Monthly Archives: May 2012

"Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him." Colossians 3:17

"Whatever you do" and "do everything" clearly cover every aspect of life. What did Paul have in mind here? For the average Christian, whatever that may be, what is the "whatever and everything" of life?

The mistake we typically make is to limit "whatever and everything" to the realm of "highly spiritual events" in which everything that happens every day must be by the hand of Almighty God. I once heard a minister say quite seriously that God told him that morning what kind of cereal to eat. In an effort to duplicate that kind of devotion some Christians try to see God's hand in finding a good parking place, for example. We might want "whatever and everything" to be suffused with deep spiritual meaning and messages. A professor once told that a minister he knew that spoke as if he could not walk down the hall of his church without having six highly significant spiritual encounters. That sounds laudable, but is that really what Paul had in mind?

We want "whatever and everything" to be awesome (the most overused word in contemporary Christian vocabulary) and miraculous, and may even be guilty of trying to manufacture that. Thus, I want my sermon to be a tour de force, my column to be insightful and inspiring, my devotional to be so deep as to cause all heaven to pause in wonder. Why? Because "whatever and everything" is a call to supernatural excellence!

This approach to living the Christian life fits perfectly the post-modern mindset. Post-modernism is slippery, but it appears to me to be a mood. People today want feelings and emotions. Form and substance are secondary to experience. Thus, a post-modern wants the "whatever and everything" to be highly charged. The effect this shift has had on churches and Christians is profound and beyond the scope of a Monday morning devotional, but suffice it to say that in spite of all the recent (last 20 years or so) efforts to "make the church relevant" we have fewer Christians and arguably a dumbed-down discipleship that results from wanting "whatever and everything" to be awesome.

Try to live the Christian life this way and at some point you will soon feel defeated and frustrated. Rather than "whatever and everything" being numinous and divine, you probably will find Monday morning to be rather ordinary. Too many Christians are then beset by a despair of inadequacy. Have you failed in some way? Of course not.

God did not make you to live every day on the Mount of Transfiguration. He made you to live in the afterglow of events like that. God has a habit of showing us great things, and then asking us to faithfully guard the memory of those events without expecting a daily duplication of the earth shattering miracle. Thus Israel remembered God's deliverance from Egypt while they walked in the wilderness for forty years. They waited 700 years for a messianic prophecy to be fulfilled. The goal was to live each day with simple faith.

While weeding his garden one day, St. Francis was asked, "what you do today if you knew the Lord was returning tomorrow?" Francis replied, "I would finish weeding my garden." He apparently saw glory in the ordinary but did not rely on a feeling or emotion to validate his genuinely spiritual outlook on life.

That is the kind of day-to-day faith you need. You do "whatever and everything" faithfully and gratefully, without complaint or a nagging suspicion that your "whatever and everything" is insufficiently spiritual. You live each moment under God's careful watch and His tender care, not under His merciless evaluation. In every task you have God as your companion, and you do each task well. In this way, you will live the ordinary life extraordinarily well.

The truth is, we spend a great deal of our time living ordinary lives, but believing that as God powerfully demonstrated His faithfulness in the past, He will quietly demonstrate His faithfulness today, and tomorrow, and every day. So go to work. Take care of your family. Enjoy your recreation, your meals, your sleep. And give thanks to God in the ordinary "whatever and everything."

Grace,

Dr. Terry Ellis

May 29, 2012

"I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life." Deuteronomy 30:19

The book of Deuteronomy is a series of three closing speeches from Moses to the people of Israel. These are long speeches. The people did not get out on time that Sabbath. The Philistines beat them to Piccadilly.

In the last of the three speeches Moses clearly outlined the choice that awaited the people. He had set before them life and death, blessing and curse. Then he challenged them to "choose life." (Deut. 30:19)

By this time Moses had been with the people for more than forty years. God had called him out of retirement as a shepherd in Midian and told him to challenge the mightiest ruler on the planet. Moses was reluctant but eventually obedient. God worked through him and accomplished great things. The people were free.

