Great Reminder That We Are Sanctified By Grace

"One thing essential to growth in grace is diligence in the use of private means of grace. By these I understand such means as a man must use by himself alone, and no one can use for him. I include under this head private prayer, private reading of the Scriptures, and private meditation and self-examination. The man who does not take pains about these three things must never expect to grow. Here are the roots of true Christianity. Wrong here, and a man is wrong all the way through."
-- J.C. Ryle

A Collect for the Presence of Christ

Lord Jesus, stay with us, for evening is at hand and the day is past; be our companion in the way, kindle our hearts, and awaken hope, that we may know you as you are revealed in Scripture and the breaking of bread. Grant this for the sake of your love. Amen.

Fr. John Wallace, The Daily Office

Devotions, Coffee in a Fancy Cup & Saucer, SF Giants Championship Parade on the Radio!

Yes! Yes! Yes!

☺

http://m.mlb.com/video/topic/61827086/v36821545

More On Jesus' Way

"In striving after the higher experiences of the Christian life, the believer is often in danger of aiming at and rejoicing in what one might call the more human virtues. Such virtues are boldness, joy, contempt of the world, zeal, self-sacrifice -- even the old Stoics taught and practiced these. While the deeper and gentler, the more divine and heavenly graces are scarcely thought of or valued. These virtues are those which Jesus first taught upon earth -- because He brought them from heaven -- those which are more distinctly connected with His cross and the death of self -- poverty of spirit, meekness, long-suffering."

– Andrew Murray

Great Thought on Lordship, The Counter Cultural Nature of Following Jesus

"Tragically, the church has become so comfortable with the culture it can no longer see the bankruptcy of its egocentric, materialistic ways. Indeed, much Christian literature and preaching is but a religious adaptation of self-indulgent, secular standards. But the 'what's in it for me,' 'God will put a chicken in every pot' message mocks the hard-edged truth of the gospel. It is nothing less than heresy."

– Charles Colson

Motivation for Pastors to Take Care of Words

"...the incarnation, the doctrine closest to pastoral work. Caro salutis est cardo, wrote Tertullian. “The flesh is the pivot-point of salvation.”"

Eugene Peterson in The Contemplative Pastor

On Prayer

"The Amen gathers what has just happened into the Maranatha of the about to happen and produces a Benediction."

Eugene Peterson

The Pastoral Work of Prayer & Parables

“The quiet (or noisy) closet life of prayer enters into partnership with the Spirit that strives still with every human heart, a wrestling match in holiness. And parables are the consciousness-altering words that slip past falsifying platitude and invade the human spirit with Christ-truth. This is our primary work in the real world. But we need continual convincing. The people for whom we are praying and among whom we are telling parables are seduced into supposing that their money and ambition are making the world turn on its axis. There are so many of them and so few of us, making it difficult to maintain our convictions. It is easy to be seduced along with them.” http://ref.ly/o/ldlib17/55384 via the Logos Bible Android app.

Yep (Eugene Peterson quote on pastoring)

"...my job is not to solve people’s problems or make them happy, but to help them see the grace operating in their lives. It’s hard to do, because our whole culture is going the other direction, saying that if you’re smart enough and get the right kind of help, you can solve all your problems. The truth is, there aren’t very many happy people in the Bible. But there are people who are experiencing joy, peace, and the meaning of Christ’s suffering in their lives.

The work of spirituality is to recognize where we are—the particular circumstances of our lives—to recognize grace and say, “Do you suppose God wants to be with me in a way that does not involve changing my spouse or getting rid of my spouse or my kids, but in changing me, and doing something in my life that maybe I could never experience without this pain and this suffering?”

Sometimes I think all I do as pastor is speak the word “God” in a situation in which it hasn’t been said before, where people haven’t recognized his presence. Joy is the capacity to hear the name and to recognize that God is here. There’s a kind of exhilaration because God is doing something and, even in a little way, it’s enough at the moment."

Avoid Magic Turkish Delight

"... there's nothing that spoils the taste of good ordinary food half so much as the memory of bad magic food."

