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Frank thoughts on our times from the view of the Gospel.

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The Things of God that Destroy Us

TreeEvery good gift that comes from God can destroy us.

Yep.  What do you think about that?  It’s not God’s fault, of course.  We find ways to misuse every good thing and pervert it to our own wicked ends.  It happens over and over, God gives us something good and pure, and then we take it and use it to hurt ourselves, and others.  We’re like that, we kinda suck.

Let’s look at a few random examples:

DANCING
Dancing is a perfectly natural thing to do.  If we are happy, we dance.  If we hear music that moves us, we dance.  If we have to go to the bathroom, we dance.  The Bible endorses dancing, it says that God was pleased with King David dancing before the LORD in worship.  So what’s the deal with “Footloose?”  Why is the Reverend John Lithgow so uptight? Because we make it about something else, we make it about sex.  Sleazy music, half dressed people, some gyrating  hips and we have turned dancing into something nasty.  And the usual reaction by good church people is to outlaw dancing.  As if the sin existed in the dance.  We think that we are safer, less likely to sin, if we keep ourselves as distant from the possibility of sin as possible.  We basically say to God, “Thanks, but no thanks.  We don’t need dancing.”  And when dancing is outlawed, only the outlaws will dance.

GOD GAVE WINE
How about the obvious example of wine (and beer, and scotch, etc.)  God gave these gifts to us to make us happy.  You know, if we are having a day that makes us feel “unhappy,” then God gave us a little something that we can drink and relax.  So that we can lighten up a little.  Our problems don’t go away, but they don’t seem to matter quite as much.  Ah, but some people are not satisfied with “a little something” and they drink too much.  And they drink too often.  And they don’t get happy, instead they get violent and mean, and keep going until they are sick and pathetic.  The usual reaction is to blame the booze.  We think the safer way is to abstain from drinking completely.

We think that if we build a wall around the things that could potentially cause us to sin, that we are doing a good thing.   We build a wall so that we are not even tempted to sin.  We can’t even see the sin.  We add rules where there are not rules.  But, in doing this, we despise the gifts God has given us.  Do you see this?

A NEW CAR!
Think about it, let’s say I buy my daughter a new car (and now we know for sure that this is a fairy tale.)  I hand her the keys and say, “Two rules, you have to wear your seat-belt and  you can’t have more than one passenger in the car with you.”  She thinks about it for a minute then says,

“No thanks, Dad, I don’t want to break your rules, so I just won’t accept the car at all.”

Would I be pleased?  Is she really showing how much she loves me by refusing my gift?

YOU GOTTA SEE IT
I believe that God wants us to actually live in the garden where can see the forbidden tree.  We are actually supposed to sit under it’s shade and use it’s rough bark to scratch our back.  We are just not to eat the fruit.  We are to get all the way up next to it, hold it in our hand, take it’s blessing, and not sin.  We are to learn what it means to face temptation, resist the serpent, and watch him flee.

We should take the keys, thank our Dad with a heart full of joy, get in the car and drive around wearing our seat-belt, playing music, and drinking Starbucks with a good friend.  That’s the good life.

Everything that God gives us has the potential to destroy us.  He gives us money and we love the money more than we love Him.  He gives us children and we put them on a golden altar and worship them instead of Him.  He gives us cake and butter and we eat until we can’t fit into the pants that we bought with the money that we love more than Him.

God wants His people to have things, but He doesn’t  want things to have His people.

May we accept God’s generous outpouring of blessings, and may we enjoy the blessings with a thankful heart.  May we learn to enjoy the things that He gives us in the context of worshiping Him and Him alone.  AMEN

Bible Study - Deluge

genesis-michaelangelo.jpgEvery time someone talks to me about how bad our world is I point them to two places that have served to give me some perspective.  One place is the books of Charles Dickens within which the upright and self righteous Victorians are revealed as cruel and ambivalent towards the great suffering of many on their doorsteps.  The other book I point people to is a short book of George Orwell’s letters written from England to a friend in America during the second world war.  We look around today and indeed we mourn the dead of Iraq and Afghanistan but still nothing we face fills us with the apprehension that pervades Orwell’s letters.  In the letters Orwell is not fearful but the uncertainty of the outcome haunts every word.  When we watch “Saving Private Ryan” it is from the perspective of knowing the good guys win - Orwell did not know the future but could only hope that right would prevail.  It was not a happy time.

So the world is not necesserily worse than yesterday but it is, it seems, unrelentingly bad.  Something at the core of the world pulls it back again and again towards the evil action or the cruel work. 

That world is the world of Noah.  It is the world God looks at and says enough! 