Then Moses encountered in the people the same reluctance he had first shown God. They did not believe they could take the Promised Land, so for forty years they wandered and waited until nearly every person from that reluctant generation had died. You can hear occasional hints of bitterness in Moses' sermons. He had tried his best, but they would not follow him or trust God. Now Moses had buried an entire generation and was nearing death himself. A new group stood before him who did not remember Egypt. All they had before them was an unclaimed Promised Land.

So what did Moses say to them in the closing address of his three part series? Did he talk to them about warfare and strategies for defeating walled cities? No. Did he speak of a new administrative system for governing 12 wandering tribes? Hardly.

By this time he was weary. He had surveyed their history and reviewed all the laws. The last part of the last message begins after a pause. His final encouragement is this, "choose life." The God of life offered them life. Choose life. Every other path leads to destruction. Choose life.

We might imagine the response of the people. "We are God's people! Of course, we choose life! We have been wandering for as long as any of us can remember. Isn't our choice obvious?"

Moses had been their age one time. They had never been his. He knew that following God was not merely a one-time decision that you can make, notarize, seal, and file away. A daily rededication is absolutely essential to be strong enough to stand against tests and temptation. Jesus had the same thought when He taught that if anyone would come after Him he must take up his cross daily and follow Him. (Luke 9:23)

So make this commitment to follow God your first prayer in the morning. Choose the life He offers. The abundant life. It will strengthen you for the challenges of the day.

Grace,

Dr. Terry Ellis

May 21, 2012

"Honor and majesty are before him; strength and beauty are in his sanctuary." Psalm 96:6

When was the last time you were touched by something beautiful? It could have been something you heard, saw, felt, or were impressed by. But the experience of the beautiful left you with an awareness that you saw part of something far greater.

In his book Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed Howard Gardner defines beauty as something that's interesting, that has a memorable form, and that invites revisiting. "And as a bonus," he said, "it gives you a tingle." This week I'm interested in the tingle, particularly as we experience it through beauty.

A couple of warnings here: first, beauty, truth, and goodness conform to a real standard. Pinning down that standard is enormously difficult, of course, but holding to a high standard for beauty should limit he common tendency to call all art beautiful. That's simply not the case. Some art is an illustrated grunt on canvas. Call if art if you wish, but let's not place in in the pantheon of eternal beauty.

A second warning about the pursuit of real beauty: don't confuse it with entertainment. Entertainment is fun. Entertainment is diversionary. Entertainment is fine. I saw The Avengers Yesterday. It was entertaining, but nothing about it was beautiful.

I'm convinced that many people turn away from church today because they seek only entertainment, and ironically are disappointed by beauty, a by-product of technology and skepticism.

Now turning our focus specifically to the Christian sphere, our early fathers baptized the three great Greek virtues of truth, goodness, and beauty and discerned that each proceeded from God Himself. Thus "the tingle" is nothing less than God Himself, smiling or perhaps lightly applauding.

Over the centuries we have focused on truth and goodness. Truth enables us to establish doctrine. Goodness guides our actions with one another. Brian Zahnd, in Beauty Will Save the World, argues that beauty has been marginalized. Christianity generally has suffered a loss of beauty that must be recovered.

I think nowhere is the loss of Christian beauty more evident than in our music and architecture. I recently saw an organ pushed over in the corner of the choir loft, disconnected, and unused. Maybe it was due to the lack of an organist, but I think the more likely explanation is the organ simply does not fit in with modern instruments. It is both highly demanding to play and infinitely nuanced. Most congregations, sadly, are interested in neither.

As for architecture, soaring and beautiful buildings are beyond the means of most congregations and beneath the interests of "practical" church leaders. So many churches today are very poorly planned and look little more than warehouses with crosses on top. I believe even Luther would agree with me that our schisms have gone way too far, and our resources for building to the glory of God stretched too thin.

