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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LIVING STONES

"And you are living stones that God is building into His spiritual temple." (1 Peter 2:5a)

Slowly, all through the universe, that temple of God is being built.  Wherever, in any world, a soul, by free-willed obedience, catches the fire of God's likeness, it is set into the growing walls, a living stone.  When, in your hard fight, in your tiresome drudgery, or in your terrible temptation, you catch the purpose of your being and give yourself to God, and so give Him the chance to give Himself to you, your life -- a living stone -- is taken up and set into that growing wall.

Wherever souls are being tried and ripened, in whatever commonplace and homely ways, there God is hewing out the pillars for His temple.  Oh, if the stone can only have some vision of the temple of which it is to be a part forever, what patience must fill it as it feels the blows of the hammer, and knows that success for it is simply to let itself be wrought into what shape the Master wills.

-- Phillips Brooks  in The Law of Growth


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