Devotional: Faith Circle October 2007

About a week ago, I came across the following passage in Jeremiah:

If you have raced with men on foot and they have worn you out,
how can you compete with horses?
If you stumble in safe country,
how will you manage in the thickets by the Jordan?
Jeremiah 12:5 (NIV)

I’m sure my initial attraction to this verse was the reference to running. However, when I pondered the verse more and more, I found myself meditating on the idea of stumbling.

I am quite aware that my life is one of great ease and little trouble. I know I am profoundly blessed in my circumstances and, yet, I can still find things in my life to trip me up on a daily basis. That is what makes the Lord’s response to Jeremiah’s questions so thought provoking to me. If I can find stumbling blocks in this easy life, what will I do when things really get tough?

Will I be like the seed sown on rocky ground in Jesus’ parable?

"The one who received the seed that fell on rocky places is the man who hears the word and at once receives it with joy. But since he has no root, he lasts
only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, he
quickly falls away.” Matthew 13:20-21 (NIV)

Or, even, the seed sown among thorns?

“The one who received the seed that fell among the thorns is the man who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke it, making it unfruitful.” Matthew 13:22 (NIV)

Oh, merciful Father, I hope not!

Peter gives us hope that this does not have to be the case for us:

By his divine power, God has given us everything we need for living a godly life. We have received all of this by coming to know him, the one who called us to himself by means of his marvelous glory and excellence. And because of his glory and excellence, he has given us great and precious promises. These are the promises that enable you to share his divine nature and escape the world’s corruption caused by human desires.

In view of all this, make every effort to respond to God’s promises. Supplement your faith with a generous provision of moral excellence, and moral excellence with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with patient endurance, and patient endurance with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love for everyone. The more you grow like this, the more productive and useful you will be in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But those who fail to develop in this way are shortsighted or blind, forgetting that they have been cleansed from their old sins.

So, dear brothers and sisters, work hard to prove that you really are among those God has called and chosen. Do these things, and you will never fall away [i.e. stumble] . Then God will give you a grand entrance into the eternal Kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.2 Peter 1:3-11 (NLT)

Dear Heavenly Father, According to the Psalmist:

The Lord directs the steps of the godly.
He delights in every detail of their lives.
Though they stumble, they will never fall,
for the Lord holds them by the hand.
Psalm 37:23-24 (NLT)

I pray tonight that You would direct our steps so that we might hold Your hand and continue to walk in Your ways instead of falling over the bumps we encounter in our lives. In Your Son’s most precious name, Amen.

Clay

This past Sunday, my minister approached me to ask if I would be willing to serve the church. I had hoped that this day was coming soon. I knew that the lay leadership committee of the church had been working on a slate of officers and committees. The thing is, I wasn’t asked to do the thing that I had hoped to be asked to do. Still, I gladly accepted the position that was offered, knowing that I was well suited to the role and that I could serve the church well there. But, I would be lying if I said I didn't struggle with the fact that, again, I was being asked to serve in a position that was very like my day to day work and was not, in my opinion, necessarily in alignment with my spiritual gifts.

As ususal, my Father spoke to me in my daily Bible reading just a day later:

Woe to the one who argues with his Maker—
one clay pot among many.
Does clay say to the one forming it:
What are you making?
Or does your work [say]:
He has no hands?
How absurd is the one who says to [his] father:
What are you fathering?
or to [his] mother:
What are you giving birth to?"
Isaiah 45:9-10

Oops. You’re right, Lord. I have no right to question. I must remember that the gift that the church has asked me to use to serve the body of Christ is one that God blessed me with every bit as much as the one I hoped to be asked to use (if in fact I even have that gift). In studying more the concept of the potter and the clay, I found additional convicting scriptures:

You have turned things around,
as if the potter were the same as the clay.
How can what is made say about its maker,
"He didn't make me"?
How can what is formed
say about the one who formed it,
"He doesn't understand [what he's doing]"?
Isaiah 29:16

