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Matthew 28:19-20 (NASB95)
19 “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,
20 teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

This past Sunday we heard from missionary and author, Don Richardson. I found his testimony and simple faith in God’s ability to lead him encouraging and challenging at the same time. Somehow, with his words, he carried us on a mission trip to China, India, and finally New Guinea. As I listened to him recount how God led him, his wife and infant son to the Sawi people of New Guinea, a warrior cannibalistic tribe, I longed to experience the same…well at least at that moment. But I was challenged to “go” - to make sure that I’m trusting God daily to lead me to share the Gospel with someone who doesn’t know Him. Three days later and I’m still carrying that message in my heart.

We may not be called to China, but we are called. We have a mission field – the office, PTA, recreation league, or home. We are called. So let’s follow Don’s example and pray that God will give us wisdom on how to present the Gospel.

Will Dungee

Shepherding Pastor

I’ve been struggling some with wondering why there doesn’t seem to be more Kingdom-mindedness in the Church. I long to see more people sold out for their faith, living radically and sacrificially, and it just seems that many are content to merely get by, to sporadically be excited about God and then not.
It’s so hard to live with an eye to the future; to truly believe that there is a heaven; to believe that there is this thing called “the Kingdom of God” that is both here already and at the same time is not yet here. Everything in our culture, and in our natural instincts, tells us that the way to have the best life is to do what is best for you and for your family and to give the leftovers (if there are any) to others. We tend to live in fear of not having enough, whether that is not enough significance, money, respect, rest, etc., and so we spend much of our time with making sure that we don’t lack in any area.
And yet this life on earth is a mere blink of an eye; the Bible calls it a breath. Christians believe that we will spend eternity with God in perfect peace and happiness and love, and our theology says that the most important thing about a person is whether or not they are a member of God’s family, recreated as His child through the life of Christ. But at the same time, heaven seems so abstract, and the idea of being under the reign of a King and Kingdom just doesn’t compute in our democratic mindset. And so the future that we live for tends to involve our 401K more than the treasures Jesus urges us to store up in heaven.
How do we shift our mindset; how do we learn to live as though this life is temporal, the Kingdom eternal? John tells us how in chapter 13 of His gospel when Jesus washes the disciples’ feet. In verses 3-4, John says, “Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under His power, and that He had come from God and was returning to God; SO (emphasis mine) He got up from the meal, took off His outer clothing…. and began to wash His disciples’ feet.”
Jesus knew some things that are critical for living a life of sacrificial love, a life with the Kingdom in view. He knew who He was. He was God’s son and all things were His. He knew where He had come from. And He knew where He was going. Those things freed him in the present from having to grab significance for Himself and led Him instead to serve others.
Too many Christians do not know who we are or whose we are. We do not live like we know where we are going. We need to remember that we are sons of the King and partners in His Kingdom building, bringing the shalom of God more and more fully on earth. We are beloved by God and have been brought to fullness in Christ, and we have fullness to give away to others. And we have an eternity of rest, joy, and peace awaiting us, a home that we will not have to work to upkeep. I pray that we would more and more learn our identity and our final destination, so that we might take up the basin and towel in the present, not withholding our time, money, or love from God and others.

It’s been kind of sad to me that at least two people have told me that they were glad Christmas was over. In some ways I can understand what they mean – it can be a very busy and stressful time (probably not the type of celebration the Lord had in mind), and after months of hype, it can seem like Christmas will never just hurry up and get here and stop cluttering up our schedules.

But why do we stop saying, “Merry Christmas” after December 25th? Why do the Christmas music radio stations yank the Christmas songs at midnight on the 25th and everyone rush to plan their New Years Rockin’ Eve? It seems to me that December 25th marks the beginning of a season of celebration, a season of rejoicing that our King has come, not the end. Christmas day should be merely the start of the party. My friend David has “Joy to the World” as his ring tone all year long because Jesus’ coming is joyous news both in December and in July.

Isaiah 9 tells us that unto us a child is born, to us a son has been given, and He shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. If you are confused, He is the counselor. Weak? He is the Mighty God. Alone? He is the Father who has brought you into His family. Anxious? He is the Prince of Peace. The Lord of light and life has come, humble and weak, yet possessing the very life of God that He will one day give to us, and I think we turn off our celebratory lights way too soon.

