Are You Sure, God?

“Lord, I believe.  Help my unbelief.”  Mark 9:24.  This honest cry of a father seeking healing for his son expresses the heart of every Christian who longs to live a life of faith.  We do believe.  But we are afraid.  In five weeks, my daughter leaves for college. I believe that she will not only survive, but thrive.  I am excited with her about the courses, the community, and the Christian fellowship she will experience.  But I am afraid.  What if she has a wreck driving the 8-hour stretch between Traveler’s Rest, S.C. and home?  What if she never comes home?  What if she brings home a three-headed monster she secretly married during her first semester?  You see how it is.

Our stories reveal the tension of faith.  Today we believe the gospel:  Jesus has come to establish a new kingdom in the world and he has begun the process of restoring peace and securing hope.  And tomorrow (or five minutes from now or at this very moment), we fear that this King won’t really rescue us from our enemies (or hasn’t). When we live in fear rather than faithfulness, we try to take matters into our own hands to bring certain endings to small stories.  Remembering the redemption stories Scripture tells as well as the ones God has written into my life helps me to surrender trust back to its rightful object:  my Savior King.  It is in God’s faithfulness, not our own, that we trust.

Stay tuned for more of our journey of faith as we prepare to send first daughter, second child, off to college!  God is meeting us in this place.

July 23, 2009

John Stott:  The Contemporary Christian

On Vocation
“The whole of our life belongs to God and is part of his calling,  both before conversion and outside religion.  We must not imagine that God first became interested in us when we were converted, or that now he is interested only in the religious bits of our lives.”
“God’s sovereignty extends over both halves of our life.  He did not begin to work in and for us at our conversion, but at our birth, even before our birth in our genetic inheritance, as later in our temperament, personality, education and skills.  And what God made us and gave us before we became Christians, he redeems, sanctifies, and transforms afterwards.  There is a vital continuity between our pre-and post-conversion life.  For although we are a new person in Christ, we are still the same person we were by creation, whom Christ has made new.”

on Ministry
“It seems to me fully compatible with our Christian doctrines of creation and redemption that we should talk to ourselves somewhat as follows:  ‘I am a unique person.  (That is not conceit.  It is a fact….My uniqueness is due to my genetic endowment, my inherited personality and talents, inclinations and interests, my new birth and spiritual gifts.  By the grace of God I am who I am.  How then can I, as the unique person God has made me, be stretched in the service of Christ and of people, so that nothing he has given me is wasted, and everything he has given me is used?”

To ponder:  What are your genetic inheritance, temperament, personality, education, and skills?  Think about the “vital continuity” between your pre- and post- conversion life?  Into what cultural spheres does that take you?  How can you live as a “redeemed redeemer” in that sphere, using all that God created and redeemed you to be?

This blog began as a comment responding to a gospel-devotional posted on my friend Pastor Scotty Smith’s Facebook Fan page…See the devotional at the end, and sign on as a fan for more like it! Scotty Smith’s Facebook fan page.)

Let God turn your whining into worship!
Yesterday, Scotty posted this great devo-prayer, and in my brokenness, I pulled a swift maneuver and used it to beat myself up for much of the rest of the day.  I awoke in a whine.  I was aching from a hamstring torn in tennis practice. I was saddened by news of a distant relative, a 12-year-old girl, whose brain stem injuries in the Shreveport Baptist bus crash look dire.  I was sickened by my daughter’s report that her friend’s mom had died of cancer two nights ago.  I wasn’t lamenting; I was whining.  I used Scotty’s words to say, “What’s wrong with you, get with the program, you know God is good, so quit whining.” Never mind that it’s not what he said at all; I heaped an unhealthy dose of guilt into my whining tonic and sipped the poison.
A few hours later, while working out the working parts of my worn body, I listened to this week’s sermon from CCC (I don’t want you to think I’m a FAN or anything☺…but true confession, I listen to CCC service weekly.  I am still hoping they will make me an honorary member!).  The worship teamed performed the Matt Redman song, “Oh no, you never let go…through the calm and through the storm…you never let go of me.”  The song begins in reality and continues in praise:  “Yes, I can see a light that is coming for the heart that holds on/And there will be an end to these troubles/But until that day comes/Still I will praise You…”
Still I will praise You.
As I listened and mouthed the words (I have been asked not to sing aloud at the gym!), my whine turned to worship.  I believed the words.  I felt the turn in my heart.  The Psalms do that.  This song did that.  The point, I think, is not that we won’t whine (at least until we are fully restored in the final Day.)  The point is that Jesus transforms our whine into worship.  Thanks be to God!

Why do you say, O Jacob, and complain, O Israel, “My way is hidden from the Lord; my cause is disregarded by my God”? Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Isaiah 40:27-29

Gracious Father, I remember my parent’s very loud “get-over-it” body language when I would whine as a child. Whether weary from the forever car ride on a trip in a non-air-conditioned care, having to eat canned asparagus or beef liver, or sitting in the waiting room of the dentist’s office, to complain was to invoke “the look”. I understood the genesis and gist of “the look” later when I became a parent. None of us likes to be on the other end of a whine.

Today my utter delight is to know that as your child, you will never be disgusted with me. You will never roll your eyes at me. You will never slam a door in my face. You will never be irritated with me or shame me. The only look you give me reminds me of your welcoming heart. Though you find no pleasure in my whining, you find all and only pleasure in your Son, Jesus, and you have hidden my life in his.

