Juggling?

How do you do with the juggling? Maybe that's not what it feels like to you - this 'life-balance' thing! That's precisely what it feels like to me, to us - wifey LJ included. Maybe for you its like some sort of harmonious, synchronized process that flows seamlessly in congruence with your spiritual growth, personal development etc. Not for me/us! Actually, increasingly, I'm coming to see that this juggling - and remember some of the 'items' being juggled are of such inestimable worth and startling fragility - is precisely the 'soil' in which my spiritual growth and personal development take place.

One powerful verse from Paul's first epistle to the Corinthian church which has always had significant meaning to me comes to mind in this context, "So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God." (I Co. 10.31) Why that verse? Well I think growing up, and in the preponderance of messages on Christian living that I hear, I thought/hear growing in love for the Lord and developing spiritually were/are things that take place in some sort of vacuum - let me break it to you they don't! For the vast majority of Christ-followers it's not in some remote, tumultuous part of the globe as a brave missionary that we will fight for spiritual growth; it's not leading some dynamic ministry praying for thousands and seeing the dead raised, but in the midst of the juggle, the stuff of daily living that we can most develop Christlikeness, that we MUST develop Christlikeness. We are to be Christlike in real life: holding down a job, loving wife, kids, extended family, keeping healthy, reading the word every day, serving the local church, loving the church family, balancing the books, consistently growing in holiness, driving on the roads, and checking in on what shows our kids are watching. Know what I mean?

Man I want to juggle well, I want to love my Lord, wife, kids, and church family well and still feel like I'm standing and flourishing being light and salt to a dying world. Going to need serious power from above and those old-school biblical traits of perseverance and steadfastness.
How about you? You going to re-commit to it again?

Simon

A church with a View

It appears God still works with non-church organizations and leadership in the same way as the days of old with Nehemiah, Ezra, & Daniel. If you look at each of those three books of Scripture you will find stunning little relations between these men of God and the 'Secular Powers that Be' where God has totally worked on these 'powers' beforehand and used them to provide astonishing things for the people of God.

Well God is still at it, and He has done it for the little church that God has called the wife and I to lead.
It is pretty amazing.

We have thought long and hard about our response as a church leadership to the certain calling upon us to be a visible witness, a 'RADIANT CITY WITHIN THE CITY" as a church. Out of this has come interactions with various organizations, one of which we thought would simply never happen as it would all be simply to phenomenal if it worked out as it would be too plum to relate in this brief blog.
Well after a meeting last Monday with said organization, where it appeared the phrase most often mentioned by them was, "What else can we do for you," or "Why don't you try this as well?" the door has flung open for us to meet in an amazing location.

Why, cause we're special? Heck no, because God is ultimately sovereign over all.
Basically, we're absolutely pumped by all that He's doing.

Have faith.

SImon

Eat It!

Thought I would share two quotes relating to scripture. The first from Louis Berkhof speaks of the 'proximate aim' or the human-bound goal of God giving us revelation in the form of His word. The second is from Eugene Peterson and is from a simply excellent book called Eat this Book which is a must read if one wants to come to grips for the Spiritual aspect of bible reading and the power it has to transform the soul.

Anyway, here goes:

“The proximate aim of of revelation (however), is found in the complete renewal of sinners, in order that they may mirror the virtues and perfections of God... It seeks to deliver from the power of sin, of the devil, and of death, the entire man, body and soul, with all his talents and powers, and to renew him spiritually, morally, and ultimately also physically to the glory of God; and not only the individual man, but mankind as an organic whole...”

"Holy Scripture is the source document, the authoritative font, the work of the Spirit that is definitive in all true Spirituality.
What I mean to insist upon is that spiritual writing-- Spirit-sourced writing-- requires spiritual reading, a reading that honors words as holy, words as a basic means of forming an intricate web of relationships between God and the human, between all things visible and invisible.

"There is only one way of reading that is congruent with our Holy Scriptures, writing that trusts in the power of words to penetrate our lives and create truth and beauty and goodness, writing that requires a reader who, in the words of Rainer Maria Rilke, 'does not always remain bent over his pages; he often leans back and closes his eyes over a line he has been reading again, and its meaning spreads through his blood.' This is the kind of reading names by our ancestors as LECTIO DIVINA, often translated 'spiritual reading,' reading that enters our souls as food enters our stomachs, spreads through our blood, and becomes holiness and love and wisdom."

Eat it!

Simon