Abound and Brim Over

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.  [ESV]

Oh! May the God of green hope fill you up with joy, fill you up with peace, so that your believing lives, filled with the life-giving energy of the Holy Spirit, will brim over with hope!  [The Message]

Romans 15:13

A Place

I like the song "Heaven Is The Face" by Stephen Curtis Chapman:



...

But in my mind’s eye I can see a place
Where Your glory fills every empty space.
All the cancer is gone,
Every mouth is fed,
And there’s no one left in the orphans’ bed.
Every lonely heart finds their one true love,
And there’s no more goodbye,
And no more not enough,
And there’s no more enemy (no more)
...

Grace to You and With Your Spirit

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.

Philippians 1:2 and 4:23

Challenge It

Mark Batterson post:  Status Quo Bias

A few decades ago, a pair of psychologists named William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser discovered a phenomenon they dubbed the status quo bias. Simply put: most of us have a tendency to keep doing what we've been doing without giving it much thought.

Ever been offered a free subscription to a magazine for the first year? Why would we be offered something for free? It’s because magazine companies understand the status quo bias. Most of us will forget to cancel. And it’s not really that we’ve forgotten. We’re just too lazy to make a simple phone call or write a simple letter. Right? That is human nature! We tend to keep doing what we’ve been doing. And the problem with that is this: if you keep doing what you’ve always done you’ll keep getting what you’ve always gotten.

As we get ready to begin a new year, you need to challenge the status quo. I know there is nothing magical about a new year or a new decade. And not everybody has a resolution personality. But all of us need to make changes. Take some time to evaluate your life spiritually, relationally, physically, emotionally, and intellectually. What changes do you need to make? Is there something you need to stop doing or start doing? What do you need to do more or do less? Is there a choice you need to make? A goal you need to set? A habit you need to establish?

Don't maintain the status quo. Challenge it. 

Only One

Some of the lyrics from "How Many Kings" by Downhere

How many kings, stepped down from their thrones?
How many lords have abandoned their homes?
How many greats have become the least for me?
How many Gods have poured out their hearts
To romance a world that has torn all apart?
How many fathers gave up their sons for me?
Only one did that for me

Face of God

One of my favorite songs this time of year is Mary, Did You Know? by Mark Lowry and Buddy Greene.  The first part of the song is:

Mary, did you know
that your Baby Boy would one day walk on water?
Mary, did you know
that your Baby Boy would save our sons and daughters?
Did you know
that your Baby Boy has come to make you new?
This Child that you delivered will soon deliver you.

Mary, did you know
that your Baby Boy will give sight to a blind man?
Mary, did you know
that your Baby Boy will calm the storm with His hand?
Did you know
that your Baby Boy has walked where angels trod?
When you kiss your little Baby you kissed the face of God?

Not An End

Mark Batterson post:  Means vs. Ends

I think one of the primary problems we face in Western Christianity is the simple fact that so many people view going to church as an end instead of a means to an end. Let me explain. For those who subconsciously view church as an end in and of itself, going to church is the way they do their religious duty. They check church off the religious list. But do you really think God's ultimate dream for our lives is to sit in a pew for ninety minutes?

Going to church isn't an end. It's a means to an end. The real test is how we live out our faith Monday to Friday. That's where the rubber meets the road. Church is the locker room talk or the boardroom talk. Choose your metaphor. It's not the game. It's not the business. It prepares us for the game of life, the business of life.

Sure hope this makes sense. It's subtle. But I think it's one reason why people go to church on Sundays but don't live like it on Mondays.

It's not an end. It's a means to an end.

Joy

LifeToday Weekly Devotional

The Voice of Advent
by Joan Chittister

“‘Are you the Messiah we’ve been expecting, or should we keep looking
for someone else?’ Jesus told them, ‘Go back to John and tell him what
you have heard and seen—the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are
cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life, and the Good News is
being preached to the poor.’”  (Matthew 11:3-5, NLT)

When the first small flame of the Advent wreath lights the monastery chapel and the soft, clear voices of those who have sung the chants and haunting melodies all their lives open the first of the Advent vigils, there is no doubt that we have begun a moment out of time.  It is the beginning of the liturgical year: Christmas is four weeks away.  We are at the moment in which a new cycle of old ideas will be stirred up again within us.  We are beginning a spiritual crossing on dark waters led only by an ancient sailing chart marked by a star.  Here in the dark we will begin the search for light in the soul.

