A Hunger for God
Friday, March 5th, 2010 | Lent Meditations | No Comments
Many people choose something to give up, or “fast from”, for Lent—chocolate, meat on Fridays, Facebook, and so on. But why do we fast? What is the purpose behind it? It’s not to make us feel holy. It’s not because fasting itself is pleasing to God. No, fasting itself is not the goal; it’s just one means to the end of cultivating deeper relationship with God. How can fasting help us do this?
One of the best answers I have found to this question of why we fast is in the book A Hunger For God by John Piper. In it, he references a parable Jesus tells about a farmer sowing seed on different types of soil. Maybe you have heard this story before. If not, you can read it in Mark 4:1-20. At the end, Jesus talks about how sometimes “desires for other things” choke out the seed (His word) that has sprouted in us.
About this, Piper says:
“Desires for other things”—there’s the enemy. And the only weapon that will triumph is a deeper hunger for God. The weakness of our hunger for God is not because he is unsavory, but because we keep ourselves stuffed with “other things.” Perhaps, then, the denial of our stomach’s appetite for food might express, or even increase, our soul’s appetite for God.
As Americans we are so well-off that we almost never have to go without food. Whenever we experience hunger, we satisfy ourselves almost immediately. The point of fasting is to help us understand what Jesus meant when He said, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” It is to help us experience the pain of hunger (or desire for whatever we are fasting from), and in the face of that pain, say: God is more than enough!
Father God, please help me to desire You deeply, knowing that You alone can satisfy. Please fill me today with Your grace and help me experience You as more than enough.
The Great Initiator
Thursday, March 4th, 2010 | Lent Meditations | No Comments
Truly I am God… I have spoken, and I will bring it to pass; I have purposed, and I will do it. -Isaiah 46:9,11
And I am certain that God, who began the good work within you, will continue his work until it is finally finished on the day when Christ Jesus returns. -Philippians 1:6
We love because he first loved us. -1 John 4:19
I can’t seem to get that last verse out of my head: “We love because he (God) first loved us.” Think about that for a moment. We did not start our relationship with God; He did. In fact, the verse implies that the reason we are capable of love at all is because God loved us first. He initiates, and we respond.
I love how Paul corrects himself when he writes, “But now that you know God—or rather are known by God—how is it that you are turning back to…weak and worthless…things?” We are known by God. He initiates, and we respond. Henri Nouwen writes:
For most of my life I have struggled to find God, to know God, to love God. I have tried hard to follow the guidelines of the spiritual life—pray always, work for others, read the Scriptures—and to avoid the many temptations to dissipate myself. I have failed many times but always tried again, even when I was close to despair.
Now I wonder whether I have sufficiently realized that during all this time God has been trying to find me, to know me, and to love me. The question is not “How am I to find God?” but “How am I to let myself be found by him?” The question is not “How am I to know God?” but “How am I to let myself be known by God?” And, finally, the question is not “How am I to love God?” but “How am I to let myself be loved by God?” God is looking into the distance for me, trying to find me, and longing to bring me home.
How will you respond to God’s work in you and around you today?
Imitating God… A Life of Love
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 | Lent Meditations | No Comments
One evening when I was visiting a friend’s home for dinner, we were in the middle of an animated conversation. I was making a strange face about something when I noticed their son looking up at me and twisting his own face into a perfect imitation of my funny expression. A child’s special ability for imitation must be something built-in, because nearly two thousand years ago, the apostle Paul picked up on it and wrote:
Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children, and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. -Ephesians 5:1-2
Just like a little child copies things his parents do, Paul says we should copy God. Specifically, we should live the same sort of life of love that Jesus lived, sacrificially loving others as God gives us opportunity.
The “fragrant offering and sacrifice” Paul mentions is a picture from the Old Testament. Exodus 29:23,25 says:
…take a loaf, and a cake made with oil, and a wafer… and burn them on the altar along with the burnt offering for a pleasing aroma to the LORD….
In the same way that the smoke from the Old Testament burnt offerings made a “pleasing aroma” to God, our lives of sacrificial love, imitating Jesus, are a sweet fragrance to God.
Father God, please make clear to me how I can show Your love to people around me today. Help me experience Your love so deeply that it flows out from me to the people around me, especially to people who are hard to love. I want my life to be a sweet-smelling offering to You.