CS Lewis in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe of Edmund leaving the Beavers for the Queen's castle.

Servant Leadership, Being Well Read, Influencing

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2014/august-web-only/michael-lindsay-you-have-to-be-in-room.html?utm_source=ctweekly-html&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_term=15012091&utm_content=292449604&utm_campaign=2013&start=2

Solid Life Advice

Incarnation & Shepherding

Master Plan for Discipleship with Robert Coleman

from http://www.cslewisinstitute.org/

Psalms That are A Response To Living and Moving and Having Our Being In God

“The function of this kind of psalm is theological, that is, to praise and thank God. But such a psalm also has a social function of importance. It is to articulate and maintain a “sacred canopy” under which the community of faith can live out its life with freedom from anxiety. That is, life is not simply a task to be achieved, an endless construction of a viable world made by effort and human ingenuity. There is a givenness to be relied on, guaranteed by none other than God. That givenness is here before us, stands over us, endures beyond us, and surrounds us behind and before.” http://ref.ly/o/spiritltypsalms/35640 via the Logos Bible Android app.

Love

Love doesn't need to be cute, but this is.

The Counter Cultural Nature of Trusting (and resting in) Jesus

“Such a grid in two movements reveals an understanding of life that is fundamentally alien to our culture. The dominant ideology of our culture is committed to continuity and success and to the avoidance of pain, hurt, and loss. The dominant culture is also resistant to genuine newness and real surprise. It is curious but true, that surprise is as unwelcome as is loss. And our culture is organized to prevent the experience of both.

This means that when we practice either move—into disorientation or into new orientation—we engage in a countercultural activity, which by some will be perceived as subversive. Perhaps that is why the complaint psalms have nearly dropped out of usage. Where the worshiping community seriously articulates these two moves, it affirms an understanding of reality that knows that if we try to keep our lives we will lose them, and that when lost for the gospel, we will be given life (Mark 8:35). Such a practice of the Psalms cannot be taken for granted in our culture, but will be done only if there is resolved intentionality to live life in a more excellent way.”

--Walter Brueggemann

http://ref.ly/o/spiritltypsalms/31768 via the Logos Bible Android app.

Parallel of Our Difficulties with The Psalms

“One move we make is out of a settled orientation into a season of disorientation. This move is experienced partly as changed circumstance, but it is much more a personal awareness and acknowledgment of the changed circumstance. This may be an abrupt or a slowly dawning acknowledgment. It constitutes a dismantling of the old, known world and a relinquishment of safe, reliable confidence in God’s good creation. The movement of dismantling includes a rush of negativities, including rage, resentment, guilt, shame, isolation, despair, hatred, and hostility. It is that move that characterizes much of the Psalms in the form of complaint and lament.”

--Walter Brueggemann

http://ref.ly/o/spiritltypsalms/25104 via the Logos Bible Android app.

The Spirit of Prayer

“The spirit of the soul is in itself nothing else but a spirit breathed forth from the life of God, for the sole purpose that the life, nature, working, and inclinations of God might be manifest in it.

“The Spirit of prayer is a pressing forth of the soul out of this earthly life; it is a stretching with all its desires after the life of God; it is a leaving, as far as it can, all its own spirit, in order to receive a Spirit from above—to be one life, one love, one spirit with Christ in God. This prayer, which is an emptying all of its own natural desires an opening of itself for the light and love of God to enter into it, is the prayer in the name of Christ to with nothing is denied. The love that God has for the soul—His eternal, never ceasing desire to enter into it, to dwell in it, and to open the birth of His Holy Word and spirit in it—stays until the door of the heart opens for it. For nothing can keep God out of the soul, or hinder His holy union with it, except the heart that is turned away from Him.

“A will that is  surrender to worldliness is much like Nebuchadnezzar, who ‘was driven from men and ate grass like oxen’ (Daniel 4.33). Such a will has the same life as the beasts of the field, for earthly desires maintain the same life in a man as an ox. It is suitable for earthly food to be only desired and use for the support of the earthly body; but when the desire, the delight, the longing of the soul is set up on earthly things, then humanity is degraded, is fallen from God, and the life of the soul is made as earthly and animal as the life of the body.”

