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No YA tonight – 12/27

Hey friends, what a great time with you all last Monday night at the Christmas Hymnsing.

Just a reminder that we do not have young adults fellowship tonight (12/27)—the church building is closed.

We’ll be back together next week (1/3) in our home groups, and then our first large group of 2022 will be Monday night 1/10. And then we’ll be back on our usual every-other-week schedule. Peace! And happy new year.

“Boundless Shall Thy Kingdom Be”

A hymn for Christmas Eve, by Ambrose of Milan:

Savior of the nations, come, 
virgin’s Son, make here thy home!
Marvel now, O heaven and earth,
that the Lord chose such a birth.

Not of flesh and blood the Son,
offspring of the Holy One;
born of Mary ever blest,
God in flesh is manifest.

Wondrous birth! O wondrous Child
of the Virgin undefiled!
Though by all the world disowned,
still to be in heaven enthroned.

From the Father forth he came
and returneth to the same,
captive leading death and hell,
high the song of triumph swell!

Thou, the Father’s only Son,
hast o’er sin the victory won.
Boundless shall thy kingdom be;
when shall we its glories see?

Praise to God the Father sing.
Praise to God the Son, our King.
Praise to God the Spirit be
ever and eternally. 

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Don’t Waste Your Twenties

This is a repost from July of 2014…Hope you enjoy.

A writer named Trevin Wax, who is 33, gives these pieces of advice for those of you in your twenties:

  • Read beyond the requirements of college, church, or work. That’s right. Read. Feel free to enjoy video games, movie-watching, or other fun activities, but make sure you are intentional about deepening the well of your spiritual and educational life. You’ll soon discover how much need to draw from that well.
  • Build relationships and connections with people who care about similar things. Find people you respect. Learn from them. Walk with people in ministry and learn from their successes and failures. Seek out mentors and listen to them.
  • Embrace the big markers of life. If you believe God is calling you to marriage and childbearing, don’t postpone those two things indefinitely. Truth is, no one is ever really “ready” to have a kid. Ever. You’re never “mature” enough or “financially stable” enough to get married or have kids. I actually think, most of the time, the reverse is true. Marriage and kids are often what God uses to grow us up.
  • For those who are single by circumstances or by calling, please do not misinterpret the previous word as suggesting that you can’t be mature without marriage or kids. History is filled with examples of Christians whose singleness (whether permanent or temporary) provided the opportunity to channel passion and wisdom into fruitful ministry. Take John Stott’s advice: “Go wherever your gifts will be exploited the most.”
  • Future pastors, sermon preparation doesn’t start when you get a ministry position. It’s the result of whole-life preparation. Remember that. And start preparing now. Immerse yourself in the Word and in the lives of people.
  • Future missionaries and church leaders, you are on mission now. You don’t need a title, a ministry position, or a seminary degree before you’re on mission. Jesus’ commissioning is all you need to love God, love people, and witness to the truth of the gospel. John Mayer sings ”Waiting On the World To Change.” It did. 2000 years ago when a dead Man walked out of His tomb. So let’s get going.
  • When the day arrives and a leadership role is thrust upon you, you’d better be the person you need to be. You can and will do some training, of course, but so much of your role requires you to be a certain kind of person, not just do a certain kind of thing. 
  • Be willing to serve in the trenches of ministry without praise or acclamation. Serve your church. Work hard at whatever job you’re at. Encourage the people around you. If God chooses to expand your sphere of influence, wonderful. If not, then be the best you can be right where you are.

He ends with this encouragement:

Friends, if you are entering or still in your twenties, let me exhort you: do not sit these years out. Do not wait on the big job or the amazing ministry you think you deserve. Love God and love people now.

Become the person you want to be in your thirties; prepare for the role you’d like to have, even if, like me, you’re busing tables at Cracker Barrel. You’re not waiting on anyone, and time won’t wait for you either.

If you’d like to keep thinking about your twenties, last year I wrote a booklet specifically for you called Surviving Your Twenties and you can download it here.