Advent is not the oldest season in the church.  Easter, the Pasch or Passover, is far older, by at least two hundred years.  Advent did not begin in Rome.  In fact, the earliest mention of a period of preparation for Christmas didn’t exist until 490 in Gaul, what is now modern France.

We are not here in this dark chapel tonight, then, because Christmas is the high point of every church year, and Advent its most profound season.  The church year does not start here because Christmas is coming.  The church year starts here to remind us why Jesus was born in the first place.  Most of all, it starts here to call us to determine why we ourselves are here at all.

Advent, from the Latin, means “coming.”  But Advent is not about one coming; it about three comings.  The great spiritual question the season poses for each of us is, which coming are you and I waiting for now?  At this moment in our lives, at this present stage of our spiritual development, what we’re waiting for surely determines how we will wait for it.

Each of the three comings of Advent is very different.  The first coming is the remembrance of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth in the flesh, based on the infancy narratives in the Gospels that give its historical context.  But if our expectation of Christmas remains on this level, the birthday of the “baby Jesus” becomes at best a pastoral attempt to make Jesus real.  This Jesus is a child’s Jesus that, too often – if our definition of Christmas is simply a child’s story about the birth of a child – will remain just that.  It is a simple, soothing story that makes few, if any, demands on the soul.

This coming too often leaves us, whatever our age, at the stage of spiritual childhood.  The baby Jesus captivates our hearts, true.  But the birth date of this child is not one of the great mysteries of the faith.  As Augustine pointed out, “The day of the Lord’s birth does not possess a sacramental character.  It is only a recalling of the fact that he was born.”

The next coming to which Advent calls our attention is a coming greater than the simple fact of human birth.  This is the coming of the presence of God recognized among us now in Scripture, in the Eucharist, in the community itself.  This coming makes Jesus present in our own lives, eternally enlivening, eternally with us.

The final coming to which Advent points us is the Second Coming, the Parousia.  It is this coming that whets the desire of the adult soul.  At the end of time, Jesus has promised and the Christian believes that the Son will return in glory.  Then the reign of God for which we strive with every breath will come in all its fullness.  This is the coming for which we wait.  This is the fullness for which we long.  This is what we really mean when the choir sings into the dark, “Maranatha.” “Come, Lord Jesus, come” is one rendering of the word.  But taken from the Greek, as maran atha – two words – “The Lord has come” is another equally acceptable translation.  Then the comings – past, present, and future – all live together in one long sigh of the soul.

Over the centuries and out of many traditions, Advent as we know it now has emerged to center us in these multiple layers of awareness, in these many levels of faith, in these varied plies of spiritual maturity.  We grow from one to the other, realizing as we do, that life is about more than the past, even about more than the present, and certainly, in the end, about the fullness of a future that is far longer than even our own.

Advent is a period of preparation for Christmas but, unlike Lent, it is not a period of penance.  It is a period that focuses us on joy.  We prepare ourselves to understand the full adult meaning of the feast.  We come to realize more each year how great are our blessings, how beautiful is a life lived in concert with the Jesus who came to show us the way.  We learn the joy of anticipation, the joy of delighting in a sense of the presence of God all around us, the joy of looking for the second coming of Christ, the joy of living in the surety of even more life in the future.

This Week
Are you preparing for Christmas by focusing on joy? Prioritize your time and thoughts this year and celebrate the true meaning of Christmas through advent.

Prayer
“Come, Lord Jesus, and center this season around You. Thank You for Your birth, life, death and resurrection. Help me to focus on the true meaning of Christmas and the joy of Advent.”

Only in the Cross

Excerpt from John Piper:  Boasting Only in the Cross 

Galatians 6:14

But may it never be that I would boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.

You don't have to know a lot of things for your life to make a lasting difference in the world. But you do have to know the few great things that matter, and then be willing to live for them and die for them. The people that make a durable difference in the world are not the people who have mastered many things, but who have been mastered by a few great things. If you want your life to count, if you want the ripple effect of the pebbles you drop to become waves that reach the ends of the earth and roll on for centuries and into eternity, you don't have to have a high IQ or EQ; you don't have to have to have good looks or riches; you don't have to come from a fine family or a fine school. You have to know a few great, majestic, unchanging, obvious, simple, glorious things, and be set on fire by them.

