As we think of limitations, think about all of the limitations in your life that you have gotten used to,and take for granted. What could you do if you had longer arms or could remember twice as much? Some animals can fly, see more colors or move so much faster and they are all around us to appreciate and envy. Yet most people don't seriously complain about their lack of abilities outside of standard human capabilities. Why is it that we are generally content with our limitations even though they are relatively great in many regards?
Prayer: Pray that God will give you a view of your limitation and place in light of the power and wonder of all of His creation.
Think about your physical limitations. How many places can you be at once? How many quality relationships can you maintain at one time? How much work can you get done in a day? A week? How much can you remember? What are your gifting weaknesses? Teaching, math, organization etc.
It's important to know your limitations so that you can build realistic expectations for yourself. It also helps you to create boundaries when there are so many needs. Knowing your purpose as well as your physical limitations is very important to creating a clear path forward without putting too much on your plate.
Prayer: Pray that God will divinely help you explore physical expectations in a way that you may not have understood before
Saturday
As you have pondered deeply the ideas of ownership and offerings of your time, talents, money and efforts, what factors have you found motivate you to offer these things in a joyful way? What factors may give you uneasy feelings about these offerings? Where do you think these ideas come from?
Prayer: Pray that God gives you and honest and real picture of your heart as a steward.
In church we talked about how God already owns everything so, when we offer of ourselves, we essentially offer back what is already God's.
When you think about offering your life's resources back to God, which are the hardest ones to offer and why? When you think about the things that maybe you should give up to make space for more valuable and healthy things, think deeply about any difficulties you have with allowing yourself to do so.
Prayer: Pray that God will teach you more about the value of your resources as you think about these issues.
Prayer: Pray that God will search you and give you insight to these issues as they are often hard for us to discern ourselves.
"Careful observation and thoughtful contemplation of nature soon teaches us how little we know and understand about life and the world. This in itself engenders the humility that is necessary in order to experience the divine.
This quality of humility is really the summit of the mountain that Abraham was traveling towards all his life. " Who shall go up the mountain of Yahweh and who will stand in the place of His holiness? The person with clean hands and a pure heart..." (Psalm 24:3-4
"To experience the presence of God in nature (and indeed anywhere), one must be willing to detach oneself from the pull of worldy ego-interest so as to become open to higher levels of awareness."
(Autumn's Glow, photograph on canvas, Carrie Schilling)Some Churches help Christians view culture through spiritual lenses
by Jennifer Harris, Word & Way
What does it mean to participate with God in “making all things new”?
He cautions against churches using popular culture to seem culturally relevant, however. He feels many churches have gone too far, forcing contextualization in ways that are both inauthentic and unwise.
Andrews visited one church that used a Saturday Night Live skit in worship. Not only did the skit not connect to the rest of the service, it also was poorly executed.
“You have to be honest with yourself in your ability to pull something off,” he said. Churches must use discernment and follow their giftedness.
George Mason emphasizes the need to interact with pop culture, but not allow it to take the lead. Mason, pastor at Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, points out that the gospel has a culture of its own. Pop culture is sometimes in conflict with gospel culture but often depicts some of the basic longings of creation.
“I love books, movies and music,” he said. “I think it is valuable to watch and read and listen for those places culture is getting it right and doesn’t know it.”
Biblical literacy is key, he feels. People must first know their own story—the gospel—otherwise they are likely to be drawn into another story.
“If our people don’t know their story, anything that sounds spiritual or religious, they’ll think is the same,” he said.
Convergence in Alexandria, Va., tries to influence, rather than mimic, culture.
“One thing that we have seen is that churches that strive to be relevant to culture tend to be behind,” pastor Todd Cullop said. “By the time they examine and evaluate culture, find ways to emulate it in their programs and style, and implement something, the culture has continued to change and the church is already behind.”
Convergence provides space for studios, concerts, rehearsals, performances, workshops, meetings, classes, artist salons and exhibits.
“We try to connect with emerging artists, those who will create and influence culture in the future, not necessarily in the present,” Cullop added. It is so much a part of community that transforming culture’s values through the work of emerging artists is in Convergence’s vision statement.
The Luminary, an art gallery at The Journey Church’s Tower Grove location in St. Louis, Mo., has a similar approach. Director James McAnally said the church views the Luminary’s role as service.
“It’s a way to serve the people around us,” he said. Some churches serve by starting soup kitchens. “We felt strongly the need to serve artists by finding out what they need and try to provide in meaningful ways.”
The Luminary provides space for artists to work and helps provide resources for aspiring artists to network and become professionals.
An artist’s work is incredibly personal, he said. “By showing them we care about them and what they do, we are serving where it is most personal; it’s a tangible way to speak of the gospel.”
All echo that engaging culture is an essential part of faith. Collier believes influencing culture is theological in nature.