I am not sure we know how to celebrate well in our culture. We love events, but as soon as one is over, we dash off to the next one, relishing in the build-up and the hype so much that the event itself never delivers, leaving us empty and moving on to the hope that the next party might do the trick. (Are the heart-shaped boxes of candy on display in Wal-mart yet, because there are only 45 shopping days left until Valentines Day?)

Will you join me in lingering over the wonder of Emmanuel, God with us? Joy to the world, let earth receive her king, this day and every day.

I was reading Forgotten God by Francis Chan last evening when I came across the following phrase concerning the indwelling of God's Spirit. "You've probably heard this truth a hundred times, but have you marveled at it? Would you be willing to take thirty seconds right now just to dwell on the fact that God is in you?...This is the Spirit of God choosing you and me to be His dwelling place. That means that as I write, the Spirit of the living God is inside me...As you face tragedy and pain. As you buy groceries. As you walk your dog. As you make decisions. As you live your life, the Holy Spirit is dwelling in you."I sat still marveling at this question being asked. "God is in me. God is in me. God is in me. God dwells in me!", I thought. What greater Christmas gift could I receive than God taking up residence? My mind, my heart, every part of my being seemed to be crying out, singing even. That does sound weird even as I write this. Every part, though, was singing. My heart, my mind, my bones, my flesh, my eyes, my head moved to the rhythms of this heavenly dance, the hair on my body stood as if it was reaching out for the unseen glory as I was overcome by being not just known by Him, but a temple in which He has taken residence permanently. Forever. I can't stop thinking about this. I've always known this, but it suddenly became so real in that instance. Since then I've searched His word over to hear and know even more clearly what it means to be a dwelling place of God the creator, the healer, the Saviour, the almighty when I bumped into Romans 8:9-11.9 However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him. 10 If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness. 11 But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.As Christians, we are different because "the Spirit of God dwells in you." Look right in the middle of verse 9 to see this: "However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you." This is the very presence of the Spirit of God dwelling in us.
The word "dwell" is important. It´s more than "be there," like you might be in a restaurant or in a train station or in a car or in a store. "Dwell" (oikeo) comes from the word "house" (oikos). And so the implication is that the Spirit of God is not present in you as if you were a stopover. He has taken up residence here. This is where He lives. This is His home. You are His home. The implication is nearness and familiarity and influence. If someone makes your house their home, they will be near you a lot. They will become familiar with you and you with them. And they will have an influence on you and the way you live. Know this about yourselves, Christ-followers: the Spirit of God dwells, makes his home, in you. If you are not becoming very familiar with Him, and seeking Him, and communing with Him, and being influenced by Him, something is profoundly wrong. Do not ignore Him or grieve Him or resist Him.
What greater Christmas gift could the risen Christ give you than the Spirit of God to dwell in you?

I have tried and tried to keep my kids from the commericalization of Christmas, but I have been foiled again! Here is a recent exchange between Eliza and her babysitter, Anna:

Anna: Eliza, what do you want for Christmas?
Eliza: Well, I used to want peace and love, but now I just want a coloring book.

God is doing a new thing in my heart regarding our Wednesday Community Fellowship dinners at Grace. Each week over 150 guests (most of them homeless) come for dinner and a message of hope, and this is one of the ministries that I am responsible for in my role as Director of Outreach. I came in with high expectations of myself – I was going to cast vision and usher in transformation, taking this ministry to the “next level,” which in my mind meant fixing/saving our guests. The less that transformation happened, the more frustrated I became, feeling like I was failing and not knowing how to make things better. And so the dinner stopped being a simple act of kindness, a meal of hope. The dinner stopped being for me an opportunity to fellowship with friends that I have grown to know and love.

But lately I am letting go with expectations for change. I do deeply desire that my friends find work, find shelter, find healing and hope. I want to see their lives look different. But I cannot make that happen, and right now I am not receiving clear direction from the Lord on doing much differently on Wednesday nights. What God has been leading me to do seems so simple – have a couple of worship songs each week (and God provided someone to do that); involve guests more in the dinner (so we are having a guest pray each night for the meal and will soon do another testimony night in place of the message; give the guests a chance to pray over some of the requests we receive each week; pray with our church staff team each week for the prayer requests that come in. I am letting go of trying to fix and simply being available to love and enjoy our community.