But I know that not everybody in this crowd wants your life to make a difference. There are hundreds of you - you don't care whether you make a lasting difference for something great, you just want people to like you. If people would just like you, you'd be satisfied. Of if you could just have good job with a good wife and a couple good kids and a nice car and long weekends and a few good friends, a fun retirement, and quick and easy death and no hell - if you could have that (minus God) - you'd be satisfied. THAT is a tragedy in the making.

Three weeks ago we got word at our church that Ruby Eliason and Laura Edwards had both been killed in Cameroon. Ruby was over 80. Single all her life, she poured it out for one great thing: To make Jesus Christ known among the unreached, the poor, and the sick. Laura was a widow, a medical doctor, pushing 80 years old, and serving at Ruby's side in Cameroon. The brakes failed, the car went over the cliff, and they were both killed instantly. And I asked my people: was that a tragedy? Two lives, driven by one great vision, spent in unheralded service to the perishing poor for the glory of Jesus Christ—two decades after almost all their American counterparts have retired to throw their lives away on trifles in Florida or New Mexico. No. That is not a tragedy. That is a glory.

I tell you what a tragedy is. I'll read to you from Reader's Digest (Feb. 2000, p. 98) what a tragedy is: "Bob and Penny... took early retirement from their jobs in the Northeast five years ago when he was 59 and she was 51. Now they live in Punta Gorda, Florida, where they cruise on their 30 foot trawler, play softball and collect shells." The American Dream: come to the end of your life - your one and only life - and let the last great work before you give an account to your Creator, be "I collected shells. See my shells." THAT is a tragedy. And people today are spending billions of dollars to persuade you to embrace that tragic dream. And I get forty minutes to plead with you: don't buy it. 

...

God-Light

"This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life. God didn't go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again. Anyone who trusts in him is acquitted; anyone who refuses to trust him has long since been under the death sentence without knowing it. And why? Because of that person's failure to believe in the one-of-a-kind Son of God when introduced to him. 

"This is the crisis we're in: God-light streamed into the world, but men and women everywhere ran for the darkness. They went for the darkness because they were not really interested in pleasing God. Everyone who makes a practice of doing evil, addicted to denial and illusion, hates God-light and won't come near it, fearing a painful exposure. But anyone working and living in truth and reality welcomes God-light so the work can be seen for the God-work it is." 


John 3: 16-21 [The Message]

View of God

Mark Batterson post (excerpt):  A Primal Thought: Day 9

Chapter 9: Potential Energy

Our biggest problem is our small view of God. Every other problem is a symptom. A big view of God is the cure.

On a bad day, we tend to reduce God to the size of our greatest failure, biggest problem, or worst fear. On a good day, we tend to reduce God to the size of our greatest gift, highest hope, or best attribute. But either way, we are creating God in our image. And what we end up with is a super-sized version of ourselves. A god who is just a little bigger, a little stronger, and a little wiser than we are. But in reality God is infinitely better than your best thought on your best day. In fact, your best thought on your best day is at least 15.3 billion light-years short of how good and how great God really is.

So what does a small view of God have to do with loving God with all of your strength? Well, at its core, loving God with all of your strength really means loving God with all of His strength. It’s not about what you can do for God. It’s about what God can do in you and through you. Few things are more thrilling than doing what you didn’t think could be done. And it’s not just thrilling for you. It’s thrilling for God. Like a proud parent, our heavenly Father loves it when we do impossible things by His power and for His glory. Loving God with all of your strength is living in raw dependence upon His power. And when you live in raw dependence upon His power, you will do things that cannot be done. 

Trust, Not Fear

Devotional post from Christine Wrytzen:

Matt Chandler is a 35 year old pastor in TX.  He is a gifted teacher.  Mentored by Dr. John Piper, he has grown in spiritual stature to pastor a church God led him to start.  The Village Church.  Eight thousand members. 

On thanksgiving day, Matt had a seizure, was rushed to the hospital, and a significant brain tumor was found.  This past Friday, they operated to remove it. 

The night before his surgery, he posted a video to give, potentially,  his last words to his congregation and internet family.  In light of the many devotionals this past month on the theology of suffering, nothing underscores these biblical principles more than a true life story of one who calls God 'good' in the midst of suffering.