—William Law as quoted by Andrew Murray in God's Best Secrets.

Good Thoughts on Jesus Focused Parenting

http://www.christianitytoday.com/women/2012/june/prodigal-children-if-it-can-happen-to-john-piper-it-can.html?paging=off#bmb=1

Great Questions Regarding Our Respect of Grace

Powerful article.

http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/do-you-pervert-the-grace-of-god

Soul Feeding Love

I have been meditating on Psalm 119.40 "How I long for your precepts!
In your righteousness preserve my life" and the love relationship in which the Lord feeds my soul.

And I found this great quote from Andrew Murray:

"...the great God of love is shining upon us every moment of the day. If we will give Him time and patient waiting, this love will enter our hearts with all its gifts and graces and its unspeakable blessedness. We will be made willing to part utterly with self and to yield ourselves as a continual sacrifice to the God who loves us."

Amen! Dying to self, and living in Jesus; so simple and profound. To "long" for God's Word to speak to me, I must be a consistent listener. To know His "righteousness" and that He is the only one to "preserve my life" is experienced as I consistently walk in His grace. That is an amazing love relationship where I can only adore Him because He loved me first. So I will soak up His love and be willing to cooperate with Him as He asks me to die to self in glorifying Him.

Good Thoughts on How to Read the Bible

http://jcryle.net/2012/01/23/8-profitable-ways-to-read-the-bible/

The Good News of Jesus’ Rest

Why Bible Translation

Jesus’ Loving-Kindness as our Good Shepherd

Surely your goodness and love will follow me
    all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord
    forever. 

Psalm 23.6

Life never ceases to reveal our need to depend on Him. Surely without Jesus being our Good Shepherd (John 10) we would be lost little sheep. As it is, He IS always filling our lives with His loving-kindness and mercy, so we are always found and filled little sheep (Matthew 10.42; 18.11-14). Ah the steadfast love of the Lord!

When we trust in Jesus (Romans 10.9; 1 Peter 1.17-21) we accept the reality that HE HAS FOUND US and His Holy Spirit fills us to give us His abundant life (Ephesians 1.12-14; John 10.10). [That is a good thing to remember as we go through our days in this season of having just celebrated Pentecost (Acts 2).] I love the way that Eugene Peterson in The Message gets the emphasis of Psalm 23.6a correct: that God is the one pursuing us, “Your beauty and love chase after me every day of my life.”

Push comes to shove when we go through those dark and difficult times. Will we submit to the authority of Jesus by simply accepting His loving-kindness and mercy. That is not to say we have to be fake with our emotions. Look at the rest of the Psalms, we can be “real” with God. Two questions: will we take our cathartic outpouring to Jesus? will we come back to dwell in His loving-kindness (note it is OK with this takes a while, the pain and hurt in this life is real and cuts deep).

“…the Psalms…invite us into a more honest facing of the darkness. The reason the darkness may be faced and lived in is that even in the darkness, there is One to address. The One to address is in the darkness but is not simply a part of the darkness (John 1.1–5). Because this One has promised to be in the darkness with us, we find the darkness strangely transformed, not by the power of easy light, but by the power of relentless solidarity. Out of the “fear not” of that One spoken in the darkness, we are marvelously given new life, we know not how. The Psalms are a boundary (Jeremiah 5.22) thrown up against self-deception. They do not permit us to ignore and deny the darkness, personally or publicly, for that is where new life is given, whether on the third day or by some other uncontrolled schedule at work among us.”

Walter Brueggemann. Spirituality of the Psalms.

I love the reference in Brueggemann’s quote to the resurrection. Friends, may we live under the authority of Jesus’ great care and provisions for us. May we live in His abundant resurrection life, even “through the darkest valley” (Psalm 23.4). We will dwell with Him in His house forever (Psalm 23.6), AND His Spirit is dwelling with us NOW; so let us abide in His loving-kindness today!