That sounds really simple, and it sounds like I am not “doing anything.” But I think that this is the ministry God is giving us at Grace right now. Maybe everyone else who serves at WCF understood this already. But it’s taken me a while to see that it is what it is, and that’s OK.

As I continue to keep up with graduated GUPY’s, one of the things that excites me most, even more than their work for the Lord amongst the poor, is how many of them are continuing to grow in understanding the depths of grace and the gospel. They continue to wrestle with the inconceivable wonder of grace, the freedom that the Lord gives us from sin and its power over us. They continue to stretch their souls to truly receive all the love that the Lord has for them.
Here are some quotes from three GUPY's blogs:

it just continues to strike me how we as humans continue to try and earn our salvation through works or words or ritual. Our forgiveness has been accomplished already. Christ said "It is finished," so why don't we believe him?

I will always cling to the hope that it is for freedom that Christ has set us free (Gal. 5:1). This is no excuse to sin, of course, but it is an excuse to live by the Spirit, free from the law that I cannot fulfill on my own. That is why Christ came, to be the sin offering for me, so that the barriers are now broken a friendship with God is possible. I will continue to look to Old Testament laws as good moral guidelines, but I know that the Lord calls me to more than just following the rules. He calls me to a life led by the Spirit, a life that is dead to sin and former ways and is alive...fully alive in the confidence and hope of Jesus. He doesn't want me any other way.

God sees through all of my junk & pride. ALL of it. Yet, His decision to love me never waivers (*absurd!*). He gently provides a dose of rebuke, a lathering of forgiveness, and the empowerment to change.
These days He’s trying to teach me that there’s no need to waste my time putting a PR “spin” on my sin and failure or covering it up with cute suits and church event attendance or respectable titles and empty words. And He’s using His unconditional love to break down the facades, take off the layers of my ish, and slowly reveal the daughter with humility and character I was meant to be– not the fraudulent one attempting to run fig leaves through a sewing machine.
It feels so icky to my sin in its depths, but I am genuinely thankful that Jesus doesn’t want to leave me this way.

I believe that this work of God in these young men and women will bear fruit for a lifetime, leading them to love others and to give the good news of the gospel away to so many who need to hear it, including people in their own churches!

God got me thinking about advent well before Thanksgiving, which is a blessing because I usually think about advent about halfway through and then I sort of feel it’s too late and say. “We’ll get ‘em next year.” (That happens to me during Lent, as well) To aid my advent journey, God also provided me with two companions for my advent journey, two books actually: Living the Christian Year by Bobby Gross, and Stations of the Crib by Joe Nassal. Living the Christian Year was a gift from IV Press (one of the perks of still being on IV staff), while Stations of the Crib was a delightful, random find at St. Francis Springs retreat center.

I would highly recommend both of them, for different reasons. Living the Christian Year gives you plenty of Scriptural food for thought, offering 6 different Scriptures each week of advent, and a short meditation on each Scripture. For example, this week’s focus was on lamenting the brokenness of the world, and I have found my heart crying out over the darkness all around, saying, “Come, Lord Jesus,” echoing the haunting cry of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.”

Stations of the Crib is a powerfully-written call to hope consisting of 15 meditations on the birth of Christ. The writing is simple, beautiful, and it speaks directly to the heart. I have been particularly struck by three meditations: a call to be silent and ponder Christ’s coming, written in response to Zechariah’s forced silence before John’s birth; a call to be hopeful not just for the future, but hopeful for the past, knowing that while we cannot undo our past, Christ’s grace and mercy enables us to see it with hopeful eyes; and a call to let Jesus interrupt the hurry of life, to get in our way and force us to deal with the presence of this holy one who has come.

In some ways I feel pressure to have an “aha” experience, to be able to write down “Advent 2009 was about FILL IN THE BLANK.” But this morning the Lord reminded me that advent is about creating space for Him to fill our soul more and more fully, to birth something new that might not be immediately seen or understood, yet would be present and real all the same. And so I will continue to wait.

