“I’m telling.” These are the words of a child who sees an offense and feels powerless to stop it. I can picture two scruffy little boys in a back lot playing kickball and having this discussion. And the reply that would often come from the offender was, “Who you gonna tell?” To which the first child thinks and comes up with the biggest most powerful person they know. “I’m telling the President…….of the United States!”
I think we Americans still have that opinion buried somewhere in our minds. Like the child above, deep down we think that the government can fix all the wrongs and make them right. We have always confused the President with our God. And, best as I can tell, this is idolizing or breaking rule number 1 of our big ten.
How can you tell this is idol worship? We place all our hope in election results. Rent-free, we post our idol’s sign in our yard in hope to convert our neighbors to our way of thinking. We tolerate defamation of the character of the other candidate and we often take part in this act even to the extent of ghosting friends who don’t agree with our point of view. We cling to every bit of news on election night hoping our candidate has won control and our stomach gets in knots over the possibility of loss of our savior. Government has become our god. This is idolatry at its finest.
So while we are slapping signs of our ten rules on every surface, maybe we should take another gander at rule #1.
Belonging is a basic need of every person. To belong to a social club, you must perform, pay dues, work. To belong to any interest club you must be able to participate in the activities. Each group we belong to, from little league to chess club, requires our focus and time doing the activity that ties it together. At some point we will age out and life will take us on to a new group. Church is the one group in which we can’t age out and we must not perform to belong. But this is not the reason to attend church.
Church is a place to nurture your soul. We spend our days denying even having a soul and essentially starve it until mourning the loss of a loved one reminds us of the most important part of our being. We neglect nurturing our souls and it shows in our society. We need to tend to this most important part of our God-given life. Our children need to be taught of the existence of our soul and how to feed it. It is through good churches that we learn this. No place else gives us this food for our soul. Church plays a vital role that we often choose to overlook until it is too late.
I am too busy for church. I have so many boxes to check off during the week and church is just one more. Yes, attending church takes time but it is time invested, versus time wasted. That is a huge difference! Spending my time catching up on work or sleep versus spending time in church is the difference in renting and buying. It is the difference in junk food and fine cuisine. It is the difference in time spent building sand castles versus building a house. Yes, it takes my precious time. But the time will pass whether I use it wisely or not.
Maybe you are like me and have a picture of a church planted in your head. In my picture, the church is small and busy. It is Wednesday night choir practice while children chase fireflies on the front lawn. It is a short distance from my house. It is a place where everybody knows my name(like Cheers). They sing old gospel hymns and have amazing picnics.
But that is a picture from 1968. It is a memory. It is not reality. I have to let go of my image of a church in order to learn a new church; one that fits in the twenty-first century. Yes, there are still small local churches. But more often we see mega-churches where nobody knows your name and are a long road trip from your house. There is such a learning curve to belong to one of these monsters! It takes persistence and time to “belong” to one of these churches especially for introverts like me. But before you choose to join any church, here are a few questions you should ask yourself.
Is this church focused on Christ? Does this church pray and pray often? Does this church inspire you to learn more about God? Are members maturing as Christians through the guidance of this church? Does this church look like the community it serves or is everyone there about the same in age, race, and socioeconomic status? Do I have a desire to help this church in any capacity?
If you are currently a member of a church that you seldom attend and it is one more chore to check off the list, please consider making a change. Something is wrong. This is not what the church was meant to be. Not all churches are the same. The focus of the church should be Christ. If it is not, then it is another (rather deceptive) social club. There are many churches out there and there is no rule saying that you can’t visit them. It may take years to find your church family but every minute is worth it. Church is an investment in your soul and the time and trouble to find a church is far outweighed by the benefits to your soul.
I have no idea why you would go to hell in a handbasket. I could Google that but I’m pretty sure this is one of those old sayings that is has lost its context but kept its meaning. There have been periods of time in history where everything has gone to hell in a handbasket and one of those is recorded in the Old Testament. It comes from the prophet Jeremiah in the book of Lamentations.
At that time, Jeremiah clearly saw the bad choices of the Israelites and preached for them to stop their idol worship, turn to God and repent. Imagine how those prophets who kept warning the Israelites felt when all their pleas fell on deaf ears. They witnessed it as people ignored their warnings and continued depending on everything but God to deliver them. They watched the inevitable results of bad choices unfold around them. Read Lamentations 1-2 for details. But be warned, it is not PG rated! To summarize it, Jerusalem was defeated and many survivors were carried off to exile. That was surely “hell in a handbasket”.
