| January 01 2007 |
My New Year wishes for you, YoU, yOu and yOU
**** : Thank You Lord for blessing us with his presence in our lives. His conception was timely and purposeful and we can better appreciate now that Your ways are truly higher than ours. May You continue to use him as a channel of your blessings of joy and hope to those that You bring him into contact with. Lord, thank You also for hearing our cries and beginning the process of healing him from the painful skin condition which afflicted him so badly in the first year of his life. Lord, we pray that You will by Your divine hand complete the good work which You have miraculously started in his life. Abba Father, we also pray that You may grant us the wisdom and Godly insight to teach and instruct him in Your way even as you prepare to fill him with Your Spirit for works of service and a life dedicated to You and You alone.
***** : Lord, we thank You that You have defied the odds for her. Jesus, we pray that You will extend her time here on earth with us. Only You can heal her and we pray that You will stretch out Your hand and heal her completely of her current condition. Lord, we speak in Your holy Name that every cancerous cell be rendered impotent. Lord have mercy.
****** : Thank You for bringing this person into my life. May You draw * ever closer to Thee and reveal more of Yourself to * in the days to come. May * grow in both the understanding of You and Your great works as well as in relationship with You. Lord, be real and present in *'s life, and guide * to make decisions which honour You and further Your kingdom here on earth. Father, may you fill * afresh with Your Holy Spirit, that more or Your life-transforming truth may be revealed in *'s spirit.
*** : When all is said and done, I desperately want to see you in heaven. Lord have mercy. Father, please send Your Holy Spirit to convict him of all that he needs to know to be convinced that Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Soften his heart and demolish the barriers of untruth that stand in the way of him coming to terms with Your saving grace and redeeming power. Lord of the impossible, please make possible the salvation of his soul.
**** : Lord, it pains me to see so many being absent from mainstream services. Father, please send us teachers who can speak Your truth with boldness and in love...teachers who are able to both discern the seasons as well as deliver Your message to all, regardless of age, social standing and where we are in our respective stations in life. Send us people who fear You more than they fear man and the secular norms which pervade our society and community. Come Lord Jesus.
Posted by Daniel at 12 : 00 am | Leave a note {0}
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| | December 31 2006 |
Blessed New Year
If you're reading this, may I take the opportunity to wish you the Lord's blessings of hope, truth, love and joy in the year ahead. God bless.
Posted by Daniel at 11 : 09 pm | Leave a note {0}
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| | December 14 2006 |
Of Humility and Grace
Lenten reflection: 'Humility is difficult' by Jim Wallis
We all know Lent is meant to be a time of reflection, deepening, and preparation for Easter. Lent is also a call to repentance and, especially, humility. With Lent's beginning on Ash Wednesday, we impose (I love that word) ashes as a very physical, visual, and tangible act of repentance and humility - a mark and act of commitment, not merely a rote ritual.
Some members of our staff have suggested to me that the events of recent weeks and months call us to humility. But humility is a difficult virtue for those who are called to a prophetic vocation - people like us.
Humility is difficult for people who think they are, or want to be, "radical Christians."
Humility is difficult when you're always calling other people - the church, the nation, and the world - to stop doing the things you think are wrong and start doing the things you think are right.
Humility is difficult for the bearers of radical messages.
When we're always calling other people to repent and change, it's not always easy to hear that message for ourselves.
I want to suggest that there is a real and very deep tension between humility and the prophetic vocation. And most prophetic Christians I have known - present company and preacher included - are really not very good at humility.
You see we are always making judgments of others - church leaders, political leaders, majority cultures - but are not often good at applying the judgment to ourselves. Even when the prophetic judgments we are making are necessary, they seldom lead us to humility. After all, we are the ones who know how other people are supposed to change. We are the ones with the answers. We are the ones who are doing it right.
How do we preach like Amos - "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty river!" - without becoming self-righteous ourselves? I think that is very difficult. Perhaps Micah had it right: "What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"
And we are especially prone to turn our righteous judgments on each other, at those close at hand, even within our own community - and that can be especially destructive. When that happens, if the truth be told, radical Christian communities are not always pleasant places to be.