Last week I had the chance to preach at our church, and the topic given to me was “joy,” going with an advent theme. Hoenstly, I was surprised at what came out (though I shouldn’t have been, as most of my GUPY’s would tell you that I only have one sermon that I preach – Christ in you, the hope of glory). My take home truth (sermon-class talk for "main point") is that if we truly knew that Jesus came to give us more than forgiveness, that He came to give us life, we would live lives of joy-fueled obedience. If you’d like to listen to it (it’s not long), click here and download it to your favorite PC/Mac/iPod. Below is my closing (I was preaching out of 1 Peter 3:3-9; 13-15):

In the first episode of The Beverly Hillbillies, Jed, Granny, Jethro and Ellie Mae pull up to their new home and go inside. Their mouths hang open as they stand in the foyer and look at the chandelier and the spiral staircase. Granny tells Jethro to bring her iron cook stove in from the truck and asks Ellie Mae to gather wood so that she can cook supper, despite being told that there is a brand new stove for her to use in the kitchen. When she sees the kitchen oven, she sets to work building a fire inside it. Jethro comes down from the upstairs and says, “There’s a whole other house up here, Uncle Jed,” to which Jed replies, “Git down from there – like as not that belongs to someone else.”

If only they'd known that they had a stove that would cook without a fire. If only they'd known that the whole house belonged to them, not just the downstairs.

And while we laugh at the Hillbillies, we are so often the same way with our salvation. We are amazed at the forgiveness of Jesus, as we should be, but we never begin to explore the fullness of the life that He has given us. We try to apply our old way of doing things to the new life that He has given and it just doesn’t work. We doubt that all that God says about His love for us and His work in us could possibly be true. And so we stay in the foyer of faith, missing out on the fullness of joy.

Could this Christmas season be the time where you discover afresh the joy of Jesus Christ? Will you fix our eyes upon Jesus? Will you prepare your mind for action, looking at all you have been given in Christ, and will you respond with a loving obedience, fueled by joy, that our lives might be consistent with the life of Christ in us.

It’s no secret that I love Christmas, pretty much everything about it. I especially love the lights that people put up, and my wife has done such a wonderful job of putting simple, beautiful lights on our home.

But as I drove home the other night, seeing my house made me realize that there aren’t many Christmas lights on Silver Avenue. I don’t think it’s because people are “too poor” to put up lights, though some are. But I think it speaks to the lack of ownership that people have on my street and in my neighborhood. College students just passing through and renters just finding the least expensive place to stay. I remember when I was a renter, I didn’t do much of anything to decorate the outside of my home; we just put up a tree and some decorations inside. But as an owner it’s different for some reason.

I wish there were more lights on Silver.

In a recent sermon, I told a nice story about a time where I was arriving home from work exhausted, and I remembered to pray to the Lord, asking Him to be my life and to love my family through me. It was a nice analogy of holiness working its way from the inside out, and it happened to illustrate what happens when we remember on the front-side to depend on Jesus.
But often times the rubber meets the road for me when I am in the midst of an independence streak and I realize the fruitlessness of my actions. At that moment, when I realize that I am failing the Lord and others, I tend to just press on in my funk, reasoning that since I didn’t get it right from the beginning, it’s too late to start now.

Yet isn’t that where faith and grace really kick in, when we’ve already taken the wrong turn, made the wrong choice? When I’ve already overly-fussed at my son for pooping in his bed and decided internally to have a grumpy morning from that point on? When I’ve already decided that I am too tired and frustrated to try depending on Jesus so I am just going to handle things my way, no matter how bad they get? Those are the very moments where, despite the enemy’s whispers to run, my call is to stand and remember. I have been given new birth into a living hope, and that truth is good all the time and is not dependent on my past five minutes of behavior. It is dependent on Jesus Christ and the loving grace of our Father, who takes the time to interrupt my independence and offer me life.

I think that for most of us, we swing and miss the first time through. But our identity has not changed, and God is calling us to surrender our way, surrender our guilt, surrender the thought that we’ll just get it right the next time, that we might see Jesus meet us in that very moment, giving us, as Peter wrote, “everything we need for life and godliness.” Amen and Amen!

Need some new music to get your Christmas spirit goin’? Let me be your guide. First, my top three Christmas albums:
1) Joy by Bebo Norman, Ed Cash, and Allen Levi
2) Behold the Lamb: The True Tall Tale of the Coming of Christ by Andrew Peterson
3) The Silent Stars by Alli Rogers

The first two have been on my list for years and would be a welcome addition to any musical library, but I have to say that Alli’s record is getting pretty much constant play on my iPod right now. She has written some amazing original songs, and has redone a few Christmas hymns. Her voice is very soothing and it’s a worshipful, relaxing Christmas CD. Check it out on iTunes.