Oops again. I was daring to think that God, through the church, didn’t understand what He was doing. I dared to believe that I know myself and my place better than He did.
Jeremiah says:

So I went down to the potter's house, and there he was, working away at the wheel. But the jar that he was making from the clay became flawed in the potter's hand, so he made it into another jar, as it seemed right for him to do.
The word of the LORD came to me: "House of Israel, can I not treat you as this potter [treats his clay]?"—[this is] the LORD's declaration. "Just like clay in the potter's hand, so are you in My hand, house of Israel. At one moment I might announce concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will uproot, tear down, and destroy [it].” Jeremiah 18:3-6

This makes me think perhaps this turn from where I thought God was leading me may have something to do with me being flawed and needing some fine tuning. I was beginning to force my will upon God in many respects. Looking for a greater calling, I was in great need of a lesson in humility.

The scripture continued to speak to me through Paul:

But who are you—anyone who talks back to God? Will what is formed say to the one who formed it, "Why did you make me like this?" Romans 9:20

So, I came to a place where I can happily, willingly say (paraphrasing Isaiah 64:8):

Yes LORD, You are my Father;
I am the clay, and You are my potter;
I am the work of Your hands.

And, I will know that by serving Him where He places me, I am certain to bring Him glory, not myself.

Now we have this treasure in clay jars, so that this extraordinary power may be from God and not from us. 2 Corinthians 4:7

All scripture quoted from the Holman Christian Standard Bible.

There are cookies!

About two or three years ago, a live action movie based on the Scooby Doo cartoons came out in which the lovable Great Dane and his mystery solving friends found themselves captive in the house of a mysterious man. There were other prisoners there as well as the front door had been booby trapped to capture anyone who rang the doorbell more than once. The first group the gang encountered was an enthusiastic troop of Girl Scouts who wanted to know if they wanted to buy some cookies. Next, they saw a pair of nicely dressed young men who asked them, “Have you heard the Good News?” Scooby responded happily, “Yeah! There are cookies!”

As I was driving home from our Wednesday night church service, this scene came to mind. Our pastor read from the book of 1 Timothy 2:1-7:

The first thing I want you to do is pray. Pray every way you know how, for everyone you know. Pray especially for rulers and their governments to rule well so we can be quietly about our business of living simply, in humble contemplation. This is the way our Savior God wants us to live. He wants not only us but everyone saved, you know, everyone to get to know the truth we've learned: that there's one God and only one, and one Priest-Mediator between God and us—Jesus, who offered himself in exchange for everyone held captive by sin, to set them all free. Eventually the news is going to get out. This and this only has been my appointed work: getting this news to those who have never heard of God, and explaining how it works by simple faith and plain truth. (The Message)

In his message, he pointed out that we need to be taking the mission to share the Good News as seriously as Paul did. Specifically, Bill asked, “If we don’t tell other people, how do we know we truly believe it ourselves?”

Think about that. Think about all of the things that, in a given day, you DO tell other people. OK, I’ll confess. What do I tell other people in a given day?

I relate stories I heard on NPR on my commute. I explain my work to my boss. I explain to my employees how to do their work. I tell my kids that, yes, they will get their bath tonight because I am their mother and I said so. I tell my husband and my children that I love them.

And, folks, I gossip. Sometimes it is telling one coworker what another coworker said or did. Even worse, sometimes it is telling one coworker what another coworker said or did based on what a third coworker told me! (By the way, this is an issue for another day…but one God and I are working on daily.)

Now, do I honestly believe all of these things that I am using my mouth to pass on? I guess I do or I wouldn’t have taken the time to say them, right?

But, in my heart, I profess to believe the following more than any of these other things: I believe that Jesus was God walking on earth. I believe that Jesus died not just generally for the world’s sins, but specifically for MY SINS…sins that I had yet to contemplate when He was being nailed to the cross. I believe that Jesus rose from the dead and that one day I will see Him face to face…my savior, my God, my One and Only.

In short, if I truly believe what I profess to believe, I need to be using my mouth to do more than tell people there are Girl Scout cookies available.

