jesus happened at the same time of year. (Of course, those living in the southern hemisphere miss out on this connection.)
Context
I used to think the Bible was pretty easy to read. That was when I was young and thought I knew it all. Now I’m older, and I realize I’m pretty clueless!
Take prophesy, for example. As I read through books such as Hosea, Micah and Amos, the prophesies seem pretty clear cut: the Israelites have history with God. They’re messing up. God is distraught. God is warning them to return to him before the bad guys get them. And then he warns the bad guys that he’s going to judge them, too.
Granted, other prophetic books—Daniel, Ezekiel, Revelation—are totally mystifying, but that’s because they haven’t all happened yet. When the time comes, it will all make sense. Isn’t that how prophesy works?
Apparently not.
What Ever Happened to Purity, Part 2
Last week I discussed how a large majority of single Christians are engaging in premarital sex. Yet, I always thought the Bible was quite clear on this topic—God’s against it. How do these unmarried believers handle what appears to be a black and white issue?
It seems there are two possible approaches. Either they still believe that engaging in extra-marital sex is sinful—and end up feeling guilty—or they reinterpret the Bible and claim that there’s no problem.
What Ever Happened to Purity?
Back and forth, from one side to the other. It seems as though the church is a giant pendulum, swinging back and forth between opposing extremes. During the first half of the 20th century there was a focus on knowing about God—sermons were educational, hymns reiterated the same theology, Bible studies brought the lesson home yet again.
Then the pendulum swung the other way. We discovered that head knowledge alone didn’t satisfy. Books were written, sermons preached, ministries created—all with the goal of helping us foster an intimate relationship with God. No complaint here; we need both: to know about God and know God.
Similarly, we’ve moved from legalism and a focus on rules to permissiveness and grace, from shunning the sinner to accepting unbiblical cultural norms.
Read This: Torches of Joy
The church has always sent missionaries—believers who God tapped on the shoulder and sent to other cultures to share the gospel. When we hear of their great deeds, the amazing way God used them to bring the gospel to hard places, we realize that God can use us, too.
For example, I’ve read fascinating biographies of both Hudson Taylor (1832 – 1905) and Gladys Aylward (1902 – 1970), each a missionary to China. There are at least two books—Shadow of the Almighty and Through Gates of Splendor—about Jim Elliot (1927 – 1956), who gave died at the hands of the Auca Indians of South America. And there are several engrossing biographies about Amy Charmichael (1867- 1951), who started an orphanage and mission station in India, and whose life inspired Jim Elliot’s widow, Elisabeth.
Compost 