If you'd like to see his 3 minute video, click here. [see below]

Matt did survive the surgery, recognized his doctors upon waking up in recovery, but long term prognosis is still unknown. 

If you are suffering today, here is profound encouragement to hang on to sound theology.  You are not alone.  Matt's voice is a clear and compelling call to trust, not fear, and to count our trials as opportunities to showcase the stunning glory of God's grace.

 Video from Matt

Matt Chandler's posting:

The last seven days have been some of the most interesting of my life. I have felt anxiety, fear, sadness and a deep and unmovable joy simultaneously and in deeper ways than I have felt before. I am grateful for this heightened sense of things. Today at 10:45 a.m. CST I will have a good portion of my right frontal lobe removed. I head into that surgery with a heart that is filled with gratitude and hope.
Here are some of the things I am thankful for in no particular order:

1. I am thankful for the thousands of you who have prayed and fasted for my health. It has brought far more tears to Lauren’s and my eyes to receive this kind of attention from the Church universal than this tumor has.
2. I’m thankful for health insurance because I’m guessing they aren’t doing my five-hour surgery for free!
3. I am thankful that I have deep, real friendships at The Village with Michael Bleecker, Josh Patterson, Brian Miller, Chris Chavez and Beau Hughes. They have been such a comfort to me and my family this past week. Pastors should have good friends on their staff. It’s risky but worth the risk.
4. I am grateful for the men of God in my life, namely John Piper who taught me to hold my life cheap and to join with Paul in saying “I don’t count my life of any value or as precious to myself if only I might finish my course and complete the work that He gave me to do to testify to the Gospel of the grace of God. I’m nothing, I just have a job. God keep me faithful on the job and then let me drop and go to the reward.” Without this strong view of God’s sovereign will, I’m not sure how you don’t despair in circumstances like mine.
5. I am thankful for my wife Lauren. “Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laughs at the time to come. She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue. She looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: ‘Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all.’” “Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised.”
6. I am thankful for my children. Audrey the Beautiful, Reid the Valiant and Norah the Joyous. Being a daddy to these three is one of the greatest joys of my life.
7. The privilege of seeing and appreciating all of life through the grid of a heightened sense of my own mortality.
8. I am thankful for brilliant doctors and surgeons who have been given a real gift by our great God and King to repair things as complex as the brain.
9. I am thankful for The Village Church. If there is a place that loves Jesus more, takes sanctification as seriously and wants to see the lost love the great King deeply I am unaware of it. These last seven years have been a spectacular joy!
10. More than anything else I am grateful to my King Eternal, my Lord Immortal, for my God invisible. He alone is God. All Glory and Honor, Forever to You O God. I am overwhelmed in these moments by God Himself and the assurance of a future inheritance of a Kingdom that cannot be shaken and where all things are made new (Hebrews 12).

Christ is All,
Matt Chandler

Greatness of our King

Lifter

But you, O LORD, are a shield about me,
   my glory, and the lifter of my head.

Psalm 3:3

No Condemnation

Great video:

Freedom, Balm and Joy

God of hope,
you call us home from the exile of selfish oppression
to the freedom of justice,
the balm of healing,
and the joy of sharing.
Make us strong to join you in your holy work,
as friends of strangers and victims,
companions of those whom others shun,
and as the happiness of those whose hearts are broken.
We make our prayer through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.

Thematic prayer, Year C, Third Sunday of Advent

Water

Yesterday we discussed the Samaritan's Purse gift catalog, and reminded everyone of our efforts to raise $9,000 to provide a community with clean water (gift #36):

Almost half of all the people in developing countries suffer from water-borne diseases and other illnesses caused by unclean water. Working with local ministry partners, Samaritan’s Purse provides communities with safe water for drinking, cooking, and washing through projects ranging from water treatment and protection to sanitation and hygiene education. In this way, countless people have discovered that only Jesus Christ can satisfy their spiritual thirst: “To him who is thirsty I will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life” (Revelation 21:6, NIV). A gift of $9,000 can supply enough clean water for 500 families—just $18 per family—by providing a portable water purification unit or other sustainable water system. 

Weakness

If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness.

2 Cor 11:30

Irrevocable

For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.

Romans 11:29

Unsearchable and Marvelous

"As for me, I would seek God,
   and to God would I commit my cause,
who does great things and unsearchable,
    marvelous things without number:

Job 5: 8-9

Primal Essence

Excerpt from Mark Batterson post:  A Primal Thought

Over the next ten days I'm going to share excerpts from Primal: A Quest for the Lost Soul of Christianity. If you want to download a sample chapter, visit www.theprimalmovement.com.

