Month: January 2019

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Lord's Day Liturgy

No Lesser Bread

One of the things Paul valued about clarity was how it brings “upbuilding and encouragement and consolation” (1 Corinthians 14:3). When the Spirit gives words to His people for the good of the body it brings comfort.

Communion is also a consolation, a comfort. The Lord’s Supper is not a consolation prize, mostly because it isn’t a prize, and also because we aren’t competing to get it. Communion is a grace from God. He gives communion and comfort to those who need it but not to those who deserve it or try to earn it. There isn’t bread for the winner, but lesser bread for the runner-ups.

But God does alleviate our pain by reminding us that Jesus endured anguish and affliction on our behalf (Isaiah 53:4, 7, 11), by reminding us that pain can only last so long (this life)(2 Corinthians 4:17; 1 Peter 1:6), and by reminding us that pain can only take so much (not our salvation)(Matthew 10:28). Communion also comforts us with gospel truths that we are “no longer strangers and aliens, but…fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” (Ephesians 2:19). Because of Christ the cornerstone “in him…[we] are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit” (verse 21).

Are you feeling isolated? Afflicted? Perplexed? Do you see a lot of problems? Do have a lot of problems? Don’t lose heart! We are being renewed day by day. “He who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us…into his presence” (2 Corinthians 4:14). Communion at His Table is a no small consolation.

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Lord's Day Liturgy

Blessing-ficiaries

I can’t remember if I’ve asked this question before during an exhortation to confession. We’re now over 400 times of corporate confession on the Lord’s Day, and while there are a lot of things that require repentance, some of them need more repetition.

Who do you confess your sin for? Who benefits when you “say the same thing” (homologeo) as God? You are certainly one who profits. Sin separates us from fellowship, forgiveness granted restores fellowship, so if you want fellowship you need forgiveness which comes through confession.

You are not the only blessing-ficiary, though. God receives glory when we repent. It’s not that we should sin that grace may abound, though grace does reign over sin. God’s patience and mercy and atonement are exalted when we depend on Him. He doesn’t need us to confess in order to get honor for Himself, but He is honored by our honesty and our humility and our hope in Him.

That still isn’t the end of it. The scope of benefits and blessings should be broadened. When we confess our sins we are restored to fellowship, and God’s holy standard and perfect sacrifice are praised, and also the entire church body is built up.

Your sin may be private in that only you and God know about it, for now, but your sin is never isolated as if only you are affected by it. We are one body, we are God’s building. We might not be able to see the disintegration of some studs in the wall, but when you deal with rot the right way it strengthens the whole structure.

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Every Thumb's Width

The Punchline

I do not really like hockey. I do not really like podcasts. (I also really do not like a couple of the words used in this episode.) But FOR REAL IF YOU LIKE SPORTS AND STORIES AT ALL YOU SHOULD REALLY LISTEN TO THIS!

The Punchline

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Enjoying the Process

bahookie

Added to my commonplace book today: 

BAHOOKIE

n. Scottish informal, “a person’s buttocks”

also, “an ass“

Example usage: “try that again I’ll be kicking your fury, brown bahookie” —McSquizzy’s Army Scene, in “Open Season”

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Enjoying the Process

Fellowship: A Mess Worth Making

Our church has another seminar scheduled a few Sundays from now. This will be our fifth seminar, the first two were about parenting and the last two were about marriage. We asked for feedback and ideas after last year’s seminar and one of the suggestions was to talk about fellowship. 

Fellowship is an easily misunderstood and often misused word. For many folks it means food, probably in a basement with a tiled floor (or industrial carpet) with all sorts of casseroles and bitter coffee. Our seminar does include food, and dinner is in a basement, but the food is not potlucked. As for the basement, well, it is actually fellowship hallish, but we do what we can. 

All four of the pastors at our church will speak for one session, then we’ll have a group Q&A as the final session. Our four elders are very different in personality, but united in theology and vision. It should make for a fantastic day together. 

I’m planning to talk about tough cases, how to set expectations and how to behave in order to do our part to reach those expectations. 

