Meditate Vs Memorize

Meditation is a lost spiritual discipline amongst Christians today. Our approach to Scripture is left-brain memorization instead of right-brain meditation. And it affects our spiritual health. We have a deficiency in our spiritual diet because reading without meditating is like eating without digesting. We simply regurgitate the wordingesting it. Consequently, we become malnourished. Overtime, our souls dry up; opening the Word becomes mundane and routine.

Meditation is a form of imagination.

In 1816, Sir David Brewster invented the first kaleidoscope. A kaleidoscope consists of fragments of coloured glassreflect light in an endless variety of colours and patterns. Isn't that what Scripture does? It reflects lightkaleidoscopic. I never cease to be amazed at the way different verses can inspire me in different ways at different times in my life.

Meditation is taking the time to turn the kaleidscope so we can appreciate different nuances of a text. I gaurantee this: the more time you take to look at a verse from a variety of angles the more God will reveal to you. It will help you internalize and personalize the truth. It will get the word into your spirit. Don't be in such a hurry to get through the word that the word doesn't get through you.

The phrase "look intently" in James 1 means to bend overstoop down. We've got to humble ourselves and take a posture of submission when we read the word. Meditation is bending over to take a closer look.

Do You Know How To Really Celebrate?

It’s hard to celebrate properly. Many people want to, but they just don't know how.

Mostly people celebrate badly because their idea of celebration is to overdo things. They try to celebrate by taking ordinary things (eating, drinking, having fun, playing) to excess. Celebration, for many, means over-eating, over-drinking, loud socializing, drunken singing, and staying at parties into the wee hours of morning, all in the hope that somehow in all that excess they will achieve celebration (whatever that means). But, for all our frenzied effort, there is precious little genuine enjoyment.

I grieve as I watch these so called celebrations – birthday parties, transitions into adulthood, end of academic year parties, wedding anniversaries and so on. It’s loud and hyped but the soul is silently in hiding; hardly attended to.

Occasionally people do succeed and genuinely celebrate. At those times we feel ourselves more deeply joined to others, widened, made larger, made more sensitive to the people around us, and sense more deeply the love and joy that lie at the heart of life. We then come close to a genuine celebration because all true celebration is the celebration of lives, of people who have added meaning to our lives. But that rarely happens and it never happens when we are in frenzy. Too often our celebrations are followed by a hangover. Why?

The reasons for this are complex, deep, and mostly hidden from us.

Perhaps the primary reason why we find it so difficult to genuinely celebrate is because we are not reflective enough. We haven’t gone back to the Source of all our blessings and sense that awe that if not for God none of these good things would have been our portion. We haven’t been grateful enough. We haven’t stepped back and recognized that the people in our lives have played a significant part in who we are today. God has used them to shape our lives. That’s why we celebrate with them. We haven’t taken the time to go beneath the surface to uncover the deeper reasons for our celebration. And these richer reasons will always be about the people in our lives and the God who rules over our lives. So celebration is seldom about us. A genuine celebration is always a God-centred appreciation of others in our lives.

But because our lives are so centred on our pleasures and our enjoyment, whenever we throw a party we tend to pursue unrestrained enjoyment too much and substitute excess for meaning. The champagne-soaked athletes celebrating a major victory and the mindless frenzy of a Mardi gras give us all the video footage we need to understand this. But excess isn't true enjoyment, nor is obliterated consciousness heightened awareness of self or of others or of God. They are weak, unsatisfying substitutes. They just leave us with a hangover.

The very purpose of celebration is to heighten and intensify the meaning of something (a birthday, a wedding, a major achievement, a victory, a graduation, the birth of a child, the beginning or ending of a year). These events demand to be shared with those we love, heightened, widened, and trumpeted. We have an inborn need to celebrate and this is very healthy.

What does it mean to celebrate something? To celebrate an occasion is to heighten it, share it, savour it, enlarge it, make it loud and clear. We also celebrate in order to link ourselves more fully to others, to intensify a feeling, to bring ourselves to experience deep unspoken meanings and values, and, more commonly, just to rest and unwind with those we truly love. But because of our incapacity to enjoy something for its meaning and value, we often try to create that enjoyment through excess and seek the ecstasy of heightened self-awareness in the obliteration of our consciousness.

Small wonder we often trudge home with a hangover, emptier, more tired, more alone. A hangover is an infallible sign that somewhere we missed a signpost.

