The Reality of Grace

In his book The Life You've Always Wanted, John Ortberg says, "Confession is not primarily something God has us to do because he needs it...We need to confess in order to heal and change." He talks about how we often think of confession as being legalistic -- make a confession and have a sin erased -- transactional. Instead, confessional should be transformational.

It reminds me of a description of prayer from the class JtM and I taught on Yancey's Prayer book. Prayer should develop a relationship with God, and yet so often we use it because we see it as a transaction with God.

I was looking for something else this evening on Ye Ole Blog, and I found this quote sent to me in an email from JtM, back in 2006:

There is no union with God without transformation. Paradoxically, the person who has struggled with personal transformation and become psychologically stronger is the person who can be empty and receptive before God. This vulnerability is an act of strength, since we no longer need to hold tightly to a false self that protects us from our inner pain and fears. We are free at last.

Confession. Is there anything that makes us more vulnerable than confession? To admit before God that we are wrong is to become vulnerable before God (and ourselves). Confession empties us -- our hearts and hands and spirits -- so that we can be open before God and accept the freedom of forgiveness and grace.

Ortberg also says that confession is not just the idea of grace, but is the reality of grace. God doesn't ask us to do it our of his own self-interest, or out of a need to hear our admissions. Better than we know, he knows how it can be grace.

In a post by Songbird, she states:

And I sobbed, too, because this is what God wants from us, not rules and rituals and lines of exclusion. God wants the I'm sorry written on our hearts, sobbed and sung and wrung out of us,...

Joyfully

When our church was in a discernment process for a vision and mission statement, we included the phrase "worship God joyfully" as one of the five components of the mission statement. Later, as we were discussing it with members of the congregation, one person suggested that we add the words "and prayerfully" to the phrase.

Try being Lay Leader and speaking against adding "and prayerfully" to a phrase. It sounds like you are against prayer. I'm not. I just think that we should be doing the entire mission statement "prayerfully." I also think that the person wanted to add "prayerfully" to the phrase because she believed "joyfully" meant loudly, and that "prayerfully" meant quietly. (I think that because that's how she explained it.)

I don't think either word is indicative of volume.

These people come near me with their mouth and honor me with their lips but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is made up only of rules taught by men. Isaiah 29:13

Nancy Ortberg, in her book Looking for God speaks about this passage. Her point is that our worship must be a reflection of our obedience to God. Believe in God? Then do what he commands? Develop a relationship with him; accept a relationship with him. Do we treat God as a stranger on the inside and then only act as if we know and follow him on the outside?

Does our worship reflect a relationship with God?

If joy is born of closeness to God, then joyful worship is worship which springs from that relationship. Of course it's prayerful -- I would think communication with God is a requirement of a relationship with him.

That joyful worship can't be pigeonholed by a particular volume.

Remember when I was talking about "Are you hungry? Then feed my sheep." We are hungry for joyful worship, which springs from a relationship with God, and we will experience that when we are obedient to God.

Not just when we worship quietly.

Image: Tree outside of GlenWood Park

Holy Wholeness

What does the word "holy" mean to you? I think of it as referring to something "of God." Set apart. Sanctified by God.

Merriam Webster defines it as "exalted or worthy of complete devotion as one perfect in goodness and righteousness."

Nancy Ortberg, in her book Looking for God, said that until her father died, she equated it with (and I'm putting words in her mouth) a wrathful God. To her it meant a distant God.

Then her father died at too young an age, after an 18 month battle with cancer. That's not what her parents had planned. It wasn't the way it should have worked out.

She writes:

That's when it hit me. Holiness, whether I liked it or not, was what I craved. A holy world, a world set right the way it was supposed to be. Sacred and pure. Clean and strong. A holy world, where there is no smog in LA, no cracks in the sidewalk. A holy world where children are never hungry, wars are never fought. No snow in Chicago, no struggles that overtake us, no fathers dying.

I think she's right. I think we crave holiness. I think we sense, even if we cannot articulate it, that life is not the way it is supposed to be. It is broken. God came to the world to save each one of us, but also to make his world holy -- to return it to a kingdom state.

