It was puzzle, I was sure I had planted cute little flowers in that plot. Spread seeds all over the place I thought from those little foil packets. Should have yielded flights of floral fancy, not an overcrowded cluster of carrot seedlings and radishes! The fertile soil yielded a great crop; it just wasn’t I had hoped for. What the heck?! How did that happen?
Apart from me not having labelled the little packets, a lesson in itself, it was a matter of what you sow, is what you reap - now who said that I wonder?
In the Letter we’re studying, the apostle John’s first, he talks about how God has planted extravagant love in us and so expects that to yield a harvest of loving action in our lives. If He has planted love in us He expects and looks for us to plant love into the lives of others by virtue of our actions that demonstrate our love for God. In this way we cultivate and even harvest love for our brothers and sisters and for those among the Lord has sent us in order to witness to His unquenchable love.
What’s going on if we find ourselves being hateful? It means we have allowed something other than God to be planted and growing in our hearts and minds. However it gets there, it is the work of the anti-Christ about whom John writes more later in the Letter.
The only useful response to that potentially disastrous situation is to bring that failure to God, understanding He already sees it, and allow Him to forgive and cleanse the invasive, life-choking weeds that have come to dominate as only He can. It’s a total weed-out - no trace, no evidence left that we have erred. Thus we’re free again to receive His planting of sacrificial love and begin again producing the harvest of loving action expected.
Wednesday, 22 February 2012
Not jumping at shadows
Loved - forever! part the first
I suppose it was my own fault; I really shouldn’t have been watching a grisly episode of Criminal Minds so close to bed-time. Not that I dreamed about the strange-but-effective team of individuals, or the seriously-distorted pieces of humanity they were trying to catch and apprehend. But something nasty from that show crept into my sleeping consciousness and produced a very unpleasant and unsettling nightmare - of sorts. So I woke up, rattled and unnerved and needing a “little walk down the passage”.
That’s when the trouble started. I was in the halfway world between dream and reality when I entered the darkened hallway, and nearly leapt clean out of my skin when I “saw” something lurking next to the mirror near the kitchen!!! Whoa! After a severe attack of knee-trembling, and deep-breathing, I snapped on the light to find it was a pile of instruments that had been brought in and deposited just there. The light removed the spectre of my fevered imagination, and revealed not just the reality of the situation in the hallway, but also my silly suggestible fear for what it was - a jumping at shadows.
In our Christian lives we do quite a lot of jumping at shadows - which pleases the enemy no end - and yet we should know better. God will not allow that kind of thing invade our space, or terrify us. God is about light and love and intends such good for us that it is almost beyond our understanding; and when we habitually hang around in His presence, in prayer, worship, thoughtful reflection and study (and in the loving embrace of fellowship) we find His wisdom and compassion often enlightening our world of shadowy fears and looming apparitions and reminding us that love conquers all and His light shows the wonder of His enduring Presence.
I suppose it was my own fault; I really shouldn’t have been watching a grisly episode of Criminal Minds so close to bed-time. Not that I dreamed about the strange-but-effective team of individuals, or the seriously-distorted pieces of humanity they were trying to catch and apprehend. But something nasty from that show crept into my sleeping consciousness and produced a very unpleasant and unsettling nightmare - of sorts. So I woke up, rattled and unnerved and needing a “little walk down the passage”.
That’s when the trouble started. I was in the halfway world between dream and reality when I entered the darkened hallway, and nearly leapt clean out of my skin when I “saw” something lurking next to the mirror near the kitchen!!! Whoa! After a severe attack of knee-trembling, and deep-breathing, I snapped on the light to find it was a pile of instruments that had been brought in and deposited just there. The light removed the spectre of my fevered imagination, and revealed not just the reality of the situation in the hallway, but also my silly suggestible fear for what it was - a jumping at shadows.
In our Christian lives we do quite a lot of jumping at shadows - which pleases the enemy no end - and yet we should know better. God will not allow that kind of thing invade our space, or terrify us. God is about light and love and intends such good for us that it is almost beyond our understanding; and when we habitually hang around in His presence, in prayer, worship, thoughtful reflection and study (and in the loving embrace of fellowship) we find His wisdom and compassion often enlightening our world of shadowy fears and looming apparitions and reminding us that love conquers all and His light shows the wonder of His enduring Presence.
Monday, 25 July 2011
chasing the wild goose.1
beginnings
Why do some seeds actually grow and some never produce a thing...even when I’ve done all that gardening wisdom suggests I should? It’s a mystery - that’s what it is - it’s in God’s hands. Life and growth are things that ultimately God makes happen - we can provide the best conditions, apply the best skills we know how, but the end result, the actual growing is Divine labour.
Because all life owes it’s beginning to God, and even the apparent raffle as to why some don’t make it past childhood and others live to an advanced and productive age; it’s somehow all His.
So with the spiritual life; we can do the best we know how in bringing the News to others, and even show them the best of God’s kindness and mercy, surround them with faithful and creative friends and still some never quite get it - some choose to do without God. From our way of looking at it, against all odds, some grasp faith in God like it was going to save their life, and hang on to faith in spite of the most discouraging adversity. The best we can do is to keep breathing the air of heaven; relating to Him, opening ourselves to his life-giving Spirit, trying everything He shows us. So, go on, live!
