BACK TO BIBLICAL BASICS – Part 2 of 2

The great C. H. Spurgeon, a preacher who reached out and grabbed the guts of the people of his day, once said that the Christian bloodline ought to be a Bibline. [Spiritual leadership] entails mastery of this Bibline bloodline. Novelist Joyce Carol Oates writes of a character’s grandmother: “We are linked together by blood, and blood is memory without language.” Christians are linked together by the blood memory of the Bibline that circulates through the body of Christ.

There is nothing more exciting in life than to find your sense of direction. Why is it that when we open God’s Word we expect to be bored? It is theologically incorrect to talk of making the Word “come alive.” It already is. We’re the ones who have tried to kill it. We’ve sucked the blood right out of the Bibline. We’ve drained it dry with boredom, banality, and mediocrity.

“Breathe on Me, Breath of God” is a song the soul should sing every time one opens the Scriptures. To study and learn the Scriptures is to inhale the energies of the Spirit. We inhale the breath of God. We exhale the breath of life: biblical stories. Through modulating exhaled breath, humans fashion stories, stories to build lives upon. When the stories of Scripture become “our” stories, when biblical images and metaphors become “our” images and metaphors, when we structure “our” lives around the cornerstone Jesus story, a new architecture for our souls is constructed.

In his first letter, Peter wrote to the scattered church about this cornerstone: “As you come to Him, the living Stone -- rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to Him -- you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For in Scripture it says: ‘See, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and the one who trusts in Him will never be put to shame.’ Now to you who believe, this stone is precious.”  (1 Peter 2:4-7a NIV) 

-- Leonard Sweet in “Aqua Church: Essential Leadership Arts for Piloting Your Church in Today’s Fluid Culture”

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THE MINISTRY OF JESUS

The ministry of Jesus is grounded in personal practices. Jesus' life is marked by prayer, solitude, worship, reflection, the study of Scripture, conversation, community, serving, engagement with suffering, and generosity.  These personal practices sustained a ministry that opened people to God's grace, transformed human hearts, and changed the circumstances of people in need. 

Jesus modeled going away to quiet places, spending time in the Temple, and listening for God.  Jesus spoke to the woman at the well; the tax collector in the tree; the rich young ruler on the road; the paralyzed man beside the pool; to the lepers and the blind and the widowed and the wealthy; to Mary and Martha and Peter and John.  He held a child in His arms, noticed the woman who touched His robe, healed a soldier's servant, ate with sinners, told stories to Pharisees, and blessed the thief beside Him on the cross.  He intervened to challenge unjust systems that abused vulnerable people, overturning the money changers' tables and dispersing those ready to kill a woman accused of adultery. He connected people to God, opened their hearts and minds to God's kingdom, invited them to follow in His steps, and set them on a path toward God.  Jesus knitted them into community, interlaced their lives with one another by the Holy Spirit, and wove them into the body of Christ, the church. 

By example and story, by lessons and parables, and by inviting them into ministry and sending them out in His name, He taught them to practice and live the ways of God.  Jesus made maturing in faith and growth toward God unexpectedly and irresistibly appealing. 

-- Robert Schnase in “Five Practices of Fruitful Living”

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THE HYMNS OF CHARLES WESLEY – Part 2 of 3

O that the world might know the all-atoning Lamb!
Spirit of faith, descend and show the virtue of His name;
The grace which all may find, the saving power, impart,
And testify to humankind, and speak in every heart.  (Charles Wesley)

The most impressive factor in Wesley’s hymns of salvation, and in his work in general, was the massive biblical content.  J. Ernest Rattenbury contends that a skillful person, if the Bible were lost, “might extract much of it from Wesley’s hymns…”

…Wesley wrote 5,100 hymns in Select Passages of Scripture, most of which are unread today, but which effectively retold the biblical story, in the form of a kind of devotional commentary.

Very few contemporary congregations can do full justice to the singing of Wesley’s hymns because they don’t have the biblical knowledge to appreciate what they are singing.  Rattenbury says that Holy Scripture was Wesley’s “sole literary inspiration,” because even when he took phrases from other authors, they were generally nothing other than a recasting of some biblical truth. But Wesley’s weaving of phrases, allusions, and biblical insights is so masterful that even the careful reader will find it hard to catch them all.

-- J. Ellsworth Kalas in “Our First Song: Evangelism in the Hymns of Charles Wesley”

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SIT STILL AND TRUST

“For I am the LORD your God who takes hold of your right hand and says to you, ‘Do not fear; I will help you.’”  (Isaiah 41:13 NIV) 

We need to hear that God is still in control. We need to hear that it’s not over until He says so. We need to hear that life’s mishaps and tragedies are not a reason to bail out. They are simply a reason to sit tight.

Corrie ten Boom used to say, “When the train goes through a tunnel and the world gets dark, do you jump out? Of course not. You sit still and trust the engineer to get you through.”…

The way to deal with discouragement? The cure for disappointment? Go back and read the story of God. Read it again and again. Be reminded that you aren’t the first person to weep. And you aren’t the first person to be helped.

Read the story and remember, the story is yours! 

-- Max Lucado in “He Still Moves Stones”

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THE STORY OF OUR LIVES - Part 2 of 3

The biblical story reminds us that the difficult chapters are never the final chapters of our story. Think about just a few of the many stories in the Bible that include adversity and pain but ultimately end in triumph.

Joseph, when he was in prison, could not see that one day soon he would become Pharaoh’s right-hand man (see Genesis 39-41). Naomi, while mourning the death of her husband and sons, could not see that the children of her daughter-in-law Ruth would start a family line that would one day lead to the greatest king Israel would ever know, and that Naomi’s mourning would be turned to laughter. The Israelites, while being led away from the promised land by their Babylonian conquerors could not see that within fifty years their children would return home singing. And the disciples, as they watched Jesus crucified, could not know that on the third day He would rise from the dead. 

-- Adam Hamilton in “Why? - Making Sense of God’s Will”

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