Purity of Heart
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 | Lent Meditations | No Comments
As we pass through the forty days of Lent, let’s regularly recall to mind these verses from the first week:
Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded…. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up. -James 4:8,10
Sören Kierkegaard once wrote a meditation on James 4:8 which he entitled, “Purity of heart is to will one thing”. It is our “double-mindedness” that is our downfall! Our desires are for God and….
If I had written that meditation, I would have said, “Purity of heart is to love one thing.” I think what we love is even more primary than what we will, or choose, because our choices are based on what we love the most.
One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” -Mark 12:28-31
When our love is divided up a hundred ways, we are pulled in a hundred directions, and we can’t truly love anything or anyone well—we can’t love wholeheartedly. But when love for God is our ruling affection, the love that undergirds every aspect of our lives, then all our loves are rich and right! The very love of God flows through us to everyone around us. Loving God with our whole selves, undividedly, is how we are able to truly love others and how we can be pure of heart.
Father God, please help me today to love you with my whole self: heart, soul, mind, and strength. Please reveal to me the areas of my life which I have not given completely to you. I want to have a pure heart, to be humble before you, and to come near to You so that You will come near to me. In Jesus name, amen.
God’s Life In Me
Monday, March 1st, 2010 | Lent Meditations | No Comments
Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. -James 1:17
I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So the life I now live in the body, I live because of the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. -Galatians 2:20
We love because He loved us first. -1 John 4:19
“The goal of our life is to live with God forever.
God who loves us, gave us life.
Our own response of love allows God’s life to flow into
us without limit.
“All the things in this world are gifts of God,
presented to us so that we can know God more easily
and make a return of love more readily.
“As a result, we appreciate and use all of these gifts of God
insofar as they help us develop as loving persons.
But if any of these gifts become the center of our lives,
they displace God
and so hinder our growth toward our goal.
“In everyday life, then, we must hold ourselves in balance
before all of these created gifts insofar as we have a choice
and are not bound by some obligation.
We should not fix our desires on health or sickness,
wealth or poverty, success or failure, a long life or short one.
For everything has the potential of calling forth in us
a deeper response to our life in God.
“Our only desire and our one choice should be this:
I want and I choose what better
leads to the deepening of God’s life in me.”
-St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556)
Turning Over The Tables
Sunday, February 28th, 2010 | Lent Meditations | No Comments
This morning at Christ Community’s worship services, we will be focusing on the following passge. Would you read it and mediate on it?
Jesus entered the temple area and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. “It is written,” he said to them, ” ‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it a ‘den of robbers.’”
The blind and the lame came to him at the temple, and he healed them. But when the chief priests and the teachers of the law saw the wonderful things he did and the children shouting in the temple area, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” they were indignant.
“Do you hear what these children are saying?” they asked him.
“Yes,” replied Jesus, “have you never read,
“‘From the lips of children and infants
you have ordained praise’?”
-Matthew 21:12-16
Isn’t it sad that the chief priests, who were the religious leaders of Jesus’ day, were indignant and unaccepting of what God was doing in their midst, yet the little children praised Jesus wholeheartedly? The chief priests were more interested in keeping their places of power in the status quo than in embracing what God was doing around them.
As you go to worship this morning, ask God to speak to you and give you an open heart. How does He want to change your priorities? Who is He asking you to show love to this week? What tables does He want to turn over in your heart? We have the choice to be like the chief priests or the children in this story—clinging to control and the status quo, or joyfully embracing what God wants to do. Which will you choose?
What God Is Doing
Saturday, February 27th, 2010 | Lent Meditations | No Comments
The assumption of spirituality is that always God is doing something before I know it. So the task is not to get God to do something I think needs to be done, but to become aware of what God is doing so that I can respond to it and participate and take delight in it.
-Eugene Peterson
What is God doing around you and in you? It probably will not be what you expect, or where you expect it. He has a history of using unusual people to do out-of-the-ordinary things in out-of-the-way places. From opening a donkey’s mouth to speak His words to allowing the King of the universe to be born in a stable and grow up in a backwoods town (“What good thing ever came out of Nazareth?” they said), God delights in surprising us—and involving us.
Ephesians 2:10 says, “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” You were created by God with a job to do. God is doing things all around if only we would pay attention. One of the greatest joys we can ever experience as human beings is to be unexpectedly caught up in one of God’s beautiful, messy, extraordinary schemes through which He rescues someone or something we thought utterly irredeemable. Are you watching for Him?
God, please help me to see with Your eyes and love with Your heart. Give me an opportunity to be involved in what You are doing, and please give me the courage to join in when I see You working. In Jesus name, Amen.
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