The Word

“Your Word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” Psalm 119:105

I have been spending a lot of time in that verse this week. I find great value in reading a particular verse over and over again and letting it speak to me in different ways. Here is some of the light God has given me through that verse this week.

God’s Word is unique in its light.
“Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path.”

Devotional books and sermons are great, but only insofar as they give us the light of God’s Word. They are not substitutes for the Word. Our only true and certain light comes from spending time in God’s Word.

2 Timothy 3:14-17 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

God’s Word dispels darkness
“Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path.”

Our lives are often dark, uncertain, confusing, fearful. It is easy for us to focus on the dark and unknown and become distracted from God’s path. God’s remedy for that is His Word. It brings vision, clarity, understanding, courage and boldness.

God’s Word moves us forward
“Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path.”

Notice, it is not light for our chair, couch or bed. Nor is it for our heads, hearts or hands. It is for our feet and our path. God is constantly moving us forward. His Word keeps our feet on His path.

Matthew 28:18-20 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

God’s Word directs our next steps.
“Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path.”

We don’t get the whole map or the whole trail. We get light for our next few steps. Our distant past needs no light. The light for our distant future will come as needed. For today God’s Word enlightens only the next few steps along the path. The writer of Proverbs has a great way of expressing this:

Proverbs 4:18 The path of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn, shining ever brighter till the full light of day.

Ministering Sub-Culturally

God has put in a place where I have the privilege of ministering among several different culture groups (Sudanese, Liberian, Tibetan and Anglo). Much of my personal study is devoted to learning to minister across cultures. I am part of group (LINC) currently trying to organize our gifts and passions to maximize our effectiveness ministering cross or multi culturally. But I am also part of a weird subculture–unicycling. Like any subculture, we have our own language, our own definition of success, our own acronyms, our own heroes and our own unique gatherings. This past weekend we had one such gathering, Mondo (it could also justifiably called Weirdo), and it got me thinking.

Just as their are many unique cultures in our society where we have unique opportunities to share the Gospel, there are also many unique sub-cultures where the opportunities are just as unique and just as many.

What if there were a group like LINC that sought out Christians in specific sub-cultures and empowered them to share the Gospel in their own unique settings? What if we identified Christian skateboarders, Christian gourmets, Christian stampers, Christian photographers, Christian artists (of all forms), Christian nurses, etc and found ways to gather them and empower them for ministry in their unique settings?

I think it has possibilities.

Law and Gospel

Mark Driscoll is one of the pastors of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. He tends to draw a lot of fire from my tribe, but here is a great clip of him explaining the concept of Law/Gospel distinction–a teaching near and dear to my Lutheran heart–and doing a fine job of it.

When we lose sight of this distinction, we lose our effectiveness as missionaries.

Listen here

For other great theological and missional sound bytes, check out Theology Bites.

Speak with Conviction, Church

Taylor Mali is a school teacher and poet. I don’t know his world-view, his God-view or whether or not he prefers his hot dogs with mustard or ketchup, but I like what he says in the following video. The church needs to take this to heart. We have the most powerful, most authoritative message since “let there be light.” Let’s reflect that in how we deliver the message.

The Idolatry of Ministry

This was found on another blog. It comes from Intuitive Leadership: Embracing a Paradigm of Narrative, Metaphor & Chaos by Tim Keel.

I believe the most acceptable and common form of idolatry in churches today is ministry. I believe many leaders and many churches worship ministry – that is, what we are trying to do for God. We often do not pursue God but instead pursue the fruitfulness that we are told accompanies God’s presence in a person or community’s life. Let me rephrase that statement: we rarely pursue God directly but instead pursue external expressions called “ministry” as a sign of God. But when we make ministry our pursuit, we make it impossible to realize the very thing we seek. Ministry is always the by-product of something else. What? The pursuit of God.

It made me think. It is still making me think. I am trying not to get hung up on the last sentence. I know it is not my pursuit of God that leads to ministry; rather, God’s pursuit of me in Jesus Christ. But the whole idea of worshiping ministry, of letting ministry become god, is an idea that intrigues and convicts me.

Grace and Peace.

