Relationships

Crowd-Sourcing Obedience

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Waiting for the crowd is tempting.

Who’s in your crowd? You know… its the people you worry about and give energy to managing their approval.

Crowd-sourcing obedience to Jesus is deadly.

Jesus warns against waiting for the crowd before responding to His grace and call to follow Him.

13“You can enter God’s Kingdom only through the narrow gate. The highway to hell is broad, and its gate is wide for the many who choose that way. 14But the gateway to life is very narrow and the road is difficult, and only a few ever find it.  Matthew 7:13-14

Thankfully Jesus assures us of His Presence as we seek the grace to obey Him. The conviction to obey Jesus over the approval of people is sourced by our acceptance of  His Lordship and His promise to be with us.  See John 14:15-21:

15“If you love me, obey my commandments. 16And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, who will never leave you. 17He is the Holy Spirit, who leads into all truth. The world cannot receive him, because it isn’t looking for him and doesn’t recognize him. But you know him, because he lives with you now and later will be in you. 18No, I will not abandon you as orphans—I will come to you. 19Soon the world will no longer see me, but you will see me. Since I live, you also will live. 20When I am raised to life again, you will know that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. 21Those who accept my commandments and obey them are the ones who love me. And because they love me, my Father will love them. And I will love them and reveal myself to each of them.”

 

You and Your City

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On our 10,000 KM journey from Vancouver and back we went through a lot of cities: Seattle, Portland, Las Vegas, Santa Fe, Odessa, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco.

From the road its difficult to appreciate them. To know them and enjoy them one has to exit and stay a while. It helps too to meet someone in the city and find out what they enjoy. The longer one stays with the “real city people” the more possible it becomes to get into the “flow” of that city.

During our holiday I read through the book of Acts. Its possible to map the movement of the Gospel via people as they left from Jerusalem and went to cities all around the Mediterranean.  When they “landed” in those cities people like Luke and Paul got into the flow of commerce and accepted cultural dialogue. It seems that they kept a positive posture toward the city and its inhabitants. Here’s what it was like when they landed in Philippi (Acts 16:11-13):

11We boarded a boat at Troas and sailed straight across to the island of Samothrace, and the next day we landed at Neapolis. 12From there we reached Philippi, a major city of that district of Macedonia and a Roman colony. And we stayed there several days.

13On the Sabbath we went a little way outside the city to a riverbank, where we thought people would be meeting for prayer, and we sat down to speak with some women who had gathered there. 14One of them was Lydia from Thyatira, a merchant of expensive purple cloth, who worshiped God. As she listened to us, the Lord opened her heart, and she accepted what Paul was saying. 15She was baptized along with other members of her household, and she asked us to be her guests. “If you agree that I am a true believer in the Lord,” she said, “come and stay at my home.” And she urged us until we agreed.

What’s your posture toward the city or the community you live in?

Love it? Hate it? Avoid it? Live it?

Here’s a recent tongue-in-cheek- commentary on what its like to get into the flow of Vancouver.

So Praise Him!

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Worship is response.

When the conscience has been awakened

to the stark contrast between who God is

and who I am

despair and avoidance are options.

Seeking to appease God is an option too.

So we may be tempted to strike up a deal

and try to make things “even with God.”

Thus we have religion.  Thus we have denial.

Who thought we could really achieve our way?

When our vision of God is informed

by God’s grace through Jesus

we have praise.

6So we praise God for the glorious grace he has poured out on us who belong to his dear Son. 7He is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom with the blood of his Son and forgave our sins.   Ephesians 1:6-7 NLT

Praise is a joyful response

to God,

for who He is,

for what He has done.

So praise Him!

Where Discipling Happens

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Recently I read that disciple-making is akin to including people in your family because Jesus has included them in His.  That’s a good reminder for the university crowd since we tend to think that most knowledge is gained in the classroom, the lab, or from the books.

 

Genuine discipling though has to break out of those walls.  Jesus was including people in his life.  There in the course of His life they “heard the word of God” and he showed them how to “do it.”  Being a disciple of Jesus is not just an exercise of individuality.  Its also an exercise of being connected with others and being willing to learn from them, with them, and for them to do the world of God.

 

19 Then his mother and his brothers came to him, but they could not reach him because of the crowd. 20And he was told, “Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, desiring to see you.” 21But he answered them, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.”  Luke 8:19-21

Power to Forgive Us

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Power to Forgive Us

 

Jesus said, “Man, your sins are forgiven you.” And the scribes and the Pharisees began to question, saying, “Who is this who speaks blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God alone?”   Luke 5:20-21

 

Forgiveness.

 

It must be delivered by the one

 

who has been offended or treated dishonorably.

 

We see that the religious people

 

listening in on Jesus’ conversation

 

with the paralyzed man

 

were rightly offended for as far as they knew

 

Jesus had no authority

 

to forgive

 

sin.

 

We see a paralyzed man loved by four friends,

 

lowered through a roof,

 

meeting Jesus and he’s forgiven, set free, and healed.

 

We see our deathly independent condition rendering us incapable

 

of merit, of sacrifices, or of goodness

 

sufficient to satisfy the heights God’s holiness.

 

But we see Jesus

 

who has authority to forgive;

 

It’s because of who He is.

 

He came down from the Father, and

 

suffered the humility of the Cross,

 

to forgive us

 

of sin.

 

Who will love us enough to bring us to Jesus?