Posts Tagged "Contemplations"

I’m reading the story of Joseph this week and it strikes me how his life was a continuous cycle of ups and downs, ups and downs, ups and downs. One minute he’s the favored son, the next an exiled slave in a faraway land. He’s up with Potiphar, then down in jail, favored in prison, then forgotten. Sure, God works it all out in the end but it was quite a rocky road to get there. Sound familiar? Every week, those of us who serve in worship gatherings have the privilege of ministering to people in all sorts of circumstances. Some are on top of the world, others feel crushed underneath. Some feel loved and accepted, others feel worthless and ignored.  The truth is, all of us come through the doors with distractions and wounds, clutter in our...

Could it be that it is God Himself who brings about the “winter of our discontent”, the collapse of our joy in the work of our hands? Is it possible that sometimes He must do this, so as to wrench us away from our myopic concentration on our own perceived ability to please Him?  Perhaps it is God, trying actively to change us, as if He were behind the curtain of our life-stage, working to throw off our lines and upset our performance.  Perhaps He must do this because He knows that as long as our happiness remains rooted in our own accomplishments, instead of in a single-focused acceptance of His acceptance of us as poor servants, we will never truly be free to find and know either our greatest joy, or our fullest service. Perhaps it is not so much a test of...

“…unless you forgive your brother from your heart…” – Matt. 18:35b It’s easy to reflexively think of forgiveness as a sort of one-shot deal, where you say some magic words and everything is fixed and fine. But what about those times when you say the words, but your heart keeps churning afterwards?  Does that mean you didn’t really forgive from the heart? Maybe it’s not as simple as that. If forgiveness was just some set of magic words that fixed everything at once, then would that even be worth anything?  To me, “from the heart” implies there is a degree of work involved, and that I must choose to be forgiving of the other person, not just flip some emotional switch.  After all, different offenses cause...

Jesus ruined everything. “The high priest carries the blood of animals into the Most Holy Place as a sin offering, but the bodies are burned outside the camp.  And so Jesus also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through His own blood.  Let us, then, go to Him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace He bore.” (Hebrews 13:11-13) In the mindset of the Jews, the blood sacrifice at the tabernacle (and later, the temple) was one of the key elements of their identity as God’s chosen people.  Here was something that was prescribed to them by God, as a way to not only assure forgiveness of their sins, but also to set themselves apart from the rest of the world.  Theirs was a system of exclusivity – salvation was for the Jews, and...

“Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross…” Hebrews 12:2 Have you ever played Scrabble (or any other word-type game), and been trying to make some simple word, when all of a sudden you looked down and realized that you had the greatest word right in front of you the whole time, but just hadn’t seen it?  I LOVE that feeling!  Those are the moments when you pretty much bounce up and down in your chair and pound the table and yell “HAH!  Beat THAT!”… Ok well at least I do. Anyway, sometimes I find that the same sort of excitement, the same sense of discovering a secret treasure you completely overlooked before, can be found in the reading of God’s word.  It’s like you...