17I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish. 18 But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark. 

I can tell you now that I will not do justice to the story of Noah.  In words the story of Noah and the ark is about the same length as the story of the creation.  Strange to think that Moses in writing the early bible spent as much time on Noah as Adam and Eve.  So I will not do the story justice but I will ask you to think over just a couple of quick points.

First, the story here should convince us of God’s intention to forever have a relationship with mankind.  Even in the face of ultimate judgement God searches out the few, those who have not bowed the knee, and saves them by his specific and all powerful act.  The deluge overwhelms the world but a few are chosen to keep the secret of God’s ultimate purpose.  This thought has comforted Christians for centuries and it has provided for Christian communities a purpose for their existence.  We often over complicate our Christian purpose - even at Crosspoint.  What the story of the flood tells us is that wherever we are we are called to be those few who honor God and who bear witness to Him in the world in whatever community we are placed within.  Everything else is just stuff that gets in the way.

Second, God makes his covenant with Noah.  This theme we will return to for no other reason that the bible again and again returns to this theme.  The promise God made to Noah, his covenant, was to save him from the deluge and establish his family on the other side of the flood.  How this covenant of salvation works is of course wholly at God’s prerogative, completely an act of his will.  God chooses the family he wants to bear witness too him.  He then gives them the means of their protection and finally establishes them in posterity.  God’s covenant is consecrated in God’s mighty acts.  As I said in my last post God’s covenant is a bit like him taking out a mortgage for us and on top of that making the payments on our behalf.  That is both humbling and encouraging at the same time.   The story of the ark is just one of these payments.

Oh, and a third thought occurs to me.  Why are the animals in the ark?  Because somehow, even if we are obviously at the head of creation, the creation is not the creation without those creatures.  I think this detail is important.  We are tempted to see the relationship we have with God in metaphysical terms, like it exists only in our head.  But this story seems to tell us that we need land and animals to really be at one with God.  We need the creation - in its entirety -to know and understand the creator.

The story ends with God communicating again that he will establish his covenant with the whole of creation.  This act of ultimate judgement would never again happen.

8 Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: 9 “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you 10 and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. 11 I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

 12 And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: 13 I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. 16 Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.”

 17 So God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on the earth.”

Every time I see a rainbow I think of God’s promise and the days I will spend in heaven - we live for ever after the deluge.

Every Problem I’ve Ever Had

microwaveI know what your problem is.
Really, I do.  I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about it.
I have the same problem, that’s how I know so much about it.  It’s at the heart of every problem, everything that bothers you (everything that has ever bothered you.)  (more…)

Saturday Was A Good Day

bikeSome days are better than others.
Saturday 6-28-08 was one of those days.

1. My daughter, Von Behr, rode her bike for the first time without training wheels. We have been going for long walks most days for the last two months. Angel and Von ride their Razer scooters while Kim and I walk the hike-and-bike trail in our neighborhood for 45 minutes. I think the time on her two-wheeled scooter prepared her for two wheeled biking. She was awesome! A vision on her little purple bike with a purple helmet, two long sleeve shirts, and wool mittens on her hands all in the 90 degree heat. She had a little trouble getting started, but once she was going, she did great. Stopping was not really a problem like I thought it might be. I’m sure we were quite the sight with me running along beside her in case she fell.

2. I found the power supply to my scanner. I’ve been looking for it for over a year. It was in the drawer of our antique buffet. (Of course it was)

3. Kim now has internet access in her home office. Hey, it’s only been a year! I had to buy and install an ATT 2Wire modem/wireless router. For some reason the Netgear wireless router kept locking up.

4. We had dinner at the Clay Family Restaurant (on Clay road). It’s a chicken fried steak kind of place, very Texas. They have a huge playground for the kids with a petting zoo and sandboxes. Kim and I sat inside watching the kids through the big windows in the dinning room. I put Kim’s phone in Von’s pocket, and when our food arrived I called her to come inside. Genius.

5. Our Sony portable DVD player starting working again. We only use it for long car trips, and we are getting ready to take another one. Good timing.

Bible Study - What is this you have done?

genesis-michaelangelo2.jpgOnce again there is a lot revealed to us in these verses.  I have a bias, I know , yet I find these verses so deep I can be comforted by them at any and every point of my emotional life.  Because both the promise and the predicament - and the depth and power of both - is reveled to us in just the first 3 chapters of this book.  We have seen that God created us good, indeed very good, and we have seen how God wished to walk with us in the garden of evening.  We were to stroll with God among the creation that he gave us.   Somehow, and this really is a mystery, all of that promise was undone by one question, “Did God really say?”  Once this disaster comes to light God makes known quickly and clearly the implications of mankind’s foolishness.

