Monthly Archive for May, 2009

Prodigal God, by Timothy Keller

Published on 5/30/2009 in Bible Study. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , .

I just finished Prodigal God, by Timothy Keller, and it is very very good. I think it messed me up more than ever though concerning Jesus and grace!

Here is the premise: In the so-called ‘parable of the prodigal son’ Jesus actually tells the story of two lost sons. One is lost because of his distance from the father in wanting to live for himself and do whatever he wants, the other is lost because he does everything the father has ever asked and now thinks the father owes him for his obedience, so he was really only always serving himself.
It challenged me to think about why I do what I do? What are my motives for loving Jesus more than life? It’s all because of Him, baby!

The bad news is that I’m wrecked for the sake of grace now more than ever. Good quote from that book, “Marx said that religion was the opiate of the people, in that it sedates and makes them powerless. If religion is an opiate, Christianity should be the smelling salts, calling people to wake up!”

I love it. it was a good quick read, and I recommend it...

Abundant Life, Rule Free, from Jesus the Shepherd

Published on 5/12/2009 in Bible Study. 2 Comments Tags: , , , .

[I am sick as a dog today. stopped up, cold, runny nose, some stomach pains and nausea earlier. I’ve just been still in the chair surfing the internet for a while. It’s hard to think.]

v.8 Jesus isn’t talking about the prophets, but about false prophets and false teachers. The wild thing is, the converse of His statement is “if you listened to them, you are not my sheep”

Jesus contrasts Himself to the previous anti-shepherds by saying that He came for the sheep to have life abundantly. It seems like it would be easy to see from the previous chapter that the Pharisees are not on the side of having abundant life, but on the side of having abundant requirements, regulations, and judgments. I talked to a guy recently that is struggling to do the things “Jesus expects” and to do the things his pastor tells him to do. He is weighed down with burdens like the Pharisees would assign. ‘Do this activity this way. Don’t do this. This is wrong. This is good.’

Jesus was alive, and lived a lot talking about what the Kingdom of God was and what the Father is like. If I teach my son how to ride a bike by telling him all of the places he shouldn’t ride his bike and all of the ways he should not sit on his bike and all of the improper ways of holding the handle bars, he will never learn how to ride a bike. He will certainly be an expert on how to not ride a bike incorrectly! But he won’t be able to ride it 4 feet! When I taught my oldest son how to ride a bike, I assured him of this: “You will fall and it will hurt, but you can’t give up. I will take care of you and your booboos will get better, and you will become a better bike rider.” It was all true, and now he rides like the wind (and sometimes I wish I could get a little fear back into him!)

That’s how I think of Jesus giving us abundant life. He doesn’t train the sheep in how to avoid the wolf, or carry on telling the sheep how evil and hungry the wolf is. He just takes care of them and has them follow Him. How much of life is taken care of in that one little lesson?!

Follow the voice of the shepherd.

Here is to living life free in the Son, and trusting that the sheep of Christ will hear is voice and not be distracted by the sound of the [zealboy phrase edited out]

New News on ‘Missing the Mark’

Published on 5/9/2009 in Bookstore and Short Quotes. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

“In Hebrew, that is kha-ta’ ‚Äì what we call “sin,” our world-wide, pervasive proclivity to mess up. We often hear it defined as “missing the mark” as though our trouble is just a matter of not being perfect enough (nowhere in Scripture does it say that!). An arrow that goes shy of the bull’s eye. Bt such trivializes God. It hints at His being overly fussy, and petty in His expectations for humans. Whereas, kha-ta is not just a matter of missing perfection. More aptly, it’s a matter of missing GOD’s aim in a given situation. Or then, even worse – missing His full purposes for our lives.”

—from “The Trouble With Grace” by Keith Hueftle

The Trouble with Grace

Costly Grace for the Guest

Published on 5/6/2009 in Bible Study and Bookstore. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

I don’t usually write at night but I just read across something and want to ink some of this out before I go to bed…

khesed/grace/mercy throughout the Old Testament is, by definition, costly.

that’s the statement I read tonight

It also involves hospitality, honor, and covenant. It is something that, when it happens, allows, or maybe even INVITES, the recipient to abuse the favor shown.

For instance. Abram shows hospitality to the three men walking by, and they share with him some secret: they are going to destroy Sodom. Abram, who has now been their host to eat and rest but also their guest to some very important secret information, abuses his right to this information and asks them if they would spare the city if such and such number of people could be found righteous in it. The three men do not object, but engage in the haggling for the spare-price of Sodom.

Lot does it with these same men when they come to his home. He hosts them, and protects them with what would be a very costly price (he offers the townsmen his own virgin daughters for sex acts so that they will spare the visitors he is hosting). Part of his hosting them is khesed simply because of that moment right there. If it isn’t costly, it isn’t khesed.

I don’t have time tonight (in 9 minutes it will be tomorrow and I’ll regret staying up so late) but I’d be interested in other places in the scriptures where hosting a guest involves 2 things:
1. the guest boldly asking for more than the host originally offered
2. the host having to pay an extraordinarily high price (or at least trying to) for the sake of the guest.

Go!

Vegetable Broth at the Men’s Retreat this Weekend

Published on 5/4/2009 in Bible Study and Short Quotes. Closed Tags: , , , , .

I think the best thing I heard this weekend had to do with Vegetable soup.
As we grow up, we are handed a bowl of vegetable soup. That bowl is everything we’ve learned from our family, our culture, our life experiences. It’s everything we believe and think and know about life. Most people just chow down and eat their soup, memorize the recipe, and teach that same thing to their kids, if they can find the same ingredients.

God calls us out of that bowl of soup. We’re supposed to open up His Word (that is, Jesus) and seek and find out what really isn’t supposed to be in there. If your family recipe has beef in the soup, but God’s recipe doesn’t, take it out and sit it on a plate. You family comments to one another about women’s bodies, but God says to tread women with the purity of a sister? Take that out of your soup! Keep going and you may find that all you are left with is broth.

The amazing thing is, plain broth with God is better than the most stuffed with stuff soup of the world any day of the week. And as you eat that broth of God’s holiness, He’ll toss some stuff back in there from His recipe that is a lot better for you than that big pig shank of worldliness that the world may have dropped in your soup.