A song of ascents. I lift up my eyes to the hills– where does my help come from?  2 My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth.  3 He will not let your foot slip– he who watches over you will not slumber;  4 indeed, he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.  5 The LORD watches over you– the LORD is your shade at your right hand;  6 the sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night.  7 The LORD will keep you from all harm– he will watch over your life;  8 the LORD will watch over your coming and going both now and forevermore. (Psalm 121:1-8)

As many of you know, I am the father of three young children – Ryan (5), Will (3), and Nate (1).  When each of them was a baby, I used to put them down for bed at night by standing near the crib, holding them in my arms, and singing quietly to them before laying them down.  If you have children of your own, you know that it can be a challenge getting little ones to go to bed without crying for a parent to come and pick them up again.  One question that often went through my head during the nighttime routine was which approach would help them go to sleep more peacefully:  keeping my eyes closed while I sang to them, or keeping my eyes open.  For a time, I went with the eyes closed approach.  By closing my eyes, I reasoned that I was showing them by example that it was time for sleep. 

Ultimately, however, I settled on the latter approach – putting them down with my eyes open, looking them in the eyes as I sang to them.  And every time I did that, I was reminded of Psalm 121, Read more »

Each month in 2010, I am challenging our church to memorize one verse of Scripture together, and to spend time that month meditating on that month’s theme.  In January, we focused on our new life in Christ, memorizing 2 Corinthians 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!”  In February, the theme was spiritual warfare, with the key verse James 4:7, “Submit yourselves, then, to God.  Resist the devil and he will flee from you.”  In March, we will be focusing on the power of prayer, and the verse I am challenging you to memorize is John 15:7 – “If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you.”  This powerful promise is located in a passage where Jesus talks about himself as the vine and us as the branches, and exhorts us that we can do nothing unless we are connected to him.  I highly encourage you that when you memorize this or any verse, that you do your best to understand the context in which it is found so that you do not take it to mean something which it does not.

 As simple as prayer can be – at its heart, it is a conversation with God – it can also be hard to make sense of the different passages about making requests of God.  Read more »

“Early in the morning Samuel got up and went to meet Saul, but he was told, ‘Saul has gone to Carmel. There he has set up a monument in his own honor and has turned and gone on down to Gilgal.’” (1 Samuel 15:12)

I’ve been preaching through the life of David on Sunday mornings, and as I was talking about King Saul this past Sunday, this verse in particular stood out to me.  Saul has just finished leading the armies of Israel against the Amalekites, and as the prophet Samuel goes out to find him, Samuel is told that Saul is busy setting up a monument in his own honor.  All throughout the Old Testament are examples of the people of God erecting monuments and markers to God that commemorate places where God does something meaningful, so that future generations would be reminded of what God had done (e.g. Genesis 28:18-19, Joshua 4:2-9).  But this is the first time I ever came across a man of God – the King, no less – erecting a monument to himself!  Saul’s goal, obviously, was that future generations would be reminded not of what God had done, but what HE had done, and of the great leader HE was.

I find this story to not only be an indictment against Saul for just how unfit he was to be the king over God’s people, but also a great metaphor for what can happen when we are as insecure as Saul was about who God is and who we are in Him.  Read more »

One of my favorite authors is a man named Donald Miller, who is best known for his 2003 book Blue Like Jazz.  Miller writes with wit, creativity, and disarming honesty in the style of a memoir, reflecting on his life and what he has learned about God and himself through his experiences.  Blue Like Jazz is currently in the process of being made into a movie, and Miller’s most recent book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, is about what he learned about his life and God’s grand story while the screenwriters “edited his life” for the big screen.  His reflections on the boring, uninspired story he was living and the grand story of risk and adventure that God was calling him to live were fascinating to read, and really challenged me to reflect on the story I find myself in and to walk with faith and courage.  Let me share a few quotes from the book that really spoke to me:
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Today’s post is written by guest blogger Eddie Mui. Eddie lives in South Windsor with his wife, Fabiola, and young children Joshua & Sarah. He’s the one often playing the funny looking drum-like instrument (it’s called a cajon) on Sundays, and will be leading worship this Sunday.

“A Mighty God, A Mighty Savior”

“The LORD your God is with you, he is mighty to save. He will take delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing.” (Zephaniah 3:17, NIV)

Imagining or believing that God is all-powerful and mighty isn’t necessarily a hard thing to do. If He was even deserving of being called God with a capital “G”, one would expect that He would be. Otherwise, would He really be God?

Indeed, it’s not a foreign concept that God or a god would be endowed with extraordinary power, might, and authority. Greek and Roman mythology espoused many gods with certain power and authority over various elements of nature and the universe. Zeus was the most powerful and leader of all of gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus. Mythology attributes them with respective authority over mankind, the sun, the sea, over war, love and beauty, over Hades and death, etc. To each, they had their jurisdiction, but Zeus was all-powerful above them all.

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 This past Sunday I preached on the fact that God is eternal, that He exists outside of time and is fully present to every moment of time at once.  He is the Alpha and Omega, the one who was there in the beginning and will be there in the end.  He is the unchanging one, who because He exists outside of time does not change in His character, His truth, His promises, or His purposes.  He is the Rock upon which we stand in our faith.

One of the classic passages that speaks to God’s view of time is found in 2 Peter 3:8:  “But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.”  Read more »

One of my favorite quotes comes from the C.S. Lewis book The Four Loves, an exploration of affection, friendship, eros, and charity.  In his section on friendship, he uses an illustration about his relationship with two of his closest friends, “Charles” and “Ronald” (J.R.R. Tolkien) to make a larger point about the importance of Christian fellowship to our knowledge of God.  This is how Lewis puts it:

In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out.  By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets.  Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s reaction to a specifically Caroline joke.  Far from having more of Ronald, having him ‘to myself’ now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald.  Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves.  Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend.  They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, ‘Here comes one who will augment our loves’… In this, Friendship exhibits a glorious ‘nearness by resemblance’ to Heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each has of God.  For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest.  That, says an old author, is why the Seraphim in Isaiah’s vision are crying ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ to one another (Isaiah 6:3).  The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more we all have.

There are so many beautiful insights in this passage.  Read more »

I’ve heard it said that “God made man in His image, and man returned the favor” (I’ve seen that quote attributed to a few people, but Voltaire seems to be the first to have said it).  There is a lot of truth to that sentiment, and I think it’s worth reflecting upon.  We can all be too guilty of assuming that God is like us in the way He thinks, the values and issues that are paramount to him, and the people he likes and dislikes.  For example, far too many American Christians seem to believe that “God is love” means that God accepts everyone as they are and would never dare tell anyone that they need to repent of the way they are living, when in reality His love is a holy love that can not stand sin.  And just look at Christians and politics – some people are convinced that Jesus would vote Republican; others that He would vote Democrat; and still others that He would stay as far away as he could from politics.  I think it’s safe to say that too often we can be guilty of assuming that God is just like us.

But He’s not like you. 
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Back when our church decided to plan a mission trip for this summer, we knew that raising $2000 per person was going to be a daunting task, so we put on the calendar to have a tag sale to raise some money towards the trip.  As fundraisers go, the tag sale can be pretty painless – collect a lot of stuff, price it, sell it, and clean up the leftovers, usually all in a 24-hour period. 

Painless, of course, if it’s being coordinated by someone who knows how to coordinate things.
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