Ah well. I am never without hope. Gardener suggests keeping lifelong portfolios of beauty, either in our brains or a physical catalog that chronicles the experiences, music, art, and more that we find beautiful over time. In fact, today, take notice of the beauty around you. I began last week and noted a wondrous clarity of a bell in a concert. Then the beauty wove itself around me: The stained glass in our sanctuary, the light coming through it; the tiny fingernail of a newborn baby, the thousand shades of green in my backyard, the "Supermoon" (surely you didn't miss that did you?)

The world is suffused with God's beauty, so start your portfolio today. Look in the skies, in the bush aflame with God, the music (really good music), literature, and don't forget people around you. God is beauty and you can enjoy Him now.

Grace,

Dr. Terry Ellis

May 14, 2012

"Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me." Psalm 51:10

I have a confession. Not anything nefarious, more along the lines of embarrassingly dumb. A couple of years ago I was backing my prized Ford Taurus about half-way into my garage, and, for reasons too complicated to explain, I hopped out, leaving the door open, and left the car in reverse. I'll let that sink in for a moment . . . all right, let's proceed. As I realized the car was still rolling, with its front left "wing" heading slowly toward destruction, I jumped in and jammed on the brake.

Too late. That's an awful, slow, crunching sound. The outer brick wall of my house had bent the door back at a precise 90 degree angle. A car door should stop about 60 degrees. I sat there for a moment in stunned stupidity. My dear wife, who had witnessed the entire incident, stood in very gracious silence. I pulled forward, and found that while I was still able to close the door, it made a loud popping, grinding sound that said, "this will cost you."

After a few moments of recovery, I sheepishly called my good friend in the car business to ask about arranging for repairs. I explained the situation and repeatedly bemoaned my foolishness. He assured me that they could take care of it, and then he said, "you're not the first person to do this." He had seen situations like this before, and he had fixed every one. I felt better. That line stayed with me: You're not the first person to do this, spoken by someone who knew how to fix the problem.

Now let's move from something mildly inane to deeply evil. David's sin is usually remembered as his affair with Bathsheba. The worse sin was trying to deceive her husband into believing he was the father. The sin was unspeakably worse when he arranged for Uriah to be left alone in battle. David took advantage of Uriah's faithfulness and courage to murder him. This sin defies comprehension. Such traitors reside in Dante's ninth and lowest circle of hell.

Nathan the prophet confronted David who quickly confessed and repented. That's all very good, but how do you approach God after such evil?

David wrote Psalm 51 after his encounter with Nathan. He had realized painfully the full impact of what he had done. He described his sin in painful detail. He realized how bad he was. The line quoted for this week's GraceWaves highlights his plea, "create in me a new heart."

The word create (bara in Hebrew) is interesting. The writer of Genesis used it to describe God's activity in the first chapter. "In the beginning, God created." Theologians say the word describes creatio ex nihilo, creation out of nothing, but that's not quite accurate. The earth was a formless void when God spoke creation into existence. I like that image better. He took a mess and made beauty.

David confessed to God and held nothing back. He asked Him to create something out of the terrible mess he had made of his life. God did not have much to work with in David, but He doesn't need anything. That's the nature of grace. God creates out of little or even nothing. He cleansed, purified, forgave, and accepted David. How? David was not the first person to do something like that, and God knows how to fix the problem. He is in the business of forgiving and transforming messy people.

I regularly speak with people whose past haunts them. After 25 years of looking out over congregations I have learned to never underestimate the terrible situations people get themselves into. Some are bearing a crushing guilt and seek to hide from God, certain that if they stood in His presence, openly and honestly, a holy fire would consume them. In Christ, and through His cross, that's not true.

What keeps you from God? What do you fear about your past? You're not the first person to do this. God knows the very worst about you, but He can create something out of nothing and has been doing this since creation. Let Him start to work on you. Give Him your mess. Let Him fix the problem. He's really very good at redemption. Be honest. Be open. Be new.

Grace,

Dr. Terry Ellis

May 7, 2012