"Tight lines" is a blessing fishermen offer each other, a wish for lines taut with the weight of good fish. May God grant that the lines written here be taut with His blessings.
Tuesday, 24 November 2009 | |||
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Waiting Until Then | |||
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I don't like to wait. My family will tell you. I don't like
to wait. If I walk into a store at a busy time, picked up a few
purchases, then discover a long line to check out, I will sometimes put
my purchases back on the shelf and walk out because I don't want to stand
in line. Yet all of Christian life is something of a waiting mode. In Advent we begin the Church year with a season focused on the spiritual discipline of waiting. We recall how God's people waited for the Messiah long ago and remember that we are also waiting for Him once again, now to return. At this moment in America it may be a little easier to understand and feel the burden of waiting. Many of us are having to wait on purchases and plans and hopes that only a couple years ago we might have pursued immediately. Our circumstances help us grasp the need to wait in spiritual matters, that not everything good God has comes to us at once. Paul's circumstances in our text from I Thessalonians 3:9-13 also forced on him the discipline of waiting. He desperately wanted to visit and see his beloved friends in Christ in Thessalonica. He had help and encouragement to offer them. He had anxieties about them he wanted to set at ease. Yet he couldn't get there right then. And in the process of pondering his wait for that opportunity, he is moved by the end of the passage to ponder what we all wait for, the coming of the Lord. May our waiting this Advent move us in Paul's direction, to better and more hopeful waiting for Christ. May waiting for Christmas make us patient for His second Coming. May waiting through economic trials and job searches and postponed vacations renew our hopeful waiting for eternal blessings. May waiting when all earthly dreams seem dim or even gone school us to wait with a heavenly joy for a day that will make all our waiting worth it. God bless you in Advent. While you wait you may want to consider the thoughts in the promo video at www.adventconspiracy.org. Lay aside the hype and the marketing of what liturgical churches have been preaching for centuries, and hear a message of how we might wait hopefully and helpfully in love and service. | |||
Thursday, 19 November 2009 | |||
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Gratitude and Grace | |||
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In the season of thanks, I want to thank God for my mother,
who made me and taught me to do a number of things which I disliked at
the time. One of those things was writing "thank you" notes.
After a birthday or Christmas, I was always dismayed by the little stack
of cards that needed to go to my grandmother, aunt and uncle, etc. I
would put that chore off until strong words forced me to sit down and try
to create some sentences to express a boyish appreciation for what I had
been given. Some folks are more naturally blessed than I am with a readiness to offer thanks for what they receive. I have a cousin who lives an incredibly busy life, yet she always seems to find time to dash off a lovely and heartfelt message of thanks immediately in return for anything sent to her. Though, thanks to my mother, I'm better at giving thanks than when I was 9, it still doesn't quite flow naturally. It frightens me to think that I might have been among the nine healed lepers who failed to come back to thank Jesus in Luke 17:11-19. What I do know now, however, is what my mother helped teach me through experience. The offering of thanks in some way completes one's reception of a gift, so that what one receives is made even better and sweeter when you've expressed gratitude for it. I feel even more joyful and glad for a birthday present when I've taken the time to say thank you for it. I would say that gratitude increases the pleasure and joy of receiving grace. And, the pleasure added by saying thanks is not just the relief of meeting a felt obligation created by the giving of the gift. The felt need to return a gift in kind in order to feel comfortable is not necessarily gratitude, nor even the feeling of a duty to write a note or whatever. No, real gratitude adds to grace by adding appreciation and love toward the giver to one's experience of receiving. The added blessing is in the enriching of the relationship between you and the one who gives to you. So, it may seem odd, but I'm suggesting that our experience of God's grace in Jesus Christ is enhanced and deepened when we develop a habit of thankfulness toward our Lord. Thankfulness blesses Him, but by a wonderful turn that is itself grace, it blesses us. Happy Thanksgiving to all who might read this, and as always I welcome your thoughts. | |||
Tuesday, 10 November 2009 | |||
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He Took a Seat | |||
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She hopped off her stool and came to help me. I was standing
at a rental car counter in one of those long strings of such counters you
find in airports. I noticed that the agents behind every counter had
places to sit--until a customer arrived. Then an agent would stand up,
type on a keyboard, check a driver's license, run a credit card, and
print out a rental agreement to be signed. Only when it was all done and
I had received instructions to head for the car in space H17 in the
garage did she sit back down. Taking her seat was the signal that I was
ready to go find my car. I walked out confident that a tan Ford Focus was
waiting for me. In this week's text from Hebrews 10:11-25, Jesus sitting down is the sign that you and I are, through the forgiveness He accomplished, ready to enter into God's presence. The commentaries tell me that the priests in the Hebrew temple always stood in the presence of God. The writer to the Hebrews takes that as a sign that their work of obtaining forgiveness for sins is ongoing, incomplete. Jesus sitting down at the right hand of God means that His work of providing forgiveness once for all is complete. He can sit because what He came to do is done. We can trust in it with utter confidence. Yet our confidence in Christ's work does not seem to mean that we are to sit down, at least not right now. We can be confident and steadfast in our hope and faith because our Lord is sitting. He has accomplished all we need. Yet that hope and confidence calls us forward, striving to appropriate fully what Jesus has done for us. Verses 24 and 25 talk about spurring one another on to good needs and not neglecting to meet together, an active response to our Lord's glorious repose. So this text places us in that constant spiritual tension between the now and the not yet, the sense that all our salvation is complete and finished and the sense that we still have to keep going forward, moving toward the goal and completion of our faith when we kneel before that throne on which Christ our Lord is sitting. Let's not neglect to meet together this Sunday to praise our Lord and talk about this text some more. | |||
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Profile |
I am the pastor of Valley Covenant Church in Eugene, Oregon. I love to flyfish and hike along the beautiful rivers in our area. I welcome your comments as I share sermon work in progress and occasional other thoughts.
Thank you for visiting this blog. I invite you also to visit my web page.
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