The Abiding Influence of the Obsolete Tutor

Last night in our home groups we continued our discussion of the Old Testament Law and what it has to say to followers of Christ today. For the discussion, I shared a very helpful passage from Allen Ross’ book Holiness to the Lord. Ross has some good insight into how the Law, while no longer over the follower of Christ as a law-code, still can act as a helpful guide to God’s will for our lives:

The law was a pedagogue [a tutor] leading to Christ. [See Galatians 3:19-29.] The law in many ways laid the foundation for the full revelation of God’s plan of salvation that came in the person of Jesus Messiah, the Son of God. A pedagogue was a servant who came alongside he child as a tutor and supervised that child in everything until maturity. Then the pedagogue was no longer needed. The people of God in the Old Testament represent the beginning of the household of faith; they were living in the promises and awaiting the fulfillment. Now that the Messiah has come and the promises are being fulfilled, the household of faith no longer needs the pedagogue, but can live in the light of the fulfillment of the promises. Nevertheless, what the pedagogue was teaching through the ritual and the rules can now be freely applied in the spiritual life.

The law was thus both regulatory and revelatory. The regulatory aspects of the law – kinds of animals, composition of incense, handling of blood, and all the other ritual acts – were bound up in the culture and experience of ancient Israel. The revelatory aspects of the laws – holiness of God, nature of sin, access to God, forgiveness of sin, removal of impurity, and all the many theological meanings of the acts – taught the abiding truths of the person and work of the Lord as they were unfolding in Scripture. When Christ came and inaugurated the new covenant, the regulatory aspects of the law came to an end: there was no longer a temple, sacrifices, or a functioning priesthood based on the Sinai covenant. But what all these laws revealed about the nature and will of God did not come to an end, for they are binding revelation.

For further study in the concepts Ross is working with here, see New Testament passages like Galatians 2:15-21, Galatians 3:19-26; Matthew 5:17-18;and Romans 10:4.

The On-Ramp to the Infinite Expanse

Probably one of the things most people notice early when they really begin to study the bible for themselves is how much the bible quotes itself. It might begin with the slow realization that what seems to be a collection of random half-words and numbers on the side or in the middle of the page is actually a bunch of bible verse references, and you might start to look them up. And if you do, you’ll find that nothing opens up your understanding of the Bible like seeing these connections and how they illuminate what the Bible is saying. The deeper you get into it, the more you might start wondering–how could someone even understand the bible at all if they didn’t know all these connections?

It’s really an interesting question to consider: how much biblical knowledge does someone need to understand the bible? Can we, for instance, just hand someone a Gospel of John and expect them to understand what they’re reading?

I recently found an interesting passage that addresses this question in a new book by Gary Schnittjer. He starts off quoting another author…

Ben Witherington III says,  “The Gospel story may be told in arcane language and may occasionally quote arcane texts but that language and those texts are now part of a new story…and must make sense without scurrying back to the OT again and again to get the full gist of the story because probably only a tiny minority of the audience…are learned enough and sophisticated enough to catch and then probe the allusions or echoes, or even for that matter to know where to look for the quotations.”

This is a great short answer to our question. at least when we’re discussing the Gospel story, it must be understandable in its essential elements, at face value, when it’s heard or read for the first time. So yes. Hand people the Gospel of John, cold, with no back story. Let God’s word do its work. But then, what of those center column references? This is how Schnittjer connects the dots:

Does not attention to scriptural allusions obstruct the simple gospel? It could, but that is not the point. The Scriptures, like anything else, can be understood in an initial manner without encyclopedic knowledge of backstory and context. Followers of the Messiah need to start somewhere.

At the same time, Scripture consistently advocates a life of meditating upon, studying, teaching, and obeying the Scriptures. The initial testimony of the Scriptures provides an on-ramp to a fuller understanding which necessarily includes interpreting exegesis within Scripture. First-time reading of Scripture offers much even while the Scriptures themselves welcome and invite close study including scriptural allusions by subtle devices.