The natural human thought process at that point would be to dwell on the injustices. They would roll around and around in their minds without any effort, replaying the scene time and time again. But somehow, out of this devastation and hopelessness, some the most hopeful words of the Bible are written down. According to Jeremiah, he called them to mind. That must have taken effort and a Higher Power to think about the faithfulness of God in those horrible circumstances. But he did it.
And here are Jeremiah’s beautiful words:
I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.” The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.
Lamentations 3:19-26 NIV
I find that I remember scripture so much better when it is set to music. Here is a song inspired by this passage. Listen and you can hear Jeremiah’s words ring through.
So to defeat depression over things going awry, we have instructions from the Prophet Jeremiah. Call these words to mind. Repeat them. Sing this song loudly even if you can’t sing anything like CeCe or Carrie. Great is thy faithfulness oh God, my Father!
He prayed then preached a normal sermon in a college chapel service on a Wednesday. It was given in a quiet humble spirit. It wasn’t what you would think of as deserving of an amazing response but it was from the heart. He spoke of love. He spoke of all the kinds of love. He spoke of horrendous acts of evil that masquerade as love. Then he spoke about agape love. He explained that agape love was perfect sacrificial forgiving love for friends and enemies. He spoke of his own works-based futile struggle to love like this. In conclusion, he stated that all agape love has One Source and we can only receive it by truly believing that we are loved by God. The agape love of Christ will naturally overflow from us to the world. He prayed again and the camera shut off.
What happened next has been told by many sources. I picture it like dominoes falling. Students began quietly, humbly pouring their hearts out to God. And it continued until at present count, ten days later, people are still lined around the building waiting to come in and experience this amazing outpouring of grace. Stories of acts happening in the event sound like those that the apostle Paul spoke of in the book of Acts.
A friend posted this verse in response to this outpouring of the Spirit.
3 John 1:4 I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.
My gut response over this news is two-fold. I am naturally a jaded fearful human who knows how the evil one and his army can spin things. And I have no doubt that he will do so. But I am also a child of God. And I know His power over evil. So this response is joy.
Walt Disney gave us talking mice with feelings and an agenda and we flock to Disney World to feed our stunted imaginations. Why? Maybe because we don’t take the time to see the amazing magical world in our own mind and at our own fingertips. We teach our children that imagination belongs in Florida and not in our house or our schools. So we are bored and watch TikTok.
But here is the thing. We have to be astute observers to see humor, enigma, beauty and enlightening contrasts in our own daily life. We have trained ourselves to only worship the God of our limited expectations, only see art in an art museum, only laugh when we watch a show that is listed as a comedy, only relax and look around when we are on an expensive vacation, only see mystery in a carefully crafted story-line of a crime drama and only use our imagination in Disney World. We have compartmentalized our lives. We have made our lives mundane. Yep, I said it. Boring! And we are solely responsible for our own boredom. I say this because I have been made aware of the amazing, crazy world around me through a book called Notes From The Tilt-a-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder In God’s Spoken World by N. D. Wilson. This book is not for everyone. The author has a strange sense of humor that I find fascinating. Don’t rush out and buy it with great expectations. It is a very different sort of book. It may not resonate with many the way it did with me but the idea behind it needs to be told. The author makes some valid points that we never hear.
God created so much that we miss because we are too busy to pay attention or we have put God’s creations in a box like everything else. Just last Sunday as I was sitting in church listening to the music, my eyes were opened. I worshipped with my eyes! There was a mom in the pew in front of me with a very young baby. This tiny baby was just learning to hold up her head. From my perspective, I could only see her fuzzy head and her perfect hand grasping her mother’s side. With tears in my eyes, I worshipped God for this amazing creation. Then I looked up and saw the most brilliant jewel colored light brightly beaming in through the stained glass window and had another moment. This open-eyed amazement was a gift God gave me.
