“Healthy, effective leadership stems from who we are, not just what we do. (The Book of) Micah teaches us that a leader’s spiritual life must transform his or her social ethics and approach to leadership. Integrity means ‘oneness,’ the opposite of hypocrisy. One compartment of our life cannot contradict another.” John Maxwell Micah commentary, in his NKJV Leadership Bible, pg. 1088.
Category: Heaven
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).
A Cutting Remark
O, that I would quit living on the Ragged Edge, grow into the Rugged Edge and graduate onto the Cutting Edge like, yesterday, lest I end up dull, and without an edge, on the unwanted scrap heap!
Courageous Happiness
“Those who won our independence…believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty.” Louis Brandeis
Ultimate Attraction
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” (and attraction, I might add, especially when established and sustained in Truth). Da Vinci, as ‘tweeted’ by Pastor David McGovern, 2/1/23 (comment added by ‘dkb’ 2/3/23)
Be
“Be Still…and Know that I AM God.” And we should also know that ‘our doing’ better flows and transforms when it’s from ‘our being’…in Jesus’ Powerful, Healing Presence.
RADICALLY…NEW!
“God promises that the glory of His People will demand a glorious creation to live in. So the fallen creation will obtain the very freedom from futility and evil and pain that the church is given. So when God “makes all things new,” He makes us new spiritually and morally, He makes us new physically and, then, He makes the whole creation new so that our environment fits our perfected spirits and bodies.” John Piper, “Behold, I Make All Things New”
Ponderings of a Sojourner 