Thus today, Jesus, though it seems like heaven isn’t paying attention to some very important things in my heart, life and story, I hear you say to me in the gospel, “Come to me all of you who are weary and burdened… you will find rest, because I will give you rest.” Jesus you took the ultimate abandonment from the Father on the cross that I might be assured I will never be disregarded or abandoned. I am weary, he is not. I lack wisdom, he does not. He is God, I am not.

Lord, though you may not answer me the way I want you to answer, I hear again and receive your promise of all the strength and power I need for my present weakness. Turn my whining into worship this day, oh gracious and ever-present God.

Scotty Smith
Pastor for Preaching, Teaching and Worship
Christ Community Church

“The only meaningful use of the phrase “the culture” is embedded in a  longer phrase: the culture of a particular sphere, at a particular scale, for  a particular people or public (ethnicity), at a particular time. And even  this much more careful way of speaking needs to always be accompanied  by the awareness that the culture we are describing is changing, perhaps  slowly, perhaps quickly.”  Andy Crouch

Again, Andy Crouch raises a new thought to me.  He says that we toss around the word culture and talk about transforming it, and while that is well and good, we need to stop and consider what “culture” we’re talking about.  According to Andy, we must consider the following when we talk about culture:  sphere, scale, people group, time.  I am taking these guidelines and thinking about my particular story and how it fits into a calling to particular cultures.  When my kids were ten and under, the calling to live and tell of the transforming power of the gospel in the ‘mom-culture’ of Pensacola, Florida and only slightly beyond, was defined by the horizons of possibility in that story.  Think about it.  In what specific sphere, scale, people group, and time is your story leading you to bring gospel transformation today?

“Culture making requires shared goods. Culture making is people (plural) making something of the world – it is never a solitary affair.  Only artifacts that leave the solitude of their inventors’ studios and imaginations can move the horizons of possibility and become the raw material for more culture making.  Until an artifact is shared, it is not culture.” Culture-Making by Andy Crouch

In the second chapter of Culture-making, Andy Crouch talks about cultural worlds and how they are created.  It turns out that we ‘make culture’ by creating something and sharing it.  The extent to which we make culture depends on the extent to which we share it.  Whether we bake a pie or calculate mathematical equations with pi, whether we study the origin and impact of slums or slime, our work must be shared to expand the horizons of possibility.

For many years, I have written articles about struggles of living the gospel in my daily story.  But until recently, I mostly kept them to myself.  Why?  Because I was afraid of many things – among them, miscommunication and criticism.  I like to be liked, and everyone isn’t going to like me if I write some of the things I am thinking.  Some people won’t agree with me, and they might write mean comments.

God has been speaking to my heart about my scrinchy self-protection (see you might not even like the fact that I just made up a word  – ‘scrinchy’ – but I’ll bet you know what it meansJ).   God has spoken fairly clearly, in Steve Jobs’ words, quoted by Crouch, “Real artists ship.”  Not because writing and publishing makes me a ‘real artist.’  It’s not about me.  It’s about God.  It’s about bringing His glory by telling His story to the world.  It can be through tying a three-year-old’s shoelace or typing a report for your boss.  It can be by picking up a piece of trash on the road you run on or by picking blueberries with your preschoolers.  The possibilities are endless.  What little patch of culture will you impact today?  Look for ways to create and communicate culture through all the world.  Or, as Jesus said, “Go ye into all the world and make disciples of all the nations.”

The Story of Culture
I’m reading Culture-Making by Andy Crouch, and in the first chapter alone, I have discovered so many important concepts on our calling and creation, I am eager to share them. So follow along for the next week or so, and see if you agree.

In Chapter One, Crouch discusses the meaning of culture, and of course, that discussion leads immediately to story. He tells about the Enuma Elish, one of the earliest creation myths.  Of Babylonian origin some 3000 years before Christ, it tells a violent and chaotic story of how the earth was born (You’ll have to read either Crouch’s book or the myth itself to hear more of the story.)  He goes on to contrast the creation story Genesis tells to many other myths circulating at that time:  ”The world [God creates] is not the product of accident or heavenly politics, but of a free, even relaxed, blessed Creator.  However, this Creator also addresses the fundamental concern that lies underneat the Enuma Elish and other creation myths — the human sense that chaos is never far away.  Genesis 1 is a sequence of acts of ordering, as the Creator gradually carves out a habitable environment.”  (Crouch, Culture-making, Location 171-172, Kindle edition).

Now think about it.  In our world, chaos has often been assumed to be the reigning ‘order’ of the day.  As a mother of four, wife of one, friend to many, and speaker at retreats, I head into most days expecting the unexpected. As a glass-half-empty sort of personality, I also assume that unexpected will come in the form of chaos and deconstruction.

Crouch forces me to re-examine my lens, to remember that God created beauty and order, and that He has not stopped in this fallen world. Revelation 21-22 tell the end of our story, in which the sea, which stands for chaos, will be no more.  (For a great study on this, visit Scotty Smith’s Facebook fan page.)

What about you?  Do you need to stop as this day begins and ask yourself — when the ‘fall’ comes today in my life, how can I be a creator of beauty?  How can I be a part of restoring peace with a relaxed order?  How will that order be different from a demand for control that says, “Life will work according to my plan”?