The word origin of holy is the same as whole. Wholeness. It fits.

Image: Sunset from Kinetic Park.

Salt

I was reading at dinner tonight from the book Looking for God by Nancy Ortberg. In the chapter I was reading, she was talking about being the salt of the earth. (Sidenote -- for a great devotional about being "salty," check this out).

She asks us to consider a memorable meal -- great food, great company, great conversation, great memories. Think about the food. What if, as we are eating, we decide that the food lacks salt. We would pick up the salt shaker, add salt, and then go on eating. We might not even remember doing it.

She says being the salt of the earth is kind of like that. It's never about the salt -- it's about the taste it adds. Being salty might mean small things -- those small ways in which we spread the word of God. They might seem unimportant to us, but to those who see God -- who experience life flavored by God because of what we do -- the "small things" are huge.

I spoke with someone tonight at Send Off for an Emmaus walk. Her husband is a pilgrim on this walk. She told me that she has been trying to get him to go on a walk for three years, and he finally, at almost the last moment, said he would. I know, because I am a member of the Emmaus Board, that we thought about cancelling the walk due to a low number of pilgrims. We decided that if God had called six, he might be calling more. Even if six were the only ones who attended, the walk was worth it for them, and the changes that God would make in their faith journey through the walk.

The walk ended up with 10 pilgrims. One of those was this woman's husband, and it took her 3 years to get him to go. If we had cancelled the walk, would he have gone next spring? Who knows.

Having the mustard seed faith to believe that God wanted this walk to go forward was being salty. It was absolutely right to continue with this walk. It only took a little faith; it wasn't a huge decision, but it will make a difference for who knows how many people.

Salty decisions are a blessing from God.

God in Work

I'm reading Looking for God by Nancy Ortberg; I'm up to the chapter called Work. Read this:

We were created for work....It matters how we live Monday through Friday. Showing up to work with a renewed sense of purpose and the expectation of contributing both to the task and to other people plays a significant role in what it means to follow Christ."

Her point was that it doesn't matter what we do -- whatever we do offers opportunities to partner with God in his work in the world.

This paragraph was on my mind as I wrote yesterday's post. It's easier to see how the work I do can be in partnership with God now than it was before. BUT, according to Nancy, none of that matters. What matters is that no matter what we do -- our heart's calling or a mundane hourly paying job, we always have an chance to make a difference for God.

It's hard to see that when nothing seems related to God. The difference is that EVERYTHING is related to God.

Surprises

I was standing at a window in the office yesterday. I was surprised to see a clown, rolling down the sidewalk on some kind of brightly colored scooter or motorized wheelchair. I just stood there, dumbstruck. A clown. Just traveling down the sidewalk. He stopped - who knows why - maybe his big shoes were in the way, and he needed an adjustment. It took me a full minute to think, "Camera!"

I grabbed the camera, but it was too late to get a good picture.

I'm reading Nancy Ortberg's book Looking for God. I've finished four chapters so far, and I would recommend it. In the Introduction, she says:

I've fought hard to find this faith I've longed for, this God I've imagined. And I have found him in the most unexpected places. Surprises have clarified for me who God is, and I've found that challenging the prescriptive path has actually opened up the God of the Bible to me. As my understanding of God has grown, my faith has also grown -- sometimes in ways that interfere with my life.

Then later that day, I read a statement on the blog Visual Voice that stopped me:

Miracles are everywhere -- trust their emergence

What do you think of the idea that we can find God when we allow him to surprise us? When we travel paths to him which are not tried and true, but are knew and unexpected? Do we trust that miracles are everywhere?

Are we willing to travel a path, expecting that it will lead to God, even if we don't have a map and can't see the outcome?

When we find God, will we stand there with shock on our faces, or will we smile and say, "Welcome. I was expecting to find you even though I didn't know where you were."

Thomas said to him, "Lord, we don't know where you are going, so how can we know the way?" Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him." John 14:5-7