“Creating a culture that lives in line with kingdom reality is an act of Christian obedience,” he said. “God meant what he said—he intends to ‘make all things new.’ He is in the work of creation and recreation. Do we believe that and join him, or do we stay about our own narrow agenda?”
All Souls is planning film nights and book events to help identify the art forms’ inherent value.
The good shepherd, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=48288 [retrieved April 27, 2009].Elizabeth Chapin on the Doable Evangelism blog:
I’ve been thinking about Christian conversion and how we often view our own stories in a linear fashion and want to mark some point in time on a straight line from birth to death that marks our transition from not-a-Christian to Christian.
I have had discussions over the years with Christians on topics like, “Once saved, always saved,” and, “Can someone lose their salvation?” Interestingly, there are verses in the Bible that seem to leave these questions open.
All of this talk presumes a view of conversion as an “in-out” proposition. Let’s take a look at this in-out question…Read more here.
“Time to die and be raised”
A selection of the informal comments by Dr. Walter Breuggemann in a film by The Work of the People:
“Being out here and seeing these tombstones, first thing that came to my mind is that place in Matthew where Jesus says to the religious leaders of his society that they’re like mausoleums or “white sepulchers.” So what he does is to take the tombstone as a metaphor for people that have shut down reality, and have no energy and no imagination. So I suppose that a cemetery is a good place to talk about the imagination of death and the imagination of life. And if you draw that to our moment in society about the economy having collapsed and about Barack Obama’s audacious hope, you could entertain the thought that we are in a life and death moment in our society.
“All kinds of people and all kinds of institutions are having to decide whether they’re going to continue the patterns of death to which our society has subscribed or whether they are going to have the energy and imagination to break out of those patterns and come alive.
“So I think that the Bible is this field of imagination in which we are constantly watching people rise up to newness. And one of the narrative images for that is this little baby that is born to Abraham and Sarah. The text says ‘and they were as good as dead,’ which, I suppose, means that Abraham couldn’t have an erection and Sarah was not ovulating any more, and they were as good as dead. And then a baby is born and everything changes.
“And I think that we’re in a society where many people are deciding we’re not going to settle for the old patterns of death and despair and denial. But we’re going to dance and sing and we’re going to practice neighborliness.
“So I think the Bible often imagines we are in an either-or moment. And I think this is one of them for churches and church people. And it’s nice to be talking about this in the season of Lent, because Lent is about getting all set to die and then be raised. And if you are in denial, you can’t get ready to die and you can’t be raised. The Old and New Testaments are clear that you have to go into the abyss. ------said, ‘The son is Father-forsaken and the Father is son-forsaken.’ Everybody is forsaken. You can tell people don’t want to go there because, by and large, very few people go to church on Good Friday. Lots of people go on Easter Sunday, but you can’t have Easter without Good Friday.
“…in the failure of our social institutions, ‘Friday’ is a way to name what is happening to us. We are really in a shut-down of the way it used to be. One of the things that’s clear as you read the New Testament narrative is that neither Herod nor Pilate had a clue about what to do. And I think we live in a time when the old rulers have no clue about what to do about anything.
“Which means it’s time to die and be raised: that’s what I think.”
Everyone’s traditional. Some of us just start new ones rather than following someone else’s. There are consequences to the tradition of pragmatism. You might be seeing “results” with the way you’re doing things but consider this:
- If people come to faith through confrontational, guilt-trip evangelism, they’re coming to a confrontational, guilt-trip faith.
- If your church’s myopic focus on Biblical knowledge makes it more lecture hall than place of worship, you’re likely going to get a bunch of armchair Reformation theologians and wanna-be ancient Greek scholars who are more concerned with being right than anything else.
- If you allow your church to get so large that it’s a challenge to really know everyone (anyone) else in that local body, (versus starting smaller, more local gatherings,) you are discipling your people into a less personal expression of Christianity and, therefore, a less personal view of Jesus. [Pragmatic argument:] Of course, relational church can happen in your megachurch (through small groups, cliques, informal social circles, etc.), but as you add programs and square-footage, it begins to happen in spite of how you do church, not because of how you do church.
- If your church mired in legalism, it won’t last. Legalistic religious people eventually can’t keep up with their legalisms. To them, God is only pleased with an impossibly demanding cycle of performance. They usually end up abandoning their “faith” or isolating themselves for fear of secular contamination.
- If your church worships worship, your people might not learn to worship God. At the very least, they could be left unable to worship without a worship band and Mediashout® video backgrounds. Believers need to learn to worship, learn, serve, and share without the help of the professionals who make their livings by (intentionally or otherwise) perpetuating dependence.
- If your church sits in grandstands with the lights dimmed, staring at a jumbo-tron, don’t be surprised if they act like spectators.
