Helping God across the road like a little old lady

“Stop helping God across the road like a little old lady.” – U2 in “Stand up Comedy”

I love that line in the song because that is what we try to do with God way, way too much.  We think God needs our help.  We are SO sure of something that we over rationalize our reasons, in effect trying to help God out.

Sometimes we act like we even know God’s business more than He does.

We want to do a good work for God instead of joining God where He is working.  We can forget that God is always at work.

“My Father is still working, and I also am working.” – John 5:17

Our job is not to make something happen, but to look for where God is already working.  I like what Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost have said:

“Those who are taken captive by Jesus see mission not merely as a practice preferred by God but as an aspect of his very character. He is mission (ReJesus).”

A classic way of talking about the missio Dei is to say the “mission of God” but it is also just as correct to say the “God of mission.”  Central to who God is, is mission.

God does not NEED our help.  But He does ask us to join Him where He is working to accomplish His mission.

 

What is the condition of your heart

I have been reflecting recently on our ability to either receive or reject guidance from God based on the condition of our heart.  Sunday, I referenced Matthew 13:39.  It is the story of the sower of seed.  In this passage the determining factor for growth was the condition of the soil.  And then Jesus closed off that passage with a statement he used often, “To him who has ears to hear, let me him hear.” The soil Jesus would later explain is a person’s heart and it matters.

So I have been considering how I cultivate the soil of my heart in such a way that I have ears to hear and how I frankly may harden my heart at times.  Certainly sin, stubbornness and pride harden our hearts.  And Scripture and worship both soften my heart.

One of the things that has cultivated my heart to listen more than anything else has been brokenness.  When I am broken before God…when I recognize my smallness and God’s bigness…when I realize I am not “all that and a box of chocolates” I’m ready to listen.

May we pay attention to Psalm 95:6-9:

“Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker! 7 For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. Today, if you hear his voice, 8 do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, 9 when your fathers put me to the test and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.”

 

Join me in reading through the Bible on Youversion.com

One of my goals for 2009 is to read through the Bible again.  A great tool to help is youversion.com.  It is an online Bible that has a lot of benefits:

• multiple translations;
• searchable by keyword and scripture;
• you can add your own commentary to passages as well as read others’ commentary;
• and has a reading plan in which to read through the entire Bible in a year.

If you’d like to join me in the adventure go to www.youversion.com, sign up (it’s free) and then look me up to add as a friend.  My username is dooger1973.  Love to have a ton of people reading through it together, keeping each other acountable and adding their on thoughts for all of us to read.

 

What is THE distinctive quality of a Christ-follower?

If you could narrow it down what would you say is the one distinctive quality of a Christ-follower?

Here are some things that don’t make it:

• going to Bible studies;
• going to Church;
• going to a worship service;
• being around a lot of Christians;
• praying;
• believing all the things that other Christians say you need to believe;

Don’t get me wrong.  These can be great AND necessary things to grow as a Christ-follower but I don’t see any of these in Scripture as being a distinctive quality of a Christ-follower.

Today I read:

7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.

8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another (1 John 4:7-8).

It struck me as I read this that LOVE is THE distinctive quality of a Christ-follower.  Now this is not a new thought, it is a revolutionary thought.

Love is the action that sets Christ-followers apart from everyone else.  Not just any love, but a Jesus-like love.  A love that is sacrificial to anyone and everyone.  Love is how people will know we follow Jesus.

Again, this is something you have heard before as I have too.  It is something we “know”.  But is the knowing being applied everyday?  Today it struck me that I try to focus on so many things when it comes to following Jesus when the one thing that matters most is to ask, “How am I loving others today?”