Soon

We’ll be singing a new song this week as we partake of the Lord’s table. The song reflects on the glorious return of Christ to receive his bride, the church.  Here is a link to the audio and lyrics are below. Looking forward to singing together with you (Eph. 5:19) this Sunday!

Soon
By Brooke Fraser

Soon and very soon my King is coming
Robed in righteousness and crowned with love
When I see Him, I shall be made like Him
Soon and very soon

Soon and very soon I’ll be going
To the place He has prepared for me
There my sin erased my shame forgotten
Soon and very soon

I will be with the One I love
With unveiled face I’ll see
There my soul will be satisfied
Soon and very soon

Soon and very soon see the procession
The angels and the elders ’round the throne
At His feet I’ll lay my crown, my worship
Soon and very soon

Though I have not seen Him
My heart knows Him well
Jesus Christ the Lamb
The Lord of Heaven

The Hunger Games Trilogy

Earlier, I scribbled down some thoughts about The Hunger Games. Having finished the Trilogy, here are a few more:

1. We All Wear Glasses: Everyone has a worldview through which they view the world. Everyone. I can’t help but read these stories as a Christian. It’s who I am and it’s the lens through which I see the world. So the storyline of creation-fall-redemption-restoration effects the way I see all other story-lines. It effects what I value, what I celebrate, what I disdain, etc. But it is arrogant to assume that I’m the only one wearing glasses. As though one can read the story (or interpret anything in life) “objectively” without your own set of lenses as well. They may be invisible to you, but we all wear glasses (worldviews) through which we see the world. If you’re a humanist, or a materialist, or an atheist, or a theist –  it impacts the way you see everything, even a fictional story. There’s no question we’re all wearing glasses. The only question is which is the best pair.

2. Stories are Engrossing: Shainu and the kids were away visiting family and I could not stop reading the books. Confession time. I stayed up late, woke up early, snuck it in while working, all to keep reading. The last time a story engrossed me like this was when I read Khaled Hosseini’s novels. With those, I could tell that Housenni was a masterful writer. Simple but brilliant. Collins was different. I definitely appreciated her writing in the third book better than the first. But what she does do well, is tell a great story. In some ways, the writing itself is invisible. Meaning it’s not so good or bad that you’re distracted, but rather unnoticed so that you’re sucked into the story itself (which I guess is good writing). For the two days it took me to finish Catching Fire and Mockingjay (and I’m not a fast reader) I was engrossed. When I finally finished the last sentence, I felt like I had been so thoroughly transported to another world for 48 hours that the real world seemed strange. Sort of like waking up in the dark and having to blink many times to adjust to the light.

3. Peeta: Peeta and Gale are two boys competing for Katniss’ love. Last time I said, love triangles make me barf. That’s still true, but here’s what I did appreciate. Peeta loves this girl before she ever even knows he’s alive. In fact, she grows to love him because he first loved her. Peeta loves her unconditionally. The more the pages turn, the more you realize how broken and flawed Katniss is. She’s got characteristics about her that you hate. And Peeta loves her still. Peeta loves her even when her heart is conflicted, pulled in opposite directions, and her passions and loyalties divided. Peeta loves her though her heart is prone to wander. Peeta loves her enough to die for her. He is beaten for her and by his wounds, she is saved. I’m not saying that Peeta is Jesus. I’m saying that every story seems to have trails to the Great Story. And every hero, longingly points to the True Hero.

4. Happily Ever After: As I read these things, it becomes apparent to me that I’m a sucker for happy endings. I don’t like tragedies. I can watch an amazing movie for two hours and it can be ruined for me in the last 5 minutes if they don’t make everything turn out ‘right.’ I need happy endings. Maybe it’s a weakness. Spoiler alert – so if you don’t want to know what happens, stop reading or forever hold your peace. When I got to the last page of Mockingjay, I yelped. Actually, I’m not really sure what yelp means, but I’m pretty sure I did it. Nobody was home so I was freed to yelp without embarrassment. I yelped because I got my happy ending. (Wait, I just looked up yelp – and its a shriek made in pain. So I did not yelp. I did the opposite of yelp. You get the idea.) The villains were defeated, the world was saved, the good guy got the girl and they lived happily ever after. And here’s what made that last page so bright – all the darkness that preceded it. The pages before included pain, suffering, death, tragedy, sorrow, betrayal, guilt, sadness, murder, bloodshed, horror, evil, and the list goes on. So out of the ashes of all of that, emerges a new world and a new life. And isn’t that what we all want? Happily ever after is the future we want. A tragedy might be great entertainment, but nobody wants it to be their life. Shakesphere was brilliant, but you don’t want to be Juliet. In the end, you want the last words to be, and they lived happily ever after. Being such a sucker for happy endings, the Bible is perfect for me. Because that’s how the Bible ends. The last page is a promise that for all who belong to Jesus, we will live happily ever after. The Bible ends with the promise of a new life and a new beginning. And what makes that last page so bright is all the darkness that preceded it. The pages before include pain, suffering, death, tragedy, sorrow, betrayal, guilt, sadness, murder, bloodshed, horror, evil, and the list goes on. And yet, out of all of that, emerges a new world and a new life. And isn’t that what we all want?

Community Garden Project

We’ve mowed the grass, built the boxes, and readied the ground for our Community Garden Project. This Saturday, we we start at 9am for a day of gardening fun.

I’d love to have you come and help out. Bring your garden gloves and yard tools if you have some (wheel barrels, shovels, heavy metal rakes, ect). You can also bring any extra seeds and veggie plants you might have. We expect to be out there till early afternoon and if you need to leave early, that’s okay. If you know anyone who might be interested, please spread the word. It’s open to everyone. Thanks!

