ON PRESENT STAGE
God Almighty, ineffably holy,
Great in weakness, immeasurably lowly,
Across the ages, I see You moving,
Sinners running, Lover pursuing
Take me into Your story now,
I resist no longer, Your will to allow,
Not mere words on ancient page,
But present Word on present stage
Gentle love, with fury dripping,
Hunt with passion, tenderly ripping,
Into my soul, where lies reside,
Pierce the darkness of shame I hide
Capture my vision, which strays to illusion,
Regard not violent mercy’s intrusion,
Cease the knocking, break the door,
I want You less as I want You more
Enthrall my desires, brutalized by lust,
Rapture my emotions, divinized by trust,
Lure me, lure me, far away from me,
Slave to Your love, yet finally free
As minutes unfold and hours fly by,
As years make older and I age to die,
Younger with innocence I become with time,
My wounds are healing by grace sublime
Deeper, yet deeper, in Your love I repose,
Lesser and lesser Your will to oppose,
‘Til I am truly myself in Christ,
Your love forever alone to suffice
THE SERMON AS SACRED ART
The pulpit is a holy place and the sermon is sacred art. To stand in front of a congregation and preach must be approached with conscious reverence and intelligent preparation, because two extraordinary things are taking place in those moments:
First, people are granting you access to their inmost being, to the most vulnerable, hungry, and private spaces in their souls. You must not violate their trust by failing to feed their longing to hear from God through His word. The sermon is not your personal time. It's God's time and, as such, it is holy time. Your job is to become a semi-invisible point of entrance into the mind and heart of God for the people gathered before you.
Secondly, the Holy Spirit is expecting you to faithfully discharge the task of magnifying the love of God as manifest in Christ. You simply are not at liberty to preach whatever you want. You are on mission for God, and the mission He has assigned you is to preach the gospel, not whatever speculations, personal grievances, extra-biblical ideologies, or cultural fads you happen be into. Preach Christ! Christ incarnate! Christ crucified! Christ risen! Christ ascended to the right hand of the Father! Christ ministering the endless flow of God's grace as our heavenly High Priest! Christ coming again to receive His spotless bride into eternal matrimonial union!
Came across this beautiful scripture. Genesis 28:15 “I will not leave you until I have done everything I promised. If you know God Will complete everything he has promised in your life before the month of March ends respond with an Amen.
OK, it's a new new week.
Now what?
We get about the business of working out what Christ worked into us by Sabbath rest, that's what!
Carry with you through the week the innocence you rested into on Sabbath, which is the gift of God through Christ in the gospel. No looking back to past sins and failures. You are forgiven. Wiped clean. Nothing you've done in the past has power over you unless you give it power over you by identifying with it by means of negative self talk and thought loops. Rather, tell yourself the truth as it is in Christ:
"I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me and the life which I now live I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me" (Galatians 2:20).
Have a great week!
It’s Sabbath and you’ve been given the gift of innocence again.
Rest in forgiveness.
Rest in grace.
Rest in the good news that God‘s love for you far exceeds the power of your sin and shame to rip you away from Him.
No matter what happened this week, His love allows you to start over again right now. Lay it all down off the tired shoulders of your conscience, and then lay down your whole being in the arms of His love. Tomorrow’s a new day: existentially new, morally new, covenantally new. After this Sabbath day of rest, you will be rejuvenated by the promise that He will never leave you, never forsake you, never let you go.
Happy Innocence Day!
I just watched a few television commercials on purpose. So am I to believe that this is what we humans are like at this current stage of our development as a species? This is us, isn’t it? Wow, we’ve got a whole lot of sense and nonsense going on inside of us. I say ‘sense,’ because we are without question in a discernible traumatized state. Which is to say, our ‘nonsense,’ as manifested in these commercials, can be read psychoanalytically. There are terrible things terribly wrong with us, according to these commercials. Apparently, we manifest our traumas in our economic behavior, else these companies would not be spending boatloads of cash to approach us in this manner. The things that are advertised to us are clearly not worthy of us, but through these commercials we are made to feel as though they are worthy of us. And the way the things are advertised to us is an insult to our intelligence and simultaneously an ingenious bypassing of our intelligence by such silly affectations of the face and body and voice and personality of the commercial actors that our emotions are so tickled by the blatant nonsense that the whole sales trick bypasses the cerebral cortex and wiggles around in the brain stem. You simply feel as though you must have the thing being offered to you by the advertisers, no matter how idiotic, unhealthy, counterproductive, potentially lethal or utterly useless the thing may be. Having that thing will somehow satisfy you, make you something more, fill you up with some something. If companies are spending multiplied billions of dollars to advertise these things to us in this way, surely that means commercials are a window into the deep traumas of the human soul.