Also, if you are strapped for cash, go to www.noisetrade.com and check out free music by lots of great artists. My favorite free Christmas finds there are the offerings from Justin McRoberts , JJ Heller, and So Elated (and Justin’s “Deconstruction” CD is amazing, too).
You can also go to this site http://vanguardrecords.com/downloads/Holiday/ for a free holiday download featuring one of my favorite artists that I found on noisetrade, Katie Herzig. I have liked all of the songs on the CD.

Many well-meaning Christians have begun to wage a war against “the war on Christmas,” urging us to boycott stores like Old Navy because they say “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas.” If Old Navy employees said “Merry Christmas”, though, would it infuse hearts with Jesus? Would He receive glory from the sale of yet another sweater sewn by poor hands? It’s doubtful.

The greatest way that we can resist the storm of Christmas commercialism is to set our hearts and minds on Jesus. It’s one thing to say that Jesus is the reason for the season; it’s another to seek Him with earnestness and conviction in the coming weeks, getting to know His heart and His ways beyond the story of His birth that we are celebrating.

Instead of lamenting the loss of Christ in Christmas at the mall, our time and mental energy could be better spent thinking on all that was given to us in Christ. Our time and physical energy could be better spent giving generously to those who cannot repay us, just as God gave His life to a world that could never repay Him. Our time and emotional energy could be better spent praising the Author of Life rather than reviling those who ride the cultural wave each December trying to make a buck.

There was a lot to pay attention to during the days of Jesus’ birth and early years. Shepherds came stumbling into the stable late at night, smelly outcasts rejoicing over a tiny baby. A jealous and evil king destroyed all of the Jewish boys ages two and under. Wise men came from far away lands to give ludicrously expensive gifts. An old man and an ancient woman in the temple of God broke out in prophecy and praise of God when Jesus was carried into the room by His parents.

And Luke tells us that Mary looked at all those things, all the commotion, and treasured them and pondered them in her heart.

Perhaps resisting the storm is built on quiet pondering and on treasuring, not being engulfed by the hubbub all around (or railing against it), being consumed with the One who has sparked all the commotion.

Budgets can be restrictive or they can be freeing. We can celebrate our decision to willingly limit what we spend in order to give more away, or we can labor under a false law that says in order to really be a Christian we have to deny ourselves stuff. We can see budgets as keeping us from getting what we want, or we can see them as protection and freedom from the byproducts of overindulgence. And they can be a product of grace and love, as ask Christ to help us allocate well what He has entrusted to us. Paul urges the Corinthian church to excel in the grace of giving (2 Corinthians 8:7). Giving is by grace, and a budget empowered by grace enables us to excel in the grace of giving.

I also have to fight the notion that loving my kids equals getting them stuff. I love to bless my kids, but I have to redefine what "blessing them" is. Some friends of mine have already thought through a version of this question when it comes to school choices – one segment of the Christian culture would say if you love your kids and want to bless them, send them to private Christian school or at least the best, more homogenous public school (which certainly is one definition of “best”). But my friends have redefined what “best” means in that they want their daughter to have friends of all races and economic backgrounds and that they want her to learn to love the Lost as a part of everyday life, so they send her to a very diverse public school.

Diane and I are just doing that same redefiinf work in the area of Christmas spending. And, because our kids are young, we have the chance now to shape what Christmas looks like in terms of presents and in terms of giving, because they don’t have years of gifts to stoke their expectations. Now, coming from a big family, our kids will get presents from their grandparents to add to their mounds of stuff that they already have, and I even try to ask my family to scale back what they give us.

So how to we take active steps to resist the coming storm of Christmas commercialism? When I was at the CCDA Conference in Cincinnati, Jim Wallis of Sojourners said, “Budgets are moral documents. How we spend/allocate our money shows what we really value.” He was speaking in terms of government spending, but this is also true of our own budgets. Jesus said that where our treasure is, there will our heart be, and so how we allocate the money God gives us reflects our values.