When the prophetic indignation we offer daily to the world is turned toward those who happen to be in judging, glaring, or shouting distance of us when we decide they too have fallen short of our ideals - look out!
And let me be human and honest enough to say that leaders in church, state, and certainly faith-inspired organizations should always be held accountable, but being a leader in a prophetic Christian community is often a very hard place to be. Just look at the qualities necessary for the prophetic vocation: The capacity to speak clearly, strongly, boldly, decisively, distinctively, and of course, visibly. I would say, from my experience, that none of those qualities lead directly to humility.
Likewise, the call to be and offer an alternative reality, community, vision, lifestyle, etc., requires an energy and confidence that, again, is not necessarily prone to humility.
So what can save us radical Christians? The same thing that saves everybody else: the grace of God.
I've found myself remembering an old article prompted by a time in the life of Sojourners when these issues were very much at play. It was an article I felt quite convicted to write as a correction to ourselves, to myself, to the prophetic vocation we had chosen. I remember I stayed home from a prophetic anti-nuclear action that many of us were undertaking because I felt the need to think and write instead. It's from May of 1979.
It's pretty faded now, but I think it might be relevant to us today:
"Sojourners has written much and often about the abuse and cheapening of grace. In many ways, it is the place where we began. That concern still stands; cheap grace continues to be the greatest affliction of the churches."
"Radical Christians, however, face another problem. It is the tendency to seek justification in our lifestyle, our work, our protest, our causes, our movements, our actions, our prophetic identity, and our radical self-image. It becomes an easy temptation to place our security in the things we stand for and in the things we do, instead of in what God has done. It is a temptation to depend on things other than God's grace."
"'For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God - not because of works, lest [anyone] should boast (Ephesians 2:8-9).' Grace is the logic of a loving God. There is nothing we can do to earn it, win it, or deserve it. Grace is simply a gift, not a reward. We can receive it only by faith, not through good works."
"Grace saves the prophetic vocation. The knowledge and experience of grace can ease the seriousness with which we tend to take ourselves. Grace can restore our humility, our sense of humor, and our ability to laugh at ourselves. All are regularly needed by prophets."
"To trust grace is to know that the world has already been saved by Jesus Christ. It is to know that we cannot save the world any more than we can save ourselves. All our work is done only in response to Christ's work. To receive the gift of grace is to let go of self-sufficiency and to act out of a spirit of gratitude."
"Radical Christians must pursue more than a successful strategy; we must seek a deeper faith. Only then will we have the assurance of salvation, not because of what we have accomplished, but because we have allowed God's grace and mercy to flow through our lives."
This article was adapted from Jim Wallis' reflections at Sojourners' Ash Wednesday service March 1, 2006.
Posted by Daniel at 4 : 18 pm | Leave a note {0}
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| | August 10 2006 |
What does it mean to be loved by You
Hebrews 12:7-11
Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father?
If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons.
Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it.
How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live!
Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness.
No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful.
Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.
Ouch. Bitter but necessary medicine and training.
Posted by Daniel at 11 : 14 pm | Leave a note {0}
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| | July 07 2006 |
A sobering thought...
Psalm 90:4 "For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night"
Ain't that something?
If we interpret Psalm 90:4 literally (though I suspect that one should consider it figuratively as well), a normal man's lifetime of say 70 years (25,550 days) could possibly be equated to 25,550,000 years in God's reckoning of time!
It's pretty mind-boggling when one appreciates that a literal interpretation of scripture suggests to us that each human year is but 0.00027% of God's divine year.
After 70 years or so of human life, we will all make the inevitable 'crossover' into eternity.
Imagine what eternity is magnified 365,000 times (i.e 1,000 years X 365 days). Whoah!
I guess our choices do matter eh.
Posted by Daniel at 4 : 56 pm | Leave a note {0}
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