Just Because I Had to Slow Down and Listen...

Beloved, let us love one another
for love is from God
and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.

Anyone who does not love does not know God
because God is love.

In this the love of God was made manifest among us,
that God sent his only Son into the world
so that we might live through him.

In this is love,
not that we have loved God
but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

Beloved, if God so loved us,
we also ought to love one another.

No one has ever seen God;
if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

1 John 4: 7-12

Speaking the Language of the "Lost"

After a long conversation this afternoon with a couple at our Farmer's Market about "community" and how we have lost a sense of wanting to be together, I am thinking a lot about contextualization... how to share the gospel in the "language" that lost people can understand.

It made me think about these words:

To contextualize with balance, we must both enter the culture sympathetically and respectfully... and confront the culture where it contradicts biblical truth...
It involves learning to express people's hopes, objections, fears, and beliefs so well that they feel as though they could not express them better themselves. (Timothy Keller, Center Church, pages 119 and 120) 

Somewhere in the same book, Dr. Keller essentially states that to connect with lost people and the lostness that we live in, we first need to find the cultural values that we have in common before we can speak authentically into the cultural values that we need to confront.

For instance, my new friends at the market have a high value of community and wanting deep friendships. That is something that I can affirm because our God is a God of relationships. In the conversation, it was obvious that people want "community" to a point, not not much further. Close relationships are hard and people run from them. People run from getting too close because it is in getting close that our sin and other's sin is more and more apparent. We can confront the sin of fear of close relationships by communicating that, in Jesus, we can get close to each other even with sin because Jesus gives us grace to forgive one another.

One way or another, I loved having the conversation this afternoon! It is so encouraging to see the Spirit give us new friends and also to open up the door to their heart to hear good news...in a language they understand.

The Storehouse behind the Trickle

Some days because I am so scattered, to soak in what the Spirit is saying, I have to write it down.

In reading the passage below this morning, I was overwhelmed by how much that I do not "get" the love of God...how often I take his character of love for granted or sentimentalize it to simply be "good feelings."

But in this passage I got a glimpse (a tantalizing glimpse!) of the love of God. The glimpse is like a trickle of water from the Hoover Dam. The God of the Universe has a storehouse of love to give away and for his people to understand... while we only grasp a trickle.

Oh, to understand and joy-fully rest in this love!

Oh, for the Spirit to manifest his love in his people!

Oh, for the Spirit to give everyone around us a glimpse of a cross-defined love that would burn us and heal us to our core!

Please may it be, Father.

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.
Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.
In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his Son into the world, so that we might live through him.
In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 
Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought to love one another.
No one has ever seen God, if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

1 John 4:7-12 (ESV)

"Salvation is a Feast"

In reading The Prodigal God with a friend of mine, these words brought me to tears this morning:

"Jesus's salvation is a feast, and therefore when we believe in and rest in his work for us, through the Holy Spirit he becomes real to our hearts. His love is like honey, or like wine. Rather than only believing that he is loving, we can sense the reality, the beauty, and the power of his love. His love can become more real to you than the love of anyone else. It can delight, galvanize, and console you. That will lift you up and free you from fear like nothing else.

This makes all the difference. If you are filled with shame and guilt, you do not merely need to believe in the abstract concept of God's mercy. You must sense, on the palate of the heart, as it were, the sweetness of his mercy. Then you will know you are accepted. If you are filled with worry and anxiety, you do not only need to believe that God is in control of history. You must see, with the eyes of the heart, his dazzling majesty. Then you will know he has things in hand." [Emphasis mine]

Tim Keller, The Prodigal God, pages 121-122

Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good!
Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!
Psalm 34:8

I'm Not (Merely) a Sinner

Words mean a lot to me. Probably too much at times and I get brain tired trying understand what someone really means by what they say. I am probably one of the few people in the world who diagrams sentences in my head while I am talking.

THIS is one of the reasons I haven't finished a Dickens Novel Yet

Not one of the few people who can do that, one of the few neurotic people who would do that.

That's why "merely" is in the title of this post.  The word "merely" changes everything.

I am not merely a sinner. Though there are days like recent days where my bent to live out selfish desires is more apparent to me than ever before, that is not all of who I am.  In all of my striving for humility (highlight for spoiler: striving for humility doesn't work) and as much as shuffling my feet with my head down might give the appearance of a holy attitude, neither of those things deals with the heart of the issue.

"Sinner" is not my deepest identity. "Holy one" is deeper.

But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. (Romans 6:17-18 ESV)

Oh yeah, this too:

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20 ESV)

I am a holy one, not because I have it all together (far from it), but because Jesus has me all together. I have not merely been declared "holy" because of Jesus death, I have been made holy in the deepest part of me because the Holy One dwells in the deepest part of me.

Here is the good news: because of everything God has given me in Jesus, the most real, authentic me is not dark, evil, depraved any longer. That is who I was- past tense (see below). Jesus changed me in the deepest part of who I am.

Today, I needed the Spirit to walk me through the gospel again...and to preach the gospel to myself.

I am not- merely- a sinner. I am- much more- a holy one.

And you WERE dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved... (Ephesians 2:1-5 ESV)