Oh, how we need to redeem celebration! Christ came and declared a wedding, a feast, a celebration, at the heart of life. God has given us every permission to enjoy life and its pleasures. And when we truly celebrate life, we deepen life; we heighten life; we enjoy life and glorify the One who is the primary reason for all our celebrations.

Will You Break Camp?

The blessings of God can be dangerous to us. They can lead toward pride and complacency. That is when the blessings of God backfire.

There are lessons to be learned from the wilderness wanderings of the Israelites. If you want to make it to the Promise Land you have to break camp. That is what God tells the Israelites in Numbers 9:15-23. Sometimes they would only camp overnight and the cloud would move. Other times they stayed put for weeks or months. But whenever the cloud moved the Israelites broke camp. By my count, the Israelites had to break camp forty-one times to reach the Promise Land. The travel itinerary is recorded in Numbers 33.

A few observations.

Most of us want to get to the Promise Land in one step or two stops! It doesn't work that way! It took forty-one moves for the Israelites to get there.

It is easy to break camp when you're at Rephidim—because there was no water. You're ready to go the instant God calls you to move!

It is much more difficult to break camp when you're in Elim--there were twelve springs and seventy palm trees. I'm convinced that Elim is the most dangerous place in our journey. It is so easy to mistake it for the Promise Land. We can become comfortable there. We don't want to leave! So we settle down when God wants us to break camp.

The same is true at Mount Horeb. The Israelites have a God encounter. They hear His voice. They receive the ten commandments. And part of you wants to stay put. But God says in Deuteronomy 1:6 says: "You have stayed long enough at this mountain. Break camp and advance into the hill country of the Amorites."

Too many times we are more focused on protecting past blessings and good experiences than taking enemy territory! It is then that we start doing ministry out of memory and stop doing ministry out of imagination. We start repeating the past and stop creating the future. And then we stop taking the risks that got us to where they are today.

Note this: The greater your past successes and blessings, the greater the danger. You're been so good at what you do that you have stop growing for the future. You are too satisfied with your past. You have congratulated yourself too soon. And you'll never reach your God-given potential. It's so easy to become comfortable. It's so easy to live in the past. It's so easy to keep doing it the way it's always been done. None of us is an exception here.

Breaking routine and the familiar and doing the novel is one way to overcome the natural complacency that sets in at some point in our journey. You're always breaking camp! It doesn't allow you to get too comfortable!

Are you ready to break camp?

By The Rivers of Babylon

Henri Nouwen once remarked that he found it curious that many of the people he knew who were very angry and bitter were people he had met in church circles and places of ministry. That made me think.

There is a biblical naming for this particular type of anger and whining. It can be called being on the banks of Babylon, feeling exiled from your own faith experience.

We are all familiar with the Psalm 137 (popularized in song in 1978 by The German disco band, BoneyM) that sings out the whining of the Hebrew people: By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept, remembering Zion; on the poplars that grew there we hung up our harps. How could we sing a song of the Lord on alien soil? Let my tongue cleave to my mouth, if I remember you not, if I prize not Jerusalem above all my joys!

There is an interesting background to this whining: After Israel had entered the Promised Land, received God's law, became one kingdom, and built a temple to worship in, she felt politically secure and confident in her faith. Her confidence in faith was very much rooted in the possession of three material things: a land, a king, and a temple. God had promised these and God had delivered on that promise. After much struggle they finally had their own land, their own king, and their own temple. These then replaced God has the foundations of their faith. Naively they expected these three material possessions to stay with them forever.

It was not to be: neighbouring Assyria, overtook them, conquered the land, deported the people, killed the king, and knocked the temple down to its last stone. Israel now found herself in exile in Babylon, with no land, no king, no temple; and, seemingly, no reason to continue to have faith in God. Her faith, anchored as it was in land, king, and temple, now seemed empty, a dream gone sour. She felt exiled, not just from her own land but from her own faith because the foundations of that faith were now removed. Someone had taken away her land, king, and temple and, with them, seemingly her reason to trust in God.

She was left with some painful questions: How can there be a God, if God promised to be present in a land, a king, and a temple, and these are gone? Moreover, how can we be happy in such a situation? Someone had stolen what I believed were the foundations of my faith and I will not be happy about that! The laments of Babylon are in the end a euphemism for whining and anger.

But they echo the bitter, whining Christians we hear today: why did God take away my job when I had believed him for it? I prayed for this job and I believe it was God who gave it to me and now it is no more. How can I keep trusting God?