If you live in the area and have February 17th free, the seminar is also free, but we’d love to know you’re coming for sake of snacks, childcare, and dinner. Take a look at the Facebook event page, or if you’re a FB hater, leave a comment here and I’ll forward your interest to the appropriate planners.

Categories
Lord's Day Liturgy

Open Communion, Closed Membership

We love celebrating weekly communion at our church, and it is having multiple desired effects. It proclaims the Lord’s death (1 Corinthians 11:26). It unites the body as we participate in the blood and body of Christ (1 Corinthians 10:16). It encourages us to keep short accounts (1 Corinthians 11:28). And it makes people ask questions, including our kids, who wonder when they will get to share in communion.

This is a feature, it doesn’t have to be a frustration. Just as the liturgy of various offerings in the Old Testament provided opportunities for parents to tell their kids about God’s redeeming work, so we want our liturgy to cause others to want it, especially our kids. If we had to choose between abusing the Table by making them dread it due to our anxiousness, or abusing the Table by making them desire it due to our joyfulness, is that hard to answer?

One question that is a bit harder, at least on a personal level, is, Who is welcome at the Table? We practice what has historically been called “open” communion. That means that you do not need to be a member of our local body to be invited to eat and drink. You do need to believe in Christ, and, in most cases, you should already be baptized in public identification with Christ. We typically discourage parents from having their young people partake until they’ve been baptized.

One additional challenge for us involves those who sincerely believe that infant baptism is a valid expression of the ordinance. As a church we do not believe that, and so we have what is called “closed” membership. We believe (in brief) that “disciples obey the Lord in baptism” and so, as a credo-baptist church, we do not affirm paedo-baptized members.

But, desiring to be charitable to those who profess with both lips and lives their belief in and love for Christ, we will encourage them to partake at the open Table though we won’t affirm them as official members. This is a compromise we are comfortable with. Currently, the most significant limitation is that such a person could not hold a church office (that is, be an elder or deacon), though in every other way they would receive the care of the shepherds.

We gladly welcome the Lord’s disciples to the Lord’s Table, even when we believe there is more to teach them to observe that He’s commanded, which is, of course, true for all of us in some way or another this side of glorification.

Categories
Lord's Day Liturgy

Our Father Who Judges

When we come to our time of confession as part of our worship we come to confess our sins to our Father. God is holy, God is righteous, God is just, God is the judge of the world. But to all who believe in His name, “he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13). We confess our sins to God, but He is our “God and Father” (Galatians 1:4).

Peter gave more explanation about what we should do because of the Father we have.

And if you call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each one’s deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile, knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. (1 Peter 1:17-19)

There are a couple things to notice about this imperative and this information. We are to pay attention to what our Father says to do. He has given instruction, and He intends for us to walk in His ways.

We are also to remember what our Father has done for us. He sent His Son to pay the price for our deliverance. He set us free from ignorance and unholiness. There were a lot of false gods and a lot of nasty behavior and a lot of gloomy moral blindness like the darkest cave, and the Lamb covers and cleanses us.

Leave the empty ways behind and call on the Father through His Son.

Categories
Enjoying the Process

On Carrying My Own (Digital) Man-purse

I am not a perfect minimalist, but I am drawn to it in certain contexts like iPad writers are to Starbucks. In my time as a more severe dualist I thought it very sanctimonious to carry the least amount of things with me as possible. My wife can not only bear witness, she has often had to bear my load.

When we would travel together, I would let her bring a bar of soap, and I would borrow. When we would go out to eat, I would let her carry my money-clip in her purse. I mean, she had all that available space doing nothing else, right? I needed to keep my pockets free for my hands. And when she would need to bring superfluous things, like more than one extra diaper for a kid, or her hair-dryer, or whatever it seemed like I might have to carry if she got injured, I often expressed my passive-but-perfervid disgust. Why couldn’t she make do with less, like me?

I’ve done the same thing to friends at conferences or other trips. They wanted to bring their backpack with them, so surely they wouldn’t mind carrying around my booklet or free books either. I’m sure that I always asked nicely, and said thank you, too.