So it’s both/and. And wouldn’t you expect God’s word to be this way? Understandable, clear, compelling, the first time you hear it–like jumping into a refreshing pond on a hot day–and also, bottomless, always fresh, infinite in depth and variety and complexity and expanse–like a pond that opens up into a shoreless ocean.

This book by Gary Schnittjer (who teaches at nearby Carin University) is Old Testament Use of Old Testament: A Book-by-Book Guide. It’s exactly what it claims to be: a guide to how the Old Testament authors quoted works by other authors, and other books they themselves had written. So, while many of us have noticed that (for instance) Matthew quotes Jeremiah, have we noticed how Jeremiah quotes Moses, or the Psalms? Realizing that the later Old Testament authors were reading and working with the parts of the Hebrew Bible they already had can be very helpful in understanding what is going on as the Old Testament unfolds. These are some of those on-ramps for getting the fuller picture, the deeper insight, into all God’s word holds for us.

Considering the Rights of My Neighbor

At our home groups, and in our large group meetings, we’re slowly studying our way through the book of Exodus. Everybody knows about the amazing stories of Egypt and the Red Sea and Moses and the Miracles, and those are indeed amazing things to study, but we been slowing down in the second half of the book to think deeply about the laws in the book of Exodus. Beginning with what we typically call the Ten Commandments, God gave Moses a series of detailed laws and directions that are recorded for us to read. A few weeks ago we took two weeks to discuss the Ten Commandments in chapter 20 in particular. I shared this quote from Daniel Block’s commentary on Deuteronomy as a way to help us think about this most familiar passage of sculpture. In case any of you wanted it, here it is:

This document functions as an Israelite bill of rights. However, unlike modern bills of rights, the document does not protect one’s own rights, but the rights of the next person. Each of the terms may be recast as a statement of another person’s rights and the adult males’ responsibility to guard the rights, first, of the covenant Lord, and second, of fellow Israelites. 

 The Divine Rights

    1. The Supreme Command: Yahweh has the right to exclusive allegiance. (Deut 5:7-10, Ex 20:1-4)
    2. Yahweh has the right to proper representation. (Deut 5:11, Ex 20:7)

 The Human Rights

    1. All in the household have the right to human treatment by the household head. (Dt 5:12-15, Ex 20:8-11)
    2. One’s parents have the right to respect. (Deut 5:16, Ex 20:12)
    3. One’s neighbor has the right to life. (Deut 5:17, Ex 20:13)
    4. One’s neighbor has the right to purity and fidelity in marriage. (Deut 5:18, Ex 20:14).
    5. One’s neighbor has the right to his property. (Deut 5:19, Ex 20:15).
    6. One’s neighbor has the right to honest and truthful testimony in court. (Deut 5:20, Ex 20:16).
    7. One’s neighbor has the right to security in marriage. (Deut 5:21a, Ex 20:17a).
    8. One’s neighbor has the right to his own household property. (Deut 5:21b, Ex 20:17b).

I noted this in our discussion directions, but…Block’s language about “adult males” might throw someone off. I would just offer two thoughts about this: First, his is reading of the text is accurate. This is what it says. Second, maybe this is a way to think our way in to what God was doing by speaking this way to Israel: How would our society, and many individual lives be much better off, if the adult males in their lives had always thought and lived the way Block is reading the ten commandments? What would our country be like if every man kept the ten commandments? Of course Israel understood that woman and children were also bound by the ten commandments, and that their lives were important–but this language calls the men to account in a specific way, and sets the tone for society with a certain strong clarity.

In general though, isn’t it amazing to think about what a society would be like if everyone saw things this way? And, doesn’t it make you realize how wise God’s commands really are?

Jesus summons us from anxiety.

In his book Confronted by Grace, John Webster has some great insight into the way Jesus’ famous teaching about worry and anxiety in Matthew 6 applies to our current situation:

“Do not be anxious,” Jesus tells us. What’s the anxiety in mind here? The anxiety which Jesus here exposes to the light of his judgement has two elements: It’s a state of the soul, and it’s a form of activity.