Richard Barton

Resources for Family Worship

On Sunday, we preached that fathers and mothers are the primary tool that God intends to use to bring sons and daughters to an awareness of Himself. We were careful to distinguish between primary and only or exclusive. Parents are not the only thing that God uses, but the primary thing that God wants to use to have our children come to faith in Christ. One of the ways parents can fulfill God’s call to make disciples of their children is to see their home as mini-church and worship God there. Parents, as you seek to implement family worship in your homes, let me offer you some encouragement and some resources to help.

Keep it simple. 15 minutes a few times a week is better than 45 minutes on Monday and skipping out till next month. And here are three ingredients for your time of family worship. Sing. Read. Pray. Simple. Sing a song or two. If you’re stuck, email Siby and he’ll send you the lyrics to any of the songs we sing at church. That way, your kids will even learn to sing along when we gather for corporate worship. Read the Bible. The ESV Study Bible has lots of great notes on each passage to help you talk about what you just read. And pray. Take what we’ve been talking about for the last several weeks and apply it in your home with your family.

Look to Jesus. Dads, when we think about our responsibility to pastor our mini-church and shepherd our small congregation of wife and children, our knees buckle. Who is sufficient for this? Moms, when you think of your call to support your husband, manage your home, and train up your children in the way they should go, your knees buckle. Who is sufficient for this? Jesus is! So don’t spend all your time looking at yourself. You’re not enough and you’re never going to be. Just accept it. And look to Jesus who is enough and who will always be. He alone is the One who cared for His bride and God’s children perfectly. So don’t start by promising to do better or stirring up your will. Seek grace from Him who did what you could not do. He is generous with His grace and patient with poor parents like you and me. He has been taking the inadequate, insufficient, meager parenting of weak fathers and mothers and multiplying it with His own power and grace for thousands of years.

Here’s an example. If you were a fly on the wall of our home yesterday, here’s what you would have seen. We finish dinner. Shainu’s exhausted after a long day with our two monsters. My mind is deviously running through a list of why we can skip family worship tonight. We’re tired and we have another meeting lined up after the kids go down. And the kids are particularly unruly tonight. But we pile into the living room. Hannah’s sitting in Shainu’s lap. Micah is stumbling about the room. We sing “All Creatures of Our God and King.” Mostly I sing (which isn’t pretty) cause Hannah doesn’t know all the words yet and Shainu’s trying to sing and keep her sitting still at the same time. We also sing “My God is so Big” one of Hannah’s favorites. Micah’s still stumbling about. We finish and I read Genesis 1:1-2. Hannah repeats each line after me as I read it. I talk with her about how in the beginning there was God and nothing else. No trees, no mountains, no sky, no people – just God. And then God made everything. She asks if she can pretend to be God as we act out the story of Genesis 1. So I feed her the lines, and she bellows, “Let there be light.” Then Shainu does her best to impersonate a ray of light. “Let there be animals.” Shainu and I make monkey, lion, elephant, and horse noises. We’re not very good at sound effects. Even Micah has temporarily stopped stumbling to watch. And so on we go through the days of creation until I finish by asking, “So who made everything?” Hannah answers, “God.” “And why did God make everything?” Shainu helps, “For His glory.” We end with prayer. Micah resumes stumbling. Hannah thanks God for making everything (sometimes she’ll say the Lord’s Prayer which Shainu taught her) and I ask God to bless our home and the church. Done. It definitely wasn’t pretty. It definitely needs to mature. But hopefully doing it 4,000 more times will have an impact. And please know that the way we do it doesn’t have to be the way you do it. Our example is a description not a prescription. If it helps, great. But figure out what works best for your mini-church and do it.

Some Resources to Help.

How I Pastor My Family

Three Main Steps to Starting Family Worship

Leading Family Worship

The Hardest and Best Job in the World

Getting ready to preach on the high calling of Motherhood this Sunday. Can’t wait.

Praying Together

This Sunday we walked quickly through the book of Acts as we preached Lord, Teach Us To Pray Corporately. Here are some questions for you and your SoulCare community to consider as you apply the preached word to your lives.

1. What stood out (convicted, comforted, encouraged, instructed, etc) you as you heard the sermon on Sunday?
2. What comes to mind as you consider how the early church in the book of Acts prayed and what God did in response to their prayers? (Acts 1:14, 24; 2:42-47; 4:23-31; 6:6; 12:5, 12-17; 13:2-3; 20:36-38)
3. Do you have examples from your life of the power of prayer and praying together?
4. What keeps us from prayer? What does this reveal?
5. What needs to change?

Random Thoughts on The Hunger Games

I just finished The Hunger Games, the first of a trilogy by Suzanne Collins. A copy of the book was sitting on Vince & Sue’s dining table, and hearing so much about the movie, I asked if I could borrow it. I’m not a good or fast reader by any means, and yet I finished it in a little over a day. Collins’ story is easy to read and holds your interest. When you read things that are generally academic and heady, fiction is a welcome change of pace.

Typically, I consume media the way I consume food – with little thought and no time for digestion. But I’m trying to change. I’m trying to be more thoughtful and engage what I take in. I’m helped by the examples of other Christians (see here and here) who watch movies and read books, not with their minds turned off, but fully on. So here are some random notes that I made having read the book.

First, the plot. The storyline is set in a nation called Panem, a future grim society which rose out of the ruins of what was once North America. Panem is comprised