Counterfeit Obedience

“When you know you should do a thing, and do it, immediately you know more. Revise where you have become ‘stodgy’ spiritually, and you will find it goes back to a point where there was something you knew you should do, but you did not do it because there seemed no immediate call to, and now you have no perception, no discernment; at a time of crisis you are spiritually distracted instead of spiritually self-possessed. It is a dangerous thing to refuse to go on knowing. The counterfeit of obedience is a state of mind in which you work up occasions to sacrifice yourself; ardour is mistaken for discernment. It is easier to sacrifice yourself than to fulfil your spiritual destiny, which is stated in Romans 12:1–2 . It is a great deal better to fulfil the purpose of God in your life by discerning His will than to perform great acts of self-sacrifice. “To obey is better than sacrifice.””

From Oswald Chambers. My Upmost For His Highest.

http://ref.ly/o/utmost/246585 via the Logos Bible Android app.

Real Life in The Psalms

“The Psalms are profoundly subversive of the dominant culture, which wants to deny and cover over the darkness we are called to enter. Personally we shun negativity. Publicly we deny the failure of our attempts to exercise control. The last desperate effort at control through nuclear weapons is a stark admission of our failure to control. But through its propaganda and the ideology of consumerism, our society goes its way in pretense. Against all of this the Psalms issue a mighty protest and invite us into a more honest facing of the darkness. The reason the darkness may be faced and lived in is that even in the darkness, there is One to address. The One to address is in the darkness but is not simply a part of the darkness (John 1:1–5). Because this One has promised to be in the darkness with us, we find the darkness strangely transformed, not by the power of easy light, but by the power of relentless solidarity. Out of the “fear not” of that One spoken in the darkness, we are marvelously given new life, we know not how. The Psalms are a boundary (Jeremiah 5:22) thrown up against self-deception. They do not permit us to ignore and deny the darkness, personally or publicly, for that is where new life is given, whether on the third day or by some other uncontrolled schedule at work among us.”

from 'Spirituality of the Psalms' by Walter Brueggemann

http://ref.ly/o/spiritltypsalms/8261 via the Logos Bible Android app.

I Feel Alive Today

I feel alive today
As I water the terrace.
Noticing the bees & their ways,
Our own little slice of Paris.

Going between the sun and the shade,
The simplest things provide wonder.
This is a moment that will not fade,
The stirring of life's full thunder.

Tending our garden with showers,
Planting the seedlings so cared for,
Peace and contentment are ours,
Gratitude towards our worthy Lord.

Says my gorgeous wife,
"We have contributed to life!"

  

Holy Spirit Renewal

An encouraging thought and reminder to allow the Holy Spirit to renew and fill our souls this morning and all day long.

John Merritt "As we humble ourselves, and look up to The One who is bigger and mightier and wiser than any one of us, may we begin to sense a fresh breeze of God's Spirit blowing wind into our sails, strengthening us, encouraging us, loving us, moving us forward."  ~John Merritt Shared from a Google+ post.

What Can I Do

What Can I Do
(By Tye Tribbet)

Tell me what can I do
Cause I can't live without
I can't live without you

So here's my heart.
Here's my mind
I give you my soul
Need you to take control

Cause I've tried it
Tried it on my own but
what i found is
I can't make it
on my own

Spoilers to The Gospel

― J. C. (John Charles) Ryle, Knots Untied 1885

“You may spoil the Gospel by substitution. You have only to withdraw from the eyes of the sinner the grand object which the Bible proposes to faith,—Jesus Christ; and to substitute another object in His place,—the Church, the Ministry, the Confessional, Baptism or the Lord’s Supper,—and the mischief is done. Substitute anything for Christ, and the Gospel is totally spoiled! Do this, either directly or indirectly, and your religion ceases to be Evangelical.” 

“You may spoil the Gospel by interposition. You have only push something between Christ and the eye of the soul, to draw away the sinner’s attention from the Saviour, and the mischief is done. Interpose anything between man and Christ, and man will neglect Christ for the thing interposed! Do this, either directly or indirectly, and your religion ceases to be Evangelical.”

Wow. A 19th century quote and it is so true today. Because our current language speaks of Jesus coming to have a relationship with us and not to establish religion I would say, using today’s vernacular, if you lose sight of Jesus by these two distractions (or any other) you become religious.