The anxiety of which the gospel speaks here is more than simply feeling worried; it’s more than the passing apprehension which all of us feel about going to the dentist or facing a difficult interview. Those kinds of apprehensions are a matter of fear; we know what troubles us, and with the right sort of determined effort to screw up our courage, we resolve to face them. But anxiety is a sickness. Anxiety is that sickness of the soul in which what might happen fills us with dread. When we’re anxious, our future as a whole, the possibilities which stretch out ahead of us, becomes a matter not of hope but of terror.

Anxiety is a terrifying shadow of our uniquely human capacity of hope. When we hope, we project ourselves into the future, imagining what it may be and stretching out toward it with longing. But when we’re anxious, our imaginations busy themselves with images of threats which the future has in store for us. We fill in the gap between now and the future with all sorts of disturbing possibilities, and they eat us up. Anxiety makes us feel that the world has somehow slipped through our fingers and that we have no control over our own destiny.

It’s this fear which drives anxiety into activity. Fear properly issues in resolution and courage; anxiety produces a sort of helpless, unfocused busyness. Courage is a gathering of myself and my resources so that I can face what makes me afraid with a kind of single-minded clarity of purpose. Courage, that is, clarifies and concentrates the soul. But anxiety does the opposite; it dissipates our energies. Above all, it makes us think we can survive only if we take charge. We have to be omni-competent if we are to shed our anxieties, and so we climb onto the merciless treadmill of working harder and harder, somehow to keep everything together. Above all, anxiety is bound up with our desperate need for security – the need to know that we will be OK, that we will survive intact, that at the end of the day we will be.

This sickness of the soul is, of course, not only a private grief. It takes cultural and political form, too: Societies and institutions can be anxious in their way, driven by a need for reassurance in the face of the uncertainties of the future. Institutional rigidity, the demarcation of the world into friends and enemies, competitiveness, and the elaboration of forms of social control, all express the same deep-seated worry that we may not have a future unless we make one for ourselves.

This was written in 1998. Doesn’t that last paragraph sound like it was written this week? Driven by a need for reassurance in the face of the uncertainties of the future. That’s our world, right? And it was Jesus’ world, too. Famine, plague, foreign occupation. And yet, there he sat, saying, Can you add even one hour to your life by worrying? Your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. Like it was so obvious.

Webster continues:

…to those terrors, too, as well as to our personal nightmares, Jesus says: “Do not be anxious.”

How on earth can he say that? How on earth can he expect us to take him seriously? To answer these questions, we need to listen very carefully to what’s being said to us here in the gospel. Jesus isn’t reinforcing some bit of conventional human wisdom. He’s not, as it were, coming into the midst of the human situation and lending the weight of his authority to a truism which has been known all down the ages – that fussing and fretting damages the equilibrium of human life, that anxiety distracts and hurts us. No: He is telling us, his hearers, that what rules out anxiety is the sheer fact of himself. He himself, Jesus Christ, the presence of God’s kingdom, the rule of God in creation – that’s what finally shows the truth of our anxiety. In him, it’s finally shown to be the sickness which it is.

What is, then, the anxiety from which Jesus seeks to detach us? Very simply, it’s our failure to grasp and live out of the significance of Jesus Christ. Anxiety is our failure – sometimes from fear, sometimes from pride – to allow that, in and as the man Jesus, God rules all things in heaven and earth, and therefore that our lives are in God’s good hands. When Jesus summons us from anxiety, he injects into the world of our responsibilities something utterly new, utterly different. He breaks the world of anxiety apart by saying that this world – the world of daily life and care, the world of work and responsibility – isn’t a world in which we and we alone have to bear the burden of ensuring that we survive. This world is the place of God’s kingdom; here, God’s rule in Jesus Christ is the great new factor.

Because this is true, Jesus tells us, we may come to learn that daily life is not a place where we’re devoured by the need to shore ourselves up against disaster. Daily life is the place where we encounter God as the one whom he calls our “heavenly Father.” Who is this Father? He’s the one who knows our needs, because we are not hidden from him; and he’s the one who provides for our needs, because he loves what he has made in all its fragility and impermanence – because he desires that we should flourish. And if God is like that – God isn’t a threat hanging over us but the astonishing Father of lavish grace – then anxiety is a kind of illusion: It doesn’t match up to what reality is truly like.