The way that Diane and I set boundaries for how much to spend at Christmas is the same way that we set boundaries for what we spend every other month of the year - our budget. Month to month, we set aside what God has led us to give first, and then we figure out how to live off of the rest. For Christmas, we limit what we budget for gifts, and then we stick to what we have set aside. I recognize that many of you have budgets for Christmas, and the way that our budget helps us resist the storm is that we set aside/budget a small amount. In order not to get caught up in craziness, Diane and I limit what we have available to spend.

When I think about my parents, sisters, and my own family, there is nothing at all that we need. Of course I always have a wish list of things that I want, but when I think about what I need, there’s nothing. That helps me spend less. I also have to fight the notion that gifts have to be large/expensive/multiple in order to be loving. I love to receive gifts (it’s my love language), and I love to give them – I almost want to unwrap the gift for the people I am giving it to because I love to give presents. But giving simple, yet thoughtful gifts, can be just as exciting. It can be more challenging to buy gifts with less money because you have to make decisions on what is really important to those people, and you buy less things on impulse and instead buy them with care and forethought.

Today as I raked leaves in our backyard, Ben (the guy who walks all through our neighborhood and collects metal to recycle) approached with his shopping cart. We had recently cleaned out our basement garage and one thing sitting there was an old wicker crib, which had been mine as a baby and then had been Eliza’s. I had forgotten that the springs at the base of the crib (which supported the mattress) were made of metal, and so it surprised me when Ben began whaling on the crib with a hammer. Sure, we were throwing it out anyway, but something in me was sad to see this crib whacked apart, broken for scrap. Nothing really more to say or think or analogize. Just weird and sad to see my old crib being turned into scrap by one of my more interesting neighbors.

There have already been rumbles on the horizon. It seems that they are heard earlier and earlier each year. And as November marches to a close, the storm will grow louder and more confusing, so its best to get ready now.

Will you be ready when every TV ad tells you that love equals expensive gifts? Will you be ready when shopping centers and malls sell you an experience that promises peace and joy but never delivers? Will you be ready to follow the wise men as they leave Bethlehem, going "another way"?

It becomes increasingly difficult in our culture to separate the noise and colors of the Christmas trappings from the true heart and meaning of what we are celebrating. That's why now is a great time, the best time, to prepare our hearts to stand against all that will be coming our way very soon. I figure if the stores can roll out the Christmas trees before Halloween, we can begin our advent preparation before Thanksgiving.

I long to live differently this Christmas, to begin to really teach my kids that Jesus is what Christmas is all about and to do that with more than just words. I long to give generously and meet the real needs of others, not to increase the clutter in my already full home. And I long to find more of Jesus when there is less under the tree. It gets really hard to do that as the season progresses.

Black Friday comes and tempts me to buy lower-priced electronics that I don't need. I want my children to be happy and when I see the things that their friends get, I want my kids to have all of those things, too. I have my own wish list as well, and I love to buy things for my wife that she would not usually get for herself. And then when you kick in the familiar Christmas songs that strike up images of shopping trips and presents with bows, before I know what is happening, I am using up the money in our Christmas present budget instaed of coming in well-below what we have set aside.

So I am starting now, preparing my heart for more of Jesus and less stuff. I am listening to a podcast from Imago Dei church in Portland, which has launched The Advent Conspiracy (click here for the podcast, which has Advent Conspiracy sermons from 2006, 2007, and 2008).

And I am praying that I will captured more by the wonder of Emmanuel, God with us, than by the craftiness of the advertisers who hope to make a buck off of my sentiment and my Savior. Will you join me in living differently this Christmas?

Deuteronomy 5:12

12"Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you."

As we heard about Sabbath, about keeping it holy, about how our eternal, untiring, Heavenly Father commands us to take a "delicious" day of remembering Him, His redemption, and His desire to renew us, I couldn't keep from seeking out what else the scriptures speak to us about Sabbath. As I searched, I came across this passage in Isaiah 58 that spoke so clearly the message of Sabbath our Saviour desires for us:
13"If you turn back your foot from the Sabbath,from doing your pleasure on my holy day,and call the Sabbath a delightand the holy day of the LORD honorable;if you honor it, not going your own ways,or seeking your own pleasure, or talking idly;14then you shall take delight in the LORD,and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth;I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father,for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.