Chapter 1: Two Thousand Stairs

We hopped on a double-decker bus and headed toward the heart of Rome. Lora and I had spent a year planning the trip, but nothing prepares you to stand in the very place where Caesars ruled an empire or gladiators battled to the death. As we walked the Via Sacra, we were stepping on the same two-thousand year-old stones that conquering armies marched on. Of course, I'm guessing they weren't licking gelatos. Our three days in the Eternal City went by far too fast. And I wish we hadn't waited until our fifteenth anniversary to take the trip.
...

As we navigated those claustrophobic catacombs, I was overcome by the fact that I was standing in a place where my spiritual ancestors risked everything, even their lives, to worship God. And I felt a profound mixture of gratitude and conviction. I live in a First World country in the twenty-first century. And I’m grateful for the freedoms and blessings I enjoy because of when and where I live. But when you’re standing in an ancient catacomb, the comforts you enjoy make you uncomfortable. The things you complain about are convicting. And some of the sacrifices you’ve made for the cause of Christ might not even qualify under a second-century definition.

As I tried to absorb the significance of where I was, I couldn’t help but wonder if our generation has conveniently forgotten how inconvenient it can be to follow in the footsteps of Christ. I couldn’t help but wonder if we have diluted the truths of Christianity and settled for superficialities. I couldn’t help but wonder if we have accepted a form of Christianity that is more educated but less powerful, more civilized but less compassionate, more acceptable but less authentic than that which our spiritual ancestors practiced.

Over the last two thousand years, Christianity has evolved in lots of ways. We’ve come out of the catacombs and built majestic cathedrals with all the bells and steeples. Theologians have given us creeds and canons. Churches have added pews and pulpits, hymnals and organs, committees and liturgies. And the IRS has given us 501(c)(3) status. And there is nothing inherently wrong with any of those things. But none of those things is primal. And almost like the Roman effect of building things on top of things, I wonder if the accumulated layers of Christian traditions and institutions have unintentionally obscured what lies beneath. 

I’m not suggesting that we categorically dismiss all those evolutions as unbiblical. Most of them are simply abiblical. There isn’t a precedent for them in Scripture, but they don’t contradict biblical principles either. I’m certainly not demonizing postmodern forms of worship. After all, the truth must be reincarnated in every culture in every generation. And I am personally driven by the conviction that there are ways of doing church that no one has thought of yet. But two thousand years of history beg this question: When all of the superficialities are stripped away, what is the primal essence of Christianity? 

...

Perceptions and Reasonings

Excerpts from John Piper sermon Skeptical Grumbling and Sovereign Grace

...

In this verse Jesus says, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day” (John 6:44). ...

...

But instead of getting more and more clarity and more and more agreement, Jesus is getting more and more resistance. This resistance in verse 41 is called grumbling. And the content of their grumbling is that what he says doesn’t fit with what they think they know about him. “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?” In other words, he can’t be from heaven, because he’s from earth. We know his parents.

So the words of Jesus about himself collide with human perceptions and human reasonings about what is possible. “You can’t be from heaven, because our eyes and ears and minds tell us you are from earth.” And so they resist what Jesus says. That’s the nub of their grumbling.

...

One clue is that he says it in response to grumbling. Verses 43-44: “Jesus answered them, “Do not grumble among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” And the content of their grumbling according to verse 42 was, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”

In other words, their perceptions and their reasonings were rising up to resist what Jesus was teaching them—that he was the Bread of God which had come down from heaven. And in essence what Jesus says to them is: You may as well stop this grumbling, because the perceptions and the reasonings of fallen human beings are never the decisive reason anyone comes to me. The decisive reason anyone comes to me is that my Father draws him.

So you would do better to stop grumbling and start praying that God would change your heart and open your eyes and draw you to Jesus. So the reason Jesus speaks this way (in verse 44) is to shake us out of our self-reliant, self-determining, self-exalting, self-absorbed presumptions about what our senses and our reason and our wills can do. One thing is certain: They cannot provide the decisive impulse to come to Christ. Only God can give that. “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” We desire, we choose, we come because we want to. But sovereign, undeserved grace is behind it all.

...