What does match up to reality, Jesus tells us, is faith.

Faith sees the truth about God and God’s merciful, gracious kingdom which is embodied for us in Jesus Christ.

Faith is not just some crazy hope against evidence (indeed, when it becomes that it is itself a kind of sickness). Quite the opposite: Faith is that deeply healthy state of the soul in which we let God be God. It’s that free, unhesitating, joyful assent to the one in the midst of whose kingdom we stand secure.

Equality and Our Father

Around 1650 years ago, John Chrysostom taught verse by verse through the book of Matthew for the church he pastored. When he reached the famous beginning of the Lord’s prayer,

“In this manner, therefore, pray: Our Father in heaven…”

…he said this:

He teaches, moreover, to make our prayer common, in behalf of our brethren also. For He says not, “my Father, which art in Heaven,” but, “our Father,” offering up his supplications for the body in common, and nowhere looking to his own, but everywhere to his neighbor’s good.

And by this He at once takes away hatred, and quells pride, and casts out envy, and brings in the mother of all good things (charity), and exterminates the inequality of human things, and shows how far the equality reaches between the king and the poor man, if at least in those things which are greatest and most indispensable, we are all of us fellows.

For what harm comes of our kindred below, when in that which is on high we are all of us knit together, and no one hath aught more than another; neither the rich more than the poor, nor the master than the servant, neither the ruler than the subject, nor the king than the common soldier, nor the philosopher than the barbarian, nor the skillful than the unlearned? For to all hath He given one nobility, having vouchsafed to be called the Father by all alike.

That’s a lot to get out of the opening to a prayer, but, doubtless, it’s all there. The words of Jesus have what we need. Followers of Christ all call God Father, so, we must all be His children. Equally.

Incidentally, if you’re interested in this sort of thing, you can find all these works, for free, in multiple downloadable formats, on this great website.

Being a Good Leader

Want to be a good leader, according to the Bible’s standards?

Daniel Block:

In keeping with a fundamental tenet of biblical leadership, the primary function of leaders is not defined in terms of the tasks they are expected to perform but in terms of the kind of persons they are to be.

If the primary function of the head of the nation was to embody the ethical and spiritual values of the community (Deuteronomy 17:14-20), the same was true for heads of households.

The household’s members should be able to observe the head and know what kinds of persons they were to be.

The Triumph of Grace, p. 232

I imagine this goes for every area of life, right? Family, Church, Business, Nation. And of course, Jesus was the ultimate example of this… being and embodying what he called his followers to. Jesus is the leaders of leaders.

We, the light.

“You are the light of the world,” said the Lord,  “A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.” 

You know the rest: “Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house.” Jesus said so much, with so few words. Here’s some insightful thinking about this teaching:

Because they have committed themselves to follow Jesus and so to adopt the new values of the kingdom of heaven, [Jesus’ followers] are now going to stand out as different from other people.

This much we are familiar with. But there’s an important detail in the original (Greek) text that doesn’t come through well in the English translations. The word “you” is a plural form of the word you. When Jesus says “you” here, he’s not pointing at any specific person, or even directing everyone listening to him to think about himself or herself individually:

The address is in the second-person plural not only because more than one person is being addressed, but because it is the corporate impact of the disciple community, as an alternative society, which is here in view.

The hilltop town…is a symbol not of a conspicuous individual but of the collective impact of a whole community.

Modern Western individualism is such that we easily think of the light of the world as a variety of a little candles shining, “you in your small corner, and I in mine,” but it is the collective light of a whole community which draws the attention of the watching world.

When Jesus said these words, his main audience was the little group of followers he had collected—those specifically dedicated to being his students. In other words, Jesus said, “You all, this community, this group, this family…all of you, together, as one… this is the light of the world. This family is the city set on a hill.”

Corporate impact. Alternative society. Collective light. Whole community.

So… you can’t be the light. But we can.

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