Some of the best humor is not from Jerry Seinfeld, not that there is anything wrong with that. Some of the best humor comes from God. You know, his Son is Jewish. Was this an accident? I think not. One example of God’s humor was the day my Labrador Retriever saw a bunny in the back yard. Thinking she could never catch that rabbit, I told her to get it just to watch her happily chase it. Unbeknownst to me, that rabbit didn’t know the way out and my dog came back to me victorious and proud as punch. I laughed and I cried until I could laugh and cry no more. Such a release of emotion all orchestrated by God. He created that moment in time, my dog, that fuzzy bunny as well as my cluelessness about that situation.
We think we know our world around us, but it just keeps surprising us. My son had a mouse in his house recently. We told him all the techniques commonly used to trap mice. He went out and bought every mouse trap known to man and baited them with the peanut butter just like we told him. But alas, no luck. He was getting frustrated. Then he noticed that the mouse got into his habanero peppers on his kitchen counter. On a whim, he carefully placed a habanero pepper in the center of the sticky trap and in the middle of the night he was awakened by the sound of that struggling, stuck, habanero-eating mouse that was much bigger and tougher than expected. Peanut butter was for wimps. This was a macho mouse.
So I will begin to try to see the built-in humor, mystery, beauty and wonder in the world my God spoke into being. He is a fascinating God.
“Here I raise my Ebenezer; Here by thy great help I’ve come”, is a line from an old hymn, Come Thou Fount, that eluded my understanding for many years.(I understand it now and love this hymn.) From childhood I wanted to sing words in church that meant something to me. And in my lifespan I have seen my desire fulfilled.
It began with the Jesus Movement when I was a young teenager and it was exactly what I craved. It was created in a controversial church in California that was reaching out to hippies with rock-and-roll worship music. Many evangelists claimed it to be devil music until Billy Graham stepped up and endorsed this new Jesus music. This was the ember that started a fire burning, breathing life back into church worship services.
Later, when I went to college, I chose a college that was promoting new Christian music with understandable lyrics and a strong beat. Wayland University had their own radio station that played new Christian music and even allowed new Christian artists a stage. I joined their symphonic band that was led by a free-thinker who taught us to play our instruments and sing loudly in worship. One time we performed at the stodgy Baptist Convention and watched old men in suits lifting their heads and loudly singing praises to God along with us. This was an answer to my heart’s desire.
Then college was over and church service returned to some old lady quietly playing the organ while we sang along with our faces buried in the hymnal, wishing the song leader would skip verses two and three to put us out of our misery. In my heart I knew this was not worship. Then…
The new Baptist hymnal was in and there it was, right beside Fanny Crosby and Charles Wesley: Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith. Oh my joy! A breath of fresh air was breathed into ancient songs in archaic language that I had sung three times a week for my entire 31 years of life. It was only one song but it was a major breakthrough.
Twenty years later, worship was transformed by lyrics being printed on the screen, someone on the guitar and piano, accompanied by bass and drums as well as an orchestra and choir. My cup runs over! I still have an appreciation for old hymns. In fact, I dearly love them. I just love them loud and proud and skillfully arranged. All I wanted was for my praises to be powerful enough to reach from my heart to the heavens.
Praise the Lord. Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty heavens. Praise him for his acts of power; praise him for his surpassing greatness. Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet, praise him with the harp and lyre, praise him with timbrel and dancing, praise him with the strings and pipe, praise him with the clash of cymbals, praise him with resounding cymbals. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Praise the Lord.
Psalm 150
While reading some rather dry parts of the Old Testament, a reader’s guide that I am using said to look for the words and phrases that describe the character of God.Suddenly, that dry scripture came to life. I caught glimpses of God. I saw a God of second chances, who is patient, answers our petitions, gives us victories. He knows us better than we know ourselves, and he wants our full devotion. Being in His presence changes us but he is too great for us to behold all at once. And all this was found in just two chapters of Exodus! Suddenly my point of view changed from me, me, me, to God the Father, creator and lover of my soul.
This also applies to my daily life. When my life is dry, mundane, or outright depressing, I need to look for the things in my world that show the character of God. They are all around me. He created it. I see Him in my dog’s brown eyes and freckled nose. I see Him in comforting words from my husband. I see Him in the intriguing script of a good book. I see Him in an article I read on Facebook. I see Him in the persistence of a cardinal protecting his nest relentlessly. God’s fingerprints are everywhere. We only have to pry our eyes off of the hurt of this world and look around expectantly.
