Hearing the Music

Happy Anniversary

Whose anniversary are we celebrating? Why, ours, of course! That’s right, 6 years ago this coming Sunday I was installed as minister of Christ Church. It is hard to believe that 6 yrs have elapsed. Since we have been here we have had 4 kids graduate from high school. We have fostered about a dozen kids and the Lord has added Moses to our family. We have been in your homes, you have been in ours. We have seen God work in our church community; in exciting ways and in ways that have stretched us. We have met each other on mountaintops and in valleys. We have been the source of one another’s delight and we have been the occasion of each other’s discouragement. These are the realities of life together. By God’s grace we will have many more years to search out the scriptures for the deep things of grace and have the opportunity to practice them together in our community.

While these occasions do not always call for outward celebration or even recognition, I do try to use them as an opportunity for reflection. Right now the thing I feel the most weight of is the calling to serve God’s people. I have been an ordained minister for over 20 years now and I can honestly say I have never experienced a season like this one. The disruption and uncertainty brought about by the pandemic and the various responses to it, the divisions that exists politically in our country AND in our churches over proper response to cultural issues, the pain being expressed as these divided groups hurt one another, the frailty and fallenness on display amongst my fellow brothers in the ministry; each of these points to a desperate need for divine intervention. With Isaiah I say “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips” (Is. 6:5). With Paul I cry out, “Who is sufficient for these things?” (2 Cor. 2:16)

But here is the hope, “thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere” (2 Cor. 2:14). We look at our selves and we see feet of clay and hearts of wax. But, when we keep our eyes on Jesus, our covenant making and covenant keeping Lord, there is always hope. Remember, the light has shone in the darkness and the darkness shall not overcome it (John 1:5)! It is this Light that guides us. It is this Light that sustains and shines through us. So let us together keep seeking the Light. Let us keep short accounts with one another that we may be long on grace. And may it be that God would spread through us the fragrance of the Gospel.

Waiting

One of the things that has struck me about our journey through 1 Kings is the patience and the time that God takes in working with his people. In the beginning of our study we encountered a period of three and a half years from the announcement of drought until the appearance of rain. This week in 1 Kings 20 we have a story that covers two years in which God is working in the life of his people. Overall, Ahab is on the throne for twenty two years. That is twenty two years of waiting for the people of God who have not bowed the knee to Baal! (Can you make some time to read 1 Kings 20 before Sunday?)

Waiting is one of the tools in the belt of the Christian. Patience is part of the Spirit’s fruit of love (see Galations 5:22f, 23). But waiting well is hard to do. This is especially true when the spirit of the age demands immediacy, such as is true now. We want our news stories now. We want our Amazon orders now. We want our bodies to instantly get in shape. We want it all and we want it now! Perhaps this is due to a perceived temporality on our part. We know that God sees time differently. For him a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years is like a day (cf. 2 Peter 3:8). We on the other hand feel our seventy years, or if by reason of strength eighty (cf Psalm 90:10), and feel that our clocks are ticking. Or perhaps our impatience is connected with our inability to see the complexities of a situation. How can Elijah see the way the Lord will use Ahab, or Hazael, or Jehu? One of those is apostate, one is a pagan, and the other he hasn’t even met. It is hard to be patient with limited knowledge.

Yet waiting is a grace that we are called to cultivate. The prophet Habakkuk in troubled times, when he is looking for the justice of YHWH to intervene says, “Yet I will quietly wait for the day of trouble to come upon people who invade us. (Habakkuk 3:16)”. David famously in Psalm 40:1 says, “I waited patiently for the LORD; he inclined to me and heard my cry.” I think it is important to point out that the Biblical concept of waiting is not the same as passivity or inactivity. Perhaps it is helpful to think of a waiter or waitress. They are anything but passive. They actively watch those that they serve and are ready to spring into action when the time is right. Such is the nature of waiting on the the Lord. We watch him. We read his word. We listen for his voice. We are not passive, but we are patient; trusting that God keeps a different clock than ours. We wait, allowing for our limitations and surrendering to the fact that He see so much more than we can.

I trust that you see some encouragement for our present time. I think back over the ten weeks since our “disruption” occurred and I confess to feeling antsy, anxious to get back to life as normal. But then I remember the invitation to wait on the Lord. Active, Biblical waiting means keeping my eyes on him, not being distracted by everything going on around me. Spirit-filled patience involves listening for HIs voice far more than it involves making my own way. Remember the words of the prophet Isaiah to a people in exile, an exile that lasted so much more than a few months or even a year, “Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint(Isaiah 40:30–31)." What a sweet invitation waiting is!

In case you haven’t heard, as we continue to navigate worship during this time when gathering together “as normal” is unwarranted, we want to offer our “worship in the parking lot,” along with the home worship guide, as ways that are eminently safe, respectful of our governing authorities and communities, and as aids for the church “scattered” to wholeheartedly worship our great Lord. Wherever the Lord leads you to engage the worship of Him this Lord’s Day, know that you are warmly welcomed by the King of kings.

PS — thank you for the kind notes and calls in response to sharing my grief with respect to Darrin. Ministry has its challenges to be sure, but it is a joy and a high calling which I do love! If you are interested here is a solid reflection on the challenges of ministry, this one from my friend Scott Sauls. For several years Scott, Darrin and I met regularly for prayer as our paths converged in St. Louis. As Scott mentions in his reflection, by God’s grace I too am not one of those pastors hanging by a thread, being loved well and cared for by you all. I am humbled and grateful to continue to serve you waiting on the strength of the Lord.

Dealing with Symptoms

I am writing this week from a lovely hospital room at Blodgett Medical Center overlooking Fisk Lake in EGR. Though the room is lovely, I would much rather be out enjoying the day, as would our daughter Lydia who has had to endure another flare up of a genetic condition which causes rhabdomyolysis. Rhabdo is no fun. It is characterized by a very painful break down of muscle tissue and the release of a protein into the blood stream, that if untreated will overwhelm her kidneys and could lead to death. Thankfully, we are learning to recognize the symptoms and got going on treating the rhabdo early, mitigating its effects.

The frustrating part of this whole pattern that Lydia has to endure is that, though we have learned to treat the rhabdo, in reality we are only treating symptoms. What we don’t fully understand is why this relatively rare condition is triggered in her. And, at an even deeper level, we don’t know how to treat the core issue that is the cause of all her distress.

This “treating of symptoms" is a picture of the way sin work in our lives. Over the course of our days and weeks, we deal with anger, greed, lust, sloth, needless worry, etc… Like rhabdo, these are serious, threatening to overwhelm us and need to be dealt with; but they are not our core issue. At core for all of us is the question of surrender and trust. Have we truly surrendered our need for control and our desire to justify ourselves, and have we begged Jesus to be our King? Or are we holding back, unable or unwilling to trust fully? 

Unlike Lydia’s battle with rhabdo, we do know the way to core health with the Savior. This week in Luke 9 we see that Jesus welcomes the crowds, speaks to them of the kingdom, and cures those who are in need of healing (v. 11). This is a Savior who does not despise the crowds. This is Lord who welcomes us in our infirmity. This is a King who is worthy of our surrender. In our battle with symptoms, Jesus invites us to get to the core and find our rest as we surrender to Him. What a joy it is to not merely have to deal with symptoms.

_{Photo by Alexandru Acea on Unsplash}