We become angry with God for ruining something that was dear to them, and for putting us on an unhappy bank on another river. We are on the banks of Babylon, unhappy, given over to whining.

What we need to hear in all this is the answer that God gave to Israel when she first expressed that unhappiness: Where is God when someone has taken away your land, king, and temple? God's answer: "You will find me again when you search for me in a deeper way, with your whole heart!"

God is beyond any material land, ruler, or building. God is also beyond any job or wealth or talent. The dark night of pain and insecurity we experience whenever we feel like we are on the banks of Babylon is the purifying pain that comes with finding out that everything that is precious to us, everything we want to identify with God himself, eventually gets crucified (just as Jesus did) and in the wake of the disillusionment we find ourselves in a free-fall, losing a grip on what once anchored our faith. And we will continue to free-fall until ultimately we lose everything so as to fall right to the bedrock of faith itself, God, solidity beyond all material lands, kings, and temples. For the raw truth is this: Jesus Christ and His death and resurrection are the only foundation of our faith. The foundation of our faith is a Person, not some possessions!

What To Do With Jealousy?

When I was growing up, I used to be plagued by this thought: All of you are loving each other but I am left out! It was only later in my early adulthood that I realized part of that kind of thinking came from the roots of rejection in my childhood. And that particular annoying feeling, that particular unexplained fear, was coming out of a base of jealousy.

Cain was the first person to murder his brother out of jealousy. What prompted his jealousy? God looked with favour upon Abel and his offering, but God did not look with favour upon Cain and his offering. And it seemed to Cain that everyone else was loving each other and he was left out!

And so, scripture says, jealousy turned him into a killer and, I suspect, the identical dynamic is present every time we see a mass murder like the ones that occurred at Virginia Tech, Columbine (March 23, 1999), and the recent school killing in Germany (Winnenden, March 11) and the shooting spree in Alabama (March 14). The same is true of David Widjaja, the Indonesian student who stabbed the NTU professor and then committed suicide (March 2). The ‘killers’ are always lonely, dangerously isolated individuals who, no doubt, share with Cain the experience of seeing others' offering as acceptable and their own as not. Everyone else, it seems, is loving each other and they are being left out.

Moreover, what we see acted out so horrifically in these murders or attempted murders often acts itself out inside of us on a smaller stage. Because of jealousy we too are all killers, except when we kill we do not do it with guns. We do it with thoughts and words.

Henri Nouwen once coined these words: Anyone shot by a gun is first shot by a word and anyone shot by a word is first shot by a thought. He is right. We murder in our thoughts every time we say inside ourselves: "Who does he think he is! She thinks she's so clever! He thinks he's God's gift to creation! She's so full of herself!"

Who of us has not walked into a meeting, a boardroom, a church service, a family gathering, a social situation, or a gathering of some kind and, not unlike the mass murderers at Columbine or Virginia Tech, subtly sprayed bullets of jealous anger around the gathering? When we are wounded like Cain, when it seems like our offering is not being accepted while that of others' is, when it seems like everyone is loving each other and we are being left out, the spontaneous impulse is to kill in word, thought, and attitude.

What's to be done? How do we live beyond jealousy and the sense of being left out?

To conquer my own jealousy I had to be courageous enough to admit I am jealous. Once I dare to admit my jealousy, half my battle is won.

When we look at the drama of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, the drama in which he struggles to give his death over to us as he had been giving his life over, we see that this drama is precisely a drama of love, not just a physical one. Unlike Mel Gibson's film, The Passion of Christ, the Bible accounts of Jesus' passion and death do not emphasize his physical sufferings. It is as though the physical sufferings, though real, were meant for something greater. What the gospel writers emphasize rather is his moral and emotional loneliness, his distance from others, his being cut out of the circle of human understanding, and his exclusion from human intimacy. That kind of emotional pain is what we can identify most with; more than the Lord’s physical suffering.

As Jesus approached his death, his earthly experience paralleled that of Cain. His offering, it seemed, anyone around him. He felt the radical isolation that comes precisely from exclusion, from misunderstanding, from being the object of hatred. The human temptation, surely, must have been towards bitterness, anger, self-pity, and hatred. But his actions are the antithesis of Cain's.

Surrounded by jealousy, hatred, and misunderstanding, he gives his life over in trust. When everything tempts him toward bitterness, he moves towards graciousness. When everything tempts him towards hatred, he moves towards love. When everything tempts him towards shutting others out, he makes himself still more vulnerable so that others can come in. When all around him there is coldness, paranoia, and curses, he affirms others, blesses them, and affirms warmth and trust. Cain gives us one answer. Jesus gives us another.