How easy it is for us in the church in America to glance off of Jesus and put other good things in front of us. As Luis Palau says, those distractions might be good but they are not the Good News. That is why we must keep grace before us; remember we are saved and grow Spiritually by Jesus!

If you are interested I put a prayer guide for National Day of Prayer on our church site. www.windbornchurch.org

To KNOW Jesus and To BE Always Dependent on His Grace

To KNOW Jesus and To BE Always Dependent on His Grace. Thoughts in preparing for a sermon on Matthew 9.27-34.

It so interesting that the week after Easter, we will look a passage that addresses how we respond to Jesus. Will we “get” Jesus, “reject” Jesus or just be safe in the crowd and “like” Jesus but not commit to Him? In the blind men we see acceptance of the claim that Jesus is the Messiah, as they recognize their other dependency on Him. At the end of the passage the Pharisees flat reject Jesus and claim that He uses the power of the Devil to cast out demons. And in the middle of the passage are the masses. The crowd gets so close to understanding Jesus as they are amazed by Him but do not confess Him nor worship Him. Close is not good enough.

I fear that pandering to the crowd is too good of a description of the current church in America. We are great at using human centered and market centered approaches. We bend over backwards to entertain the masses, producing great emotions. So like the crowd that followed Jesus, they are “amazed” but I wonder if they really KNOW Jesus. How many people in our churches understand who Jesus is? How many confess him as their Lord? How many are utterly dependent on him? How many are willing to pick up their cross daily and follow Jesus (in the way of sacrifice)? How many consistently walk in grace? In the name of being a utilitarian we seek to attract large crowds and I fear is that we dumb down the gospel.

Ironically, this dumbing down of the gospel tends to be completely Orthodox but misses Jesus. We want a little Jesus in our slick church buildings once (or maybe a few times a week) and then we live like we want Jesus to leave us alone. We want to be good Americans and do it all ourselves. We want to use or intellect and resources to solve our problems and we might even pray for the Lord to bless our plans. Problem is that grace does not work that way. The problem is that that is not how Jesus rolls. It is not the Jesus way. What do we do when Jesus’ will is different than ours and He re-directs our plans, do we fall apart? does our faith waver?

Jesus wants us to come to Him. That precludes our leaving of the world/ourselves to confess that we need Him to be in charge. (Matthew 9.27 “two blind men followed Jesus; 9.28 “the blind men came to Jesus”.) Jesus wants us to acknowledge who He is. To know what and why we believe what we do about Him. (9.27 “Calling out, “Have mercy on us Son of David!””.) Jesus wants us to admit that He is powerful enough to do whatever He wants whenever He wants. (9.28 “He asked them, “Do you believe that I am able to do this?” “Yes, Lord.” they replied”.) Christians, when was the last time you meditated and contemplated Christology (a study of who Jesus is)? And I’m not talking simple thoughts that make us feel good but actual theological reading? Especially in our world that twists and distorts our Messiah, we ought to KNOW the Biblical Jesus.

The following context of participation is wonderfully rich. In Matthew 9.25-28 we see the heart of the King and are commanded to pray for people who will proclaim and live like Jesus. Then in Matthew 10.1 and following, Jesus invites the disciples and us to live as answers to those prayers? I pray this for our church community! That we might listen to Jesus so closely, that we love Him so much, that we cannot help but cooperate with His Kingdom living. Oh that we would continue to be people dependent on Jesus’ grace as His Holy Spirit flows through us!

Happy Easter!

A great reminder of the cross.

Dustin Butler shared David Kowalski's post with you. A great reminder of the cross.

David Kowalski "Jesus did not die just to give us peace and a purpose in life; He died to save us from the wrath of God. He died to reconcile us to a holy God who was alienated from us because of our sin. He died to ransom us from the penalty of sin – the punishment of everlasting destruction, shut out from the presence of the Lord. He died that we, the just objects of God’s wrath, should become, by His grace, heirs of God and co-heirs with Him." -- Jerry Bridges

Why We Need Faith