How can you "delight" in the Sabbath day and not seek your "pleasure" on it? In one sense you can't. It's like saying, "Delight yourself in this pizza but don't seek your pleasure in it." Or, "Delight yourself in this sport but don't seek your pleasure in it." But my question is why does God contrast "seeking your pleasure" and "delighting in the Sabbath"? Could it be because "your pleasure" is not the Sabbath. When the Sabbath is not "your pleasure" then there is a huge contrast between seeking your pleasure and delighting in the Sabbath. But if we are the Christ followers who love the holiness of God then there will be no contrast between seeking our pleasure and delighting in God's holy day. We will most undoubtedly find our deepest pleasure in seeing His glory and singing His praises because He is our greatest, most treasured delight.
But this day is to not be a burden! Why? Because it is a day in which we delight ourselves in the Lord in ways we can't on the other busy days. It is a day that we remember how our Saviour broke the chains of slavery to sin with a "mighty hand" and, at the same time, drew us to the greatest good in all the universe, namely Jesus, with an "outstretched arm". He is the greatest delight our souls could ever taste. He is "delicious" and the Sabbath is designed to provide a weekly meal for our shriveling souls.
**Disclaimer: The word "delicious" was used in Sundays sermon by Bill Goans. Gotta give credit where it is due!-)

It's been a while, but I feel very led to typity type a bit. I don't know why it's been too long and I wish I was a little more consistent like my friend Marshall but, alas, my laziness has been tough to fight off. This day, oh this day, I have risen in victory over my flesh. So here we go...
It was that feeling. I couldn't explain it. I couldn't put my finger on it's birth place. Why, oh why, was I feeling a sense of unrest when I just spent the better part of a week worshipping in all gladness and joy of my Saviour. The songs still ring fresh in my head. The words, the Word, shared was still there for feasting and I was eating and drinking my fill. Oh, the taste was a delight and I wanted every mouthful to last just so I could savour the sweet taste of my glorious God. Then I couldn't figure it out.
I tried to nap late Sunday. Key word "tried". I tossed and turned with an anxiety I could not explain. I lay on my bed for at least an hour before I stood, put on a coat (I was already dressed in other clothing), grabbed my keys and drove out of the driveway to wherever He led me. I just drove and talked. Drove and questioned. Drove and listened. You see, the previous Sunday we partook of the Lord's Supper or the Eucharist or Communion, whatever you wish to call the eating of bread and drinking of wine (juice in my case) in remembrance of Christ's giving of Himself. I sat there in my seat holding my blood of Christ cup and wafer of Christ bread with a thought going through my head..."can I faithfully eat and drink of His suffering when there is someone I know and care for that I've wronged and not pursued forgiveness between? How could I?" I hesitated with cup and bread in hand. It was that moment that sat so heavily on my heart a week later. Why now? I thought the healing had begun. What was really filling me with this unfounded anxiety? I pondered...work? nope. middle school retreat? nope. leaders? nope...what could it be? I called all my mentors and prayer partners to no avail until I happened upon the least likely, for me at least, person to give a strapping christian boy (haha) advice...my stepmom, Pamela. And she spoke wisely and to my heart when I'd actually called her to get my dad. Our conversation consisted of the following:
As a follower of Christ we're told, and rightly so, that Christ should always be the central, the focal, the pedestal, the one we seek first in all things. I sooooo badly desire this! I despise when I put other desires before Him. Even good, God drenched desires like marriage or ministry. When one of these good desires pops up and I turn my head from Christ and begin to desire that good thing more than my good Saviour, I've let idolatry slip in through the back door. Where I've taken a good thing, like marriage, made it my god thing which makes it a bad thing. There is only one God, Christ Jesus, and He alone is to be worshiped. But those good things sneak in and I'm like the sea gulls from Nemo...mine, mine, mine...and I try to dive in and grab this good tasting thing, all the while Christ, the best tasting of all, sits on the shore tending a fire, roasting the good things that they'd taste even better because He makes all things better when He is central. So my focus is Christ, but these good things dive in and I turn my head from Christ and I don't want that. I want Christ. Give me Christ. I want so badly to submit all these to Christ and I confess I don't always know how, but I desire this. Praise be to God through Jesus Christ my Lord! He'd take a sinner like me and mature me into a follower of Him. I want to partake in Him whether it's bread or waiting or blood or struggles, I want to partake of Him.