What's our answer in those moments of our lives when we sense that "all of you are loving each other and I may be left out"?

The Calling That Keeps You Going.

I have been a pastor for almost 20 years. Many times I would have people throw me the question - how do you keep going? I can give a variety of answers - I learn to enjoy what I do; I don't take myself too seriously; I hold things loosely and on and on and on. But all those answers will not make sense without this one undergirding truth: I am committed to the calling that God has given to me.

If you are never certain of God's calling on your life, you cannot survive as a pastor because the people you serve will have all kinds of expectations of you.

• Some believe you are holier than you could humanly achieve. Others are skeptical, secretly hoping you’ll fail.

• Some sincerely hope your family is materially blessed. Others think your family should barely be above the poverty line.

• Many will have very high expectations of your kids. Some will privately (or publicly) gloat when your kids fail.

• Some people will want to be close to you simply because you’re a pastor. Others will be too nervous to be themselves around you.

• Some will extend irrational love toward you and your family. Others will be easily offended (and dislike you) over something you would consider a minor misunderstanding.

• Some will almost worship you (even though you don’t want it). Many of those same people will leave your church in due time because you fail to meet their expectations.

While the joy of intimate relationships for pastors couldn’t be greater, the pain and loss of broken relationships will haunt you throughout your ministry.

The life of a pastor isn’t better or worse than others. But it is different. Above everything else, it is simply answering a call from God. It is the call that keep pastors faithful to the end.

And what is that call? Paul in addressing the Ephesian elders, articulated the call in Acts 20:28:
"Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseer. Be shepherds of the church of God, which He bougfht with His own blood."

Richard Baxter's great book The Reformed Pastor (1656), which every good pastor should read, is an exposition of Acts 20:28. Here is a thought-provoking quote from the book:

"Oh then, let us hear these arguments of Christ, whenever we feel ourselves grow dull and careless in our calling: Did I die for them I will you not look after them? Were they worth my blood and are they not worth your labour? Did I come down from heaven to earth, to seek and save that which was lost, and will you not go to the next door, street or village to seek them? How small is your labour as to mine! I debased myself to this, but is is your honour to be so employed. Have I done and suffered so much for their salvation: and was I willing to make you a co-worker with me, and will you refuse what little lies on your hands?"

That's the calling and that is what keeps pastors going!

Faithfulness - Our Greatest Gift to Others

After the funeral of Martin Luther King, one of the newsmen covering the event stopped to talk to an old man standing at the edges of the cemetery. The reporter asked him: "What did this man mean to you? Why was he special to you?" The old man, through tears, answered simply: "He was a great man because he was faithful. He believed in us when we had stopped believing in ourselves, he stayed with us even when we weren't worth staying with!"

That is a testimony to a life well-lived. If, at your funeral, someone says that of you, then you have lived your life well, even if there had been many times in your life when things weren't going well. To be full of faith means precisely to be faithful. When you have great faith in God, you exercise great surrender to the faithfulness of His ways. And that in turn makes you faithful to your Maker.

And, perhaps the greatest gift we can give to those around us is the promise of faithfulness, the simple promise to stay around, to not to leave when things get difficult, to not walk away because we feel disappointed or hurt, to stay even when we don't feel wanted or valued, to stay even when our personalities and visions clash, to stay through thick and thin. Isn't that what God is to us in His faithfulness? He never fails us nor forsakes us. He is faithful.

Too often what happens is that, in our commitments, we subtly blackmail each other: We commit ourselves to family, church, company, and friendship but with the unspoken condition: I will stay with you as long as you don't seriously disappointment or hurt me. But if you do, I will move on! I will leave you – I will disengage emotionally with you; I will leave church; I will leave the company; I will move on.

No family, friendship, church, or community can survive on this premise because it is simply impossible to live or work with each other for any length of time without seriously disappointing and hurting each other.

Inside of any relationship - marriage, family, friendship, church community, or even a collegial relationship at a workplace - we can never promise that we won't disappoint others, that we won't ever mess-up, that our personalities won't clash, or that we won't sometimes hurt others through insensitivity, selfishness, and weakness. We can't promise that we will always be good. We can only promise that we will always be there! The only gift that we can give is our faithfulness.

