Tag: Christianity

Who do you follow?

Follow-Me-To-photography-by-Murad-Osmann-Barcelona-550x410It was a question that was asked of me many years ago.  And there are as many answers as there are people.  It is something we all need to look at for ourselves, because we all follow someone in our lives.  We have someone we see as important, and we look to them for inspiration, even if they don’t know we exist.  Just based on the ratings there are many people in North America at least, who spend a great deal of time “Keeping up with the Kardashians.”  Who you choose to follow will make a large impact on your life, and on the lives of those who may choose to follow you.

The reasons we choose to follow someone often are because we see something in them we want to have.  Or we admire a character quality or an ability they exhibit.  Or they have a way of understanding the world around them that we admire.  They can be someone who can teach and input into our lives, or they can be someone we admire from afar who can be a role model for us.

We live in a world which is largely lacking in good role models.  There was a time where people of great character were looked up to.  When integrity and honesty were admiral qualities to have.  A time where we saw people who stood up against the wrongs in our society and spoke of greater values.  People like Gandhi, and Mother Teresa.  Others like Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King.  Great men and women who made great contributions to our world.

As Christians we have the opportunity to follow one of the greatest people in history.  A man who stood up for some of the greatest values we still see as important.  A man who impacted the world, and who is still affecting lives and conversations 2000 years later.  And on top of the opportunity to follow Him, we have His personal promise that He will be directly and intimately involved in our lives.

Who do you follow?  The choice is not if you follow someone, but who you follow.  A better question may be to ask is are they worth following?

Worship? pt 5

Worship in Spirit.

Much of what we “offer to God” each week has little to do with what God wants or desires.  In fact much of what we do is centered on what we want and desire.  Having led worship in churches for almost two decades I am amazed at what people expect from worship.  We gather to “have our ears tickled” to borrow slightly from 2 Tim 4:3.  Worshipping God in truth means that we come before Him and see Him as He is, not as we think He should be, and we offer ourselves as we are, imperfect and incomplete.  We give God honor, respect, awe and proclaim Him for who He is, all the while recognizing who we are, knowing that we come before Him not on our own merit, but because of His value of us.

Worshipping God in Spirit is based on this one thing.  Life in the Spirit, as written about by Paul in Romans 8, hinges on the fact that we have nothing to offer God in ourselves, but ourselves.  Nothing that we can do will ever qualify us to receive anything that God has for us.  At no time can we stand before God and say “look what I have done.”  Everything we have to offer Him is a direct result of everything He has obtained and offered to us.  This begins our walk in the Spirit.  We begin by recognizing our standing before a holy and perfect Judge, who requires that payment be made for our actions.  Everything we do has a consequence, whether it is good or bad.  Isaac Newton only discovered God’s law that every action has a reaction.  Or to put it in Bible terms “we reap what we sow.”  When we recognize that we have completely missed the mark and fallen short of God’s standard for us, and we realize that God isn’t pleased with our actions and they require punishment we begin to have our hearts opened to life in the Spirit.  2Cor 7:8-10 states that we need to have repentance with Godly sorrow. ” I am not sorry that I sent that severe letter to you, though I was sorry at first, for I know it was painful to you for a little while. Now I am glad I sent it, not because it hurt you, but because the pain caused you to repent and change your ways. It was the kind of sorrow God wants his people to have, so you were not harmed by us in any way. For the kind of sorrow God wants us to experience leads us away from sin and results in salvation. There’s no regret for that kind of sorrow. But worldly sorrow, which lacks repentance, results in spiritual death. ”   Repentance is simply changing the way we think about something.  We begin to see things from God’s perspective.   We come to understand how much our actions have missed God’s intended mark for our lives and how deeply this has offended Him.  This then calls us to have a sorrow inside that regrets the thoughts and actions we have had simply for the reason that they have offended God.  If all we have is a feeling of ” now I’m in trouble” it does us no good. 

Godly sorrow leads us to open our heart to understand and receive the grace God offers to us.  We can never reach God on our own.  God’s grace, or His power doing in us what we cannot do, restores us again to relationship with Him and we come alive to His Spirit and are joined in relational communion with our creator who so greatly loves us.  Life in the Spirit is based solely in  that simple life giving relationship with God.  As we stay connected with Him and journey with Him we have a life lived according to His plan, fulfilling what He desires for us and we live empowered and guided by His Spirit in us.

This is also the way we need to worship.  That connection we have with God needs to be maintained.  It is the source of all we have to offer God.  Jesus said in John 15 that we need to abide in Him.  In modern language it simply means we need to stay connected.  The very fact that Jesus told us to stay connected means that we can become unconnected.  And once that happens no more life flows from Him to us, and we are off wandering around doing our own things even when they are covered with religious veneer.  Simply gathering with other “Christians” and singing some songs and listening to a teaching doesn’t mean we are connected.   And without that connection we cannot worship God.  How’s your connection doing today?  Does it need some attention?  The good news is God wants us to be connected and is willing to reconnect us if we have wandered off.  It is up to us to evaluate what we are offering when we gather.  It is just something that makes us feel good because we have “done our duty” or are we connected to our source and offering worship born from that connection.

Connected pt 2

cowboy-sunset Togetherness.  It is something that goes against the grain at least here in North America.  We have an ideological concept of ourselves steeped in rugged individualism, where we ride in, become the great hero and ride off into the sunset again.  We see little need for others and usually people are the reason we feel the need to be alone.  People can be extremely cruel and harsh  and all of us have been on the receiving end of some form of ridicule and abuse which just seems to reinforce the stereotype.
Add to that all the busy bodies and gossips who seem to feel it is their God given mission to know all that is going on in your life and share it with everyone they know as well as their opinions of what you are doing and it is no wonder people don’t want to invest heavily in relationship.  Even the source of basic foundational relationships we were all born into has broken down into a deep source of pain for many.  Family isn’t even something you can count on any more.
Enter the church and the people who are supposed to be ones you can begin to turn to and count on as Jesus demonstrated and we have a group of people obsessed with what is wrong with you instead of helping bring out what is right.  There is a lot wrong with our world today and it just reinforces our desire to stand alone.
Unfortunately we were not created to be alone but to be in relationship.  And our level of connection to God is dependent on our level of connection with others around us.  One always will lead to the other.  When we come to know relationship with God through Jesus we are restored to a life-giving relationship with God and He instantly begins to network us to others around us.  And if we resist building relationship with others, our relationship with God begins to die as well.  We cannot have one without the other.  We need to change our view of relationships with others to become who we were meant to be.  Our growth personally and in our relationship with God is dependent on it.
“Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.” –  Martin Luther King, Jr –
Paul wrote in Ephesians 4 that Christ gave gifts to the body of Christ so that we would become mature and complete measuring up completely to Christ who is our head.  And because of that maturity we would stand firm in our faith and we would …“Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church. 16 He makes the whole body fit together perfectly. As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love.”  Ephesians 4:15-16 NLT   What I found interesting the first time I read this and I began to understand our need for one another wconnectedas that we grow together.  There is no alone in Christianity.  No room for individualism.  “He makes the whole body fit together perfectly. As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love.”   
We can never become who God wants us to be by spending time with God alone.  We also need to be in ever-deepening relationship with the people God begins to place around us.  One whole complete body of Christ around the world together becoming who God wants us to be.  “We must depart from a self-centered view of our life in Christ. We cannot independently remain apart from others. We are formed by the Spirit to be joined into community with others, forming a body indwelled by Christ.’  Ralph. W. Neighbour Jr.. Christ’s Basic Bodies