Cry Out to Jesus

To everyone who's lost someone they love
Long before it was their time
You feel like the days you had were not enough
when you said goodbye...
There is hope for the helpless
Rest for the weary
Love for the broken heart
There is grace and forgiveness
Mercy and healing
He'll meet you wherever you are
Cry out to Jesus, Cry out to Jesus
-from Third Day's Cry Out to Jesus

God bless you, Hokies.

A New Song

"To repent means to turn, to turn from whatever binds or enslaves you."-Father Tim Kavanaugh in A New Song by Jan Karon

After reading a very good, but very dark book (Piercing the Darkness), I decided I needed to go back to Mitford. This book, the fifth in the series, follows Father Tim and his wife as they go to a new town where the he will serve as interim priest. In his new capacity, he is told by his bishop not to worry about his old parishioners, which he finds difficult to do. However, after a terrible storm rips through his temporary island home, he finds it easy to say "no" to a planned trip back to Mitford to stay and tend his new flock.
This book has a few wonderful pauses in the action (so to speak) that allow us to share in some of Father Tim's personal reflection...and which caused me to reflect myself. At one point, the priest reads over the following passage from a sermon of Charles Spurgeon's:

Go to Him without fear or trembling, ere yon sun goes down and ends this day of mercy, go and tell Him thou hast broken the Father's laws-tell Him that thou art lost, and thou needest to be saved; tell Him that He is a man, and appeal to His manly heart, and to His brotherly sympathies. Pour out thy broken heart at His feet: let thy soul flow over in His presence, and I tell thee He cannot cast thee away...

Father Tim jots down in his notes, "Not that He will not turn a deaf ear, but that He cannot."

I will share later, perhaps, my reflections on the Frank Peretti book I mentioned earlier, but will say, for now, that the most amazing section of that book was a brilliant portrayal of heaven's response to a lost soul crying out to God for forgiveness. This passage in A New Song brought that imagery flooding back and makes me know that I need to spend some time on my knees in His presence...real quality time...soon.

Out to Canaan

"We think we dare not be satisfied with the small measure of spiritual knowledge, experience, and love that has been given to us, and that we must constantly be looking forward eagerly for the highest good."-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, quoted in Out to Canaan by Jan Karon

In Jan Karon's Mitford Series, we follow the life of Father Timothy Kavanagh, the Episcopal rector in the small Carolina town of Mitford. It is encouraging to me to read of a man, a man who has given his life to God, who questions whether he is doing all that God would have him do. Because I question that a lot...particularly of late.

In one exchange with the chaplain of the local seniors' home, Father Tim muses about a ministry he feels he should be leading at "the Creek". The chaplain indicates to the rector that he already has a Creek ministry of his own and proceeds to list three individuals that the Kavanagh had personally saved from a grim life in that bad part of town. To Father Tim, these things had not even occurred to him to be a service to God.

The chaplain goes on to note, "I think we're always looking for the big things...The big calling, the big challenge." And that brings up the quote above from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They also note that Bonhoeffer says we must be "grateful even where there's no great experience and no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty".

One other segment of the book that made me look inward occured when Father Tim was overtaken by a feeling of overwhelming gratefulness for everything that he was blessed with. He drove through town seeing people and things he was thankful for and recalled a quote from Patrick Henry Reardon:

Suppose for a moment that God began taking from us the many things for which we have failed to give thanks. Which of our limbs and faculties would be left? Would I still have my hands and my mind? And what about loved ones? If God were to take from me all those persons and things for which I have not given thanks, who or what would be left of me?

Getting Into You

When I made up my mind
And my heart along with that
To live not for myself
But yet for God, somebody said
Do you know what you are getting yourself into
-from Relient K's Getting Into You

Can I admit something here? I wonder if I am doing the ministry that God is calling me to do. I don't want to elaborate any further than that, I think. I have typed some things that I'm not ready to share yet, but suffice it to say that I am really trying to hear what God is saying to me because I'm unsettled with what I am doing in His name.