Category: Faithfulness

Celebrate!

So Far, So God.

“After the Israelites pulled off an upset victory over the Philistines, the prophet Samuel built an altar and named it Ebenezer, signifying that the Lord had helped them up to that point. The altar was a way of saying to the people, “The God who did it before can do it again.”

“We all need Ebenezer’s. Reminders that the God who got us here will get us there. That the God who did this will do that. An Ebenezer is a way of recognizing and celebrating the success God has given us along the way in pursuing our dream.

“After our church built our coffeehouse on Capitol Hill, we decided to name it Ebenezers. We were afraid that some people would associate it with Ebenezer Scrooge but it was a risk worth taking. There were so many miracles in the process of purchasing, re-zoning, and building our coffeehouse that we wanted to name it what it was.

“On our coffee shirt sleeves at Ebenezer’s, there is a a Scripture reference that looks like a SKU code—1SAM712. There are also initials, SFSG. The initials stand for So Far So God.

“In every dream journey, there are Ebenezer moments. You’ve got to celebrate those milestones by building altars. Then you’ve got to surround yourself with those life symbols so you don’t forget what God wants you to remember.

“I don’t believe that our greatest shortcoming is not feeling bad enough about what we’ve done wrong, I think our greatest shortcoming is not feeling god enough about what God has done right. When we under-celebrate, we fall short of the glory of God.

“One of the commands in the Old /testament Law is a seven-day celebration (Leviticus 23:39-43). Question: when was the last tine you celebrated anything for seven days? God challenged the Israelites to celebrate longer, to celebrate better. That’s like a command to eat cupcakes!       

“And God didn’t just mandate weeklong celebrations. He also commanded a yearlong honeymoon for newlyweds (Deuteronomy 24:5). Hubba-hubba!

“We need to celebrate more.

We need to celebrate better.

Why? Because thus far the Lord has helped us.

What God-given victories can you celebrate in the course of chasing your God-given objective so far?” Mark Batterson, in Chase the Lion (italics added by me).

The Power of a God-word…

“Prophets use words to remake the world. The world—heaven and earth, men and women, animals and birds—was made in the first place by God’s Word. Prophets, arriving on the scene and finding that world in ruins, finding a world of moral rubble and spiritual disorder, take up the work of words, again to rebuild what human disobedience and mistrust demolished. These prophets learn their speech from God. Their words are God-grounded, God-energized, God-passionate. As their words enter the language of our communities, men and women find themselves in the presence of God, who enters the mess of human sin to rebuke and renew.

“Left to ourselves, we turn God into an object, something we can deal with, some thing we can use to our benefit, whether that thing is a feeling or an idea or an image. Prophets scorn all such stuff (really, it’s pursuing false comforts, ‘wanting-it-all’ [like Lucifer], AKA idolatry). They train us (instead) to respond to God’s presence and voice (through repentance and regeneration).

“Micah, the final member of that powerful quartet of writing prophets who burst on the world scene in the eighth century B.C. (Isaiah, Hosea, and Amos were the others), like virtually all his fellow prophets—those charged with keeping people alive to God and alert to listening to the voice of God—was a master of metaphor. This means that he used words not simply to define or identify what can be seen, touched, smelled, heard, or tasted, but to plunge us into a world of presence. To experience presence is to enter that far larger world of reality that our sensory experiences point to but cannot describe (nor really discover)—the realities of love and compassion, justice and faithfulness, sin and evil…and God. Mostly God. The realities that are Word-evoked are where most of the world’s (true and lasting) action takes place. There are no “mere words” (there!).” Commentary re. the Book of Micah in the Message Bible, pg. 1269, by Eugene Peterson (words in parenthesis added by me).

Jonastic Jostlings

“Everybody knows about Jonah. People who have never read the Bible know enough about Jonah to laugh at a joke about him and “the ‘whale.’” Jonah has entered our folklore. There is a playful aspect to his story, a kind of slapstick clumsiness about Jonah as he bumbles (borne out of inconsistent obedience/’subtle’ rebellion, rooted in distrust of God/His Ultimate & Universal Goodness and/or self-absorption/pride/thinking he knew better than God) his way along, trying, but always unsuccessfully, to avoid God.

But the playfulness is not frivolous. This is deadly serious. While we are smiling or laughing at Jonah, we drop the guard with which we are trying to keep God at a comfortable distance, and suddenly we find ourselves caught in the purposes and commands of God. All of us. No exceptions.

(Real-life) Stories are the most prominent biblical way of helping us see ourselves in “the God story,” which always gets around to the story of God making and saving us. Stories, in contrast to abstract statements of truth, tease us into becoming participants in what is being said. We find ourselves involved in the action. We may start out as spectators or critics, but if the story is good (and the biblical stories are very good!), we find ourselves no longer just listening to but (actually) inhabiting the story.

One reason that the Jonah story is so enduringly important for nurturing the life of faith in us is that Jonah is not a hero too high and mighty for us to identify with—he doesn’t do anything great. Instead of being held up as an ideal to admire, we find Jonah as a companion in our ineptness. Here is someone on our level. Even when Jonah does it right (like preaching, finally, in Nineveh), he does it wrong (by getting angry at God). But the whole time, God is working within and around Jonah’s very ineptness and accomplishing his purposes in him (and through him)! Most of us need a biblical friend or two like Jonah.” Eugene Peterson, in commentary preceding the Book of Jonah, in his Message Bible, pg. 1265 (words in parenthesis and italics added by me).                                                                                                                                        

What GOD Wants…

“I can’t stand your religious meetings. I’m fed up with your conferences and conventions. I want nothing to do with your religion projects, your pretentious slogans and goals. I’m sick of your fund-raising schemes, your public relations and image-making. I’ve had all I can take of your noisy ego-music. When was the last time you sang to Me? Do you know what I want? I want justice–oceans of it. I want fairness–rivers of it. That’s what I want. That’s all I want.” God, in Amos 5:21-24 (MSG).