13 Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”
      The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

 14 So the LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,
       “Cursed are you above all the livestock
       and all the wild animals!
       You will crawl on your belly
       and you will eat dust
       all the days of your life.

 15 And I will put enmity
       between you and the woman,
       and between your offspring and hers;
       he will crush your head,
       and you will strike his heel.”

 16 To the woman he said,
       “I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing;
       with pain you will give birth to children.
       Your desire will be for your husband,
       and he will rule over you.”

 17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it,’
       “Cursed is the ground because of you;
       through painful toil you will eat of it
       all the days of your life.

 18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
       and you will eat the plants of the field.

 19 By the sweat of your brow
       you will eat your food
       until you return to the ground,
       since from it you were taken;
       for dust you are
       and to dust you will return.”

 20 Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.

 21 The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. 22 And the LORD God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” 23 So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

So much for Eden, it is gone now.  I mentioned in my last post the first word is to the evil one.  God says, to the serpent, you shall not win the day.  But this battle in Genesis Chapter 3, as far as man is concerned, is lost.  Woman is condemned to pain in childbirth and man to a life of toil.  If there was a moment when we were not materialistic, not driven by work and consumption it was a moment in Eden that has now passed.  From this point onwards we move from innocents who strolled naked at the side of God to workers and consumers who subdue the earth and make a living only by the sweat and toil. 

Instead, we are banished from the place of peace and certainty and sent out into the world.  We have to make our own way now.  God does not walk at our side, behind us angels guard the gate to Eden, and we know for sure that the way back to Eden will not be simple nor will it be without cost.  Blood will be spilt or we will remain outside for ever.

It is a dark story with little in the form of light to give a shadow of the hope to come.  Only when God warns the serpent that one will come to crush him to we get any glimpse that all will be well.  But even as yet we cast lonely shadows that stretch back to Eden as we walk East into the rising sun.  Maybe that sun is also God’s promise of a new day and a new way back to Eden.  In the rest of Genesis we will begin to see that journey unfolding.

God help us to recognise that we are outside of your care and your purpose.  Eden is gone yet we long to be home.  We are the prodigal.  Strengthen us that we may lay hold of our Saviour Jesus and claim the life he so perfectly offers us.  Allow us to live for His glory, allow us again to walk in Eden.

Soccer-Europe Style

chelsea.jpgBack in London after 1 week with family in Houston - I have been remiss in not writing.  However, now back to grindstone of work and today I am in Aberdeen Scotland, tomorrow I fly to Baku, Azerbijian, and on Sunday to Aktau in Kazakhstan.  Happy trails!

Karen misses me for sure and so do my girls, Kate and Hope. Jack on the other hand displays the aloof detachment of the teenager. The fact I have a wallet guarantees that I have a relationship with Jack. I just wish it went a bit deeper (both the wallet and my relationship).  I know it will get better I just wish it would be sooner. 

Jack is definitely interested in soccer. Our team, Glasgow Rangers is on the verge of one of its most successful seasons in 125 years of history. 125 years is along time in anybody’s language.  But, with only a two weeks left, they have the chance of winning 4 different competitions!  It will be an incredible feat if they do it marked by much celebration.

Scottish football (as they say here) is just not in the same league (no, pun intended) as the English premier league. There, the worlds best players play a game only loosely connected to the soccer you might watch in Houston at a Dynamo game.  The skill levels are stratospheric as is the compensation of the best players. We are talking NBA or MLB  type salaries for the best players.  To confirm the superiority of the premier league, the European Champions league – the soccer SuperBowl competed for by the best teams of Europe - will be decided in the final between too English premier league teams, Manchester United and Chelsea.    http://www.manutd.com/ 

Americans apparently dont like “the beautiful game”, but watching these top class games can be enthralling.  The sheer physical effort is daunting.  Soccer players run constantly for 90 mins demanding of them the stamina of a college level middle distance runner.  Defenders are normally tall and many great strikers (the goals scorer) are often middle sized but powerful and explosive.  Even so, one thing I like about socccer is that you can be effective at whatever height - it actually is a game that can be played by normal size people!

If you havent checked out a game watch the Fox Soccer Channel on cable ( http://msn.foxsports.com/tv/schedule ) and look out for those English Premier League teams.  You wont find many Brits on the team but you will see the best soccer players in the world. 

Check out the fans too. The only thing I have experienced in the States that come close to the fan experience of a European soccer game is a Red Sox play of game at Fenway (that is a special memory).  And, finally, there is no religious meaning to any of this although I have prayed many times while thinking of my own team.  Enjoy.