Saturday, 2 July 2011
heroes
Who is the hero? The man or woman who speaks bravely, who dares controversy; or that
one who quietly gets out there and lives out what they say, even when there is huge and determined opposition, even antagonism? Is it more virtuous to seem to know everything about prayer, or to fill one’s life with the discipline and practise of prayer? Like saying, would you have yourself guided by the one who writes about mountaineering or the one who does it often, which would you trust? The theorist or the bold practitioner?
The same is true of spiritual warfare; lots of books and seminars; heaps of opinion about what it is and what it isn’t; no end of sermons preached about it; but who’s doing it?
Is it that wild-eyed fanatic, the self-declared prayer-warrior, who doesn’t engage with ordinary people very well, full of conspiracy theories, critical of most of the church for their ‘lack of passion’, who says he spends all night violently assaulting the heavenlies, whose text book is “This Present Darkness”?
Or is it the ordinary, unremarkable saint, replete with gratitude for their salvation, fired by the ever-present Spirit, assured of the persistent love of the Divine Father, lives out what they learn, who prays faithfully for those in need and looks for ways to serve them, who bugs government, refuses to accept injustice? The real prayer-warrior is the one who gives time to prayer, knowing it will drive them out into the mission-field at their backdoor. Eh?
For more on this check out www.fhpc.church.org.nz. click on "audio sermon" [sorry about the green]
one who quietly gets out there and lives out what they say, even when there is huge and determined opposition, even antagonism? Is it more virtuous to seem to know everything about prayer, or to fill one’s life with the discipline and practise of prayer? Like saying, would you have yourself guided by the one who writes about mountaineering or the one who does it often, which would you trust? The theorist or the bold practitioner?
The same is true of spiritual warfare; lots of books and seminars; heaps of opinion about what it is and what it isn’t; no end of sermons preached about it; but who’s doing it?
Is it that wild-eyed fanatic, the self-declared prayer-warrior, who doesn’t engage with ordinary people very well, full of conspiracy theories, critical of most of the church for their ‘lack of passion’, who says he spends all night violently assaulting the heavenlies, whose text book is “This Present Darkness”?
Or is it the ordinary, unremarkable saint, replete with gratitude for their salvation, fired by the ever-present Spirit, assured of the persistent love of the Divine Father, lives out what they learn, who prays faithfully for those in need and looks for ways to serve them, who bugs government, refuses to accept injustice? The real prayer-warrior is the one who gives time to prayer, knowing it will drive them out into the mission-field at their backdoor. Eh?
For more on this check out www.fhpc.church.org.nz. click on "audio sermon" [sorry about the green]
Thursday, 5 May 2011
Ephesians 2.11-22 from left-field
This is from my weekly bulletin comment
A friend sent me a postcard from Germany in 1989 of an unbelievable sight...
the hated wall of Berlin being sat upon by a jubilant group of people from all over the world; and another photo showing the wall being vigorously demolished by a young man with a huge sledgehammer. It marked the beginning of the end for a reality that been a part of my, then, 42 years on this planet - a divided Germany, symbolising a divided Europe; further symbolising a divided generation. “The Iron Curtain”, the “bamboo curtain”, the Berlin Wall, the generation gap.
Some walls remain and divide us, even define us because it’s easier to say what we don’t believe or what we’re against than to take the risk of saying what or who we’re for. We gather behind them, or even in front of them shouting “hurray for our side!”
Even in the church we do it - you might be liberal and I KNOW that I’m orthodox, or one might be charismatic and another traditional, or one is for Calvinism and another is for “free will”. In actually making the walls and describing, proscribing the differences we imply right and wrong around choices and preferences. What we joke about or ridicule we are implying to be without the same value that we experience for our own opinion or pressure group. We need to look again at the Cross where all barriers were demolished by the Prince of Peace and all the interesting disparity of humanity is brought together as the image of God in the Temple of God...the body of Christ in the midst of the the dying world.
A friend sent me a postcard from Germany in 1989 of an unbelievable sight...
the hated wall of Berlin being sat upon by a jubilant group of people from all over the world; and another photo showing the wall being vigorously demolished by a young man with a huge sledgehammer. It marked the beginning of the end for a reality that been a part of my, then, 42 years on this planet - a divided Germany, symbolising a divided Europe; further symbolising a divided generation. “The Iron Curtain”, the “bamboo curtain”, the Berlin Wall, the generation gap.
Some walls remain and divide us, even define us because it’s easier to say what we don’t believe or what we’re against than to take the risk of saying what or who we’re for. We gather behind them, or even in front of them shouting “hurray for our side!”
Even in the church we do it - you might be liberal and I KNOW that I’m orthodox, or one might be charismatic and another traditional, or one is for Calvinism and another is for “free will”. In actually making the walls and describing, proscribing the differences we imply right and wrong around choices and preferences. What we joke about or ridicule we are implying to be without the same value that we experience for our own opinion or pressure group. We need to look again at the Cross where all barriers were demolished by the Prince of Peace and all the interesting disparity of humanity is brought together as the image of God in the Temple of God...the body of Christ in the midst of the the dying world.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)