And, in the end, that promise is enough because if we stay and don't blackmail each other by walking away when there is disappointment and hurt, then the disappointments and the hurts can be worked through and redeemed by a faith and love that stay for the long haul. When there is faithfulness within a relationship, eventually the hurts and misunderstandings wash clean and even bitterness turns to love.

I look back at my life as I approach fifty and I am so thankful for the people who have given me their gift of faithfulness. I visited with a eighty-six year old this past week. I have known her for the last thirty years. She treats me like a son. She has seen me through many ups and downs. But she remained there for me with one constant gift – faithfulness.

I think of my staff. Many have come and gone but there remain a few who have been there with me through thick and thin and are still going strong; in fact, stronger than ever before and the gift they have given me is faithfulness.

Blessed is the man or woman who, on celebrating the anniversary of a marriage or the joy of a birthday or the commitment a calling, or the tenacity of a friendship, looks back and no longer feels the countless hurts, rejections, misunderstandings, and bitter moments, that were also part of that journey. These are washed clean by something deeper that has grown up because there has been faithfulness!

The greatest gift that we have to give is the promise of faithfulness, the promise that we will keep trying, that we won't walk away simply because we got hurt or because we felt unwanted or not properly valued.

We are all weak, wounded, sinful, and easily hurt. Inside of our marriages, families, churches, friendships, and places of work, we cannot promise that we won't disappoint each other and, worse still, that we won't hurt each other. But we can promise that we won't walk away because of disappointment and hurt. That's all we can promise - and that's enough!

A Prodigal God

Did you realize that nature is always teeming with an overabundance, prodigal, fertile, and wasteful? Why else do we have 90% more brain cells than we need and why else is nature scattering billions of seeds, of virtually everything, all over the planet every second?

And if life is so prodigal, what does this say about God, its author?

God, as we see in both nature and in scripture (and know from experience), is over-generous, over-lavish, over-extravagant, over- prodigious, over-rich, over-patient and over-gracious. If nature, scripture, and experience are to be believed, God is the absolute antithesis of everything that is stingy, miserly, frugal, narrowly calculating, or sparing in what it doles out. God is prodigal.

Dictionaries define "prodigal" as "wastefully extravagant and lavishly abundant." That certainly describes the God that Jesus incarnates and reveals.

We see this in the parable of the Sower. God, the sower, goes out to sow and he scatters his seed generously, almost wastefully, everywhere - on the road, among the rocks, among the thorns, on bad soil, and on rich soil. No farmer would ever do this. Who would waste seed on soil that can never produce a harvest? God, it seems, doesn't ask that question but simply keeps scattering his seed everywhere, over-generously, without calculating whether it is a good investment or not in terms of return. And, it seems, God has an infinite number of seeds to scatter, perpetually, everywhere. God is prodigious beyond imagination.

Among other things, this speaks of God's infinite riches, love, and patience. For us, there is both a huge challenge and a huge consolation in that. The challenge, of course, is to respond to the infinite number of invitations that God scatters on our path from minute to minute. The consolation is that, no matter how many of God's invitations we ignore, there will always be an infinite number of more. No matter how many we've already ignored or turned down, there are new ones awaiting us each minute. When we've gone through 39 days without praying or without opening the Word, and when we have gone 39 days running away from God like a Jonah, there's still a 40th day to respond. When we've ignored a thousand invitations, there's still another one waiting. God is prodigal, so are the chances God gives us.

If we look back on our lives and are truly honest, we have to admit that of all the invitations that God has sent us, we've probably accepted and acted on only a fraction of them. There have been countless times we've turned away from His invitation. For every invitation to obedience we've accepted, we've probably turned down a hundred. But that's the beauty and wonder of God's richness. God is not a petty creator and creation, itself, is not a cheap machine with barely enough energy and resources to keep it going. God and nature are prodigal. That's plain everywhere. Millions and millions of life-giving seeds blow everywhere in the world and we need only to pick up a few to become productive, fecund, capable of newness, maturity, and of producing life.

Jonah turned down God’s invitation to Nineveh. He ran from God. But God sent a wind to disturb his sleep on the ship. Then God sent a fish to house a drowning Jonah. Later God sent a plant to shelter an angry Jonah and then a worm to remove the shade so that Jonah sees the heart of His Maker. So much trouble, so many ways, so many attempts just to win the heart of a proud, prejudiced, picky prophet. All because He is a prodigal God!

There is a Jonah in all of us. Don’t miss LOST, the series that will point you back to the prodigal God, beginning this Sunday.