Hopefully you can see that I’m trying to poke fun at my selfish self here. It’s not to say that we must always carry our own burden, but , actually, there is a verse about it (Galatians 6:5).

My main point, however, is about why I joined, and still have an account with, the Facebook. I resisted for a long time, not because I dislike technology or the Internet or social networks per se. I resisted because most everyone else was doing it. I resisted because the most that anyone can waste my time on Twitter is 140 characters (it’s now twice that, and yuck, but they didn’t ask me). I resisted because I already know enough ways to waste my time. I resisted because I had seen MySpace pages. I resisted because I had Googled some articles about how Facebook uses your data to target you for ads….

That’s all high-road sounding, and I fancifully suppose people in L’Abri communities would say similar things. But, and this is big, I mostly got away with my resistance because my wife had Facebook. That meant she could tell me about all the banality. She could tell me about who was pregnant. She could pass on prayer requests that others posted, or even prayer requests from our family. She could keep in contact with my sister’s friends when my sister was dying of cancer and was stuck in hospital beds and nursing home beds two-thousand miles away. She could carry my digital social media purse.

I realized that my precious digital minimalism was just no good. I still don’t like Facebook. BLECGH! I don’t have the app on a pocketable device, but I do open it up once or twice a day on my computer. After clicking through the notifications (so I don’t have to keep looking at the red circle of how many things I’m behind on), I scrim (that’s scroll-skim) through the timeline. About that time I question the meaning/vanity of life. But a bunch of people I care about communicate, even seem to hang out, there. Lots of people at our church use it to announce opportunities, ask for prayer, and/or encourage others to persevere. Lots of parents at our school use it for the same reasons, and also to share what’s happening with their friends, which spreads the word about how God is blessing. And amen!

If Facebook went away in an hour due to a meteor, or a Federal lawsuit, or other, I might sing and dance, and not in lamentation. But for now, though lots of people seem to be abandoning the service, for understandable reasons even, I will keep carrying my own purse.

Categories
Enjoying the Process

NoDiscontentDecember Postmortem

It’s been a couple weeks since the official end of our family’s finishing hashtag of 2018. I posted about it a few times, and here is an autopsy report.

  • The focus, agreed upon by every member of the family, was fitting and helpful. December was “richly scheduled,” as Anese Cavenaugh likes to say, and it was good to take fussiness off the table as an acceptable response. That’s not to say no one was ever fussy, but it was nice to have the zero tolerance policy clearly in place.
  • Just like praying for patience, you don’t want to do it. Ha. Not only was December busy, there were some days and discussions which seemed extra providentially selected for testing the contentment commitment. By God’s grace I think my own capacity to see contentment as an appropriate response was increased, as well as my actual choice in the moment.
  • Encouraging the use of Grinch lyrics in the Open Season of confrontation added some laughter (at least for the persons whose souls were not greasy black peels), and encouraged us to remember that obedience, which itself is not a laughing matter, can be pursued with joy not just under burden.
  • If I remember next December, then we will do this again.

Since you’re certainly wondering, our new family hashtag for this month is #jerkJanuary. I’m joking. We haven’t chosen one, and I don’t think we will. Also, of course, contentment is required by God all the time, so we don’t get to return to grumpy-pants grumbling because we survived the gauntlet. Paul said that contentment should be learned for every circumstance; our pursuit of contentment isn’t dead, but we’ll pause our use of the pound sign.

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The End of Many Books

Breaking the Vicious Cycle

by Elaine Gottschall

I LOVE ALL THE CARBS IN THE WHOLE WORLD

I also have had (or have) some GERD and general gut problems, though not as extreme as the cases of Crohn’s and Celiac Disease that Gottschall addresses. 

So…that makes the Specific Carbohydrate Diet interesting, and/or frightening (#cauliflowerpizzaisnotrealpizza). Ha. I’m very glad I finally read the book, but I’m not sure if or when I’ll be implementing the diet.

3 of 5 stars