Interpreting the Language

For my last birthday, my family decided I needed to be brought kicking and screaming into the 21st century. They bought me an IPod. For those who don’t know, an IPod is a device that stores a seemingly unlimited amount of music, movies and pictures. So far I have stored all my favorite CDs (over 200 songs), 250 pictures of my family, and the past 18 weeks of Prairie Home Companion, and it still tells me I have used less than 10% of the storage capacity. It has earphones so that I can listen to the music and a screen so that I can see the pictures or watch movie. It is slightly larger than a business card.

An IPod has only one button. Hence the problem and hence the reason for this message. The button made no sense to me. All of my experience and intuition tell me that a button has two positions-on and off. An IPOD button has 5 positions, plus it turns and scrolls. I did not immediately grasp this (by “immediately,” I mean that it did not happen in the first three hours). The problem was multiplied by the fact that there were no words on the instructions, only pictures.

And then there is the program on my computer that transfers the music, pictures or movies from a CD or the computer onto my IPod. It has very few instructions. Actually, I should say it has very few words. It has lots of symbols. I grew up with words, not symbols. Nothing made immediate (within 3 hours) sense to me. It left me frustrated, angry and feeling far less than intelligent. Plus I had a gift I couldn’t use.

Fortunately, I have more than an IPod. I have 12 and 10 year old sons. They understand the button and the symbols and can teach them to me. The gift only becomes usable because it comes with those who could interpret it into my language.

And isn’t that what mission is–taking the gift of the death and resurrection of Jesus and interpreting it in such a way that it can be made real and usable to those who just don’t get it?

Grace and Peace,

Bill

Psalm 126

I was always perplexed by Psalm 126 until I heard about the Sahel, that vast stretch of savanna more than four thousand miles wide just under the Sahara Desert. In the Sahel, all the moisture comes in a four month period: May, June, July, and August. After that, not a drop of rain falls for eight months. The ground cracks from dryness, and so do your hands and feet. The winds of the Sahara pick up the dust and throw it thousands of feet into the air. It then comes slowly drifting across West Africa as a fine grit. It gets inside your mouth. It gets inside your watch and stops it. The year’s food, of course, must all be grown in those four months. People grow sorghum or milo in small fields.

October and November…these are beautiful months. The granaries are full — the harvest has come. People sing and dance. They eat two meals a day. The sorghum is ground between two stones to make flour and then a mush with the consistency of yesterday’s Cream of Wheat. The sticky mush is eaten hot; they roll it into little balls between their fingers, drop it into a bit of sauce and then pop it into their mouths. The meal lies heavy on their stomachs so they can sleep.

December comes, and the granaries start to recede. Many families omit the morning meal. Certainly by January not one family in fifty is still eating two meals a day. By February, the evening meal diminishes. The meal shrinks even more during March and children succumb to sickness. You don’t stay well on half a meal a day. April is the month that haunts my memory. In it you hear the babies crying in the twilight. Most of the days are passed with only an evening cup of gruel.

Then, inevitably, it happens. A six-or seven-year-old boy comes running to his father one day with sudden excitement. “Daddy! Daddy! We’ve got grain!” he shouts. “Son, you know we haven’t had grain for weeks.” “Yes, we have!” the boy insists. “Out in the hut where we keep the goats — there’s a leather sack hanging up on the wall — I reached up and put my hand down in there — Daddy, there’s grain in there! Give it to Mommy so she can make flour, and tonight our tummies can sleep!”

The father stands motionless. “Son, we can’t do that,” he softly explains. “That’s next year’s seed grain. It’s the only thing between us and starvation. We’re waiting for the rains, and then we must use it.” The rains finally arrive in May, and when they do the young boy watches as his father takes the sack from the wall and does the most unreasonable thing imaginable. Instead of feeding his desperately weakened family, he goes to the field and with tears streaming down his face, he takes the precious seed and throws it away. He scatters it in the dirt! Why? Because he believes in the harvest.

The seed is his; he owns it. He can do anything with it he wants. The act of sowing it hurts so much that he cries. But as the African pastors say when they preach on Psalm 126, “Brother and sisters, this is God’s law of the harvest. Don’t expect to rejoice later on unless you have been willing to sow in tears.” And I want to ask you: How much would it cost you to sow in tears? I don’t mean just giving God something from your abundance, but finding a way to say, “I believe in the harvest, and therefore I will give what makes no sense. The world would call me unreasonable to do this — but I must sow regardless, in order that I may someday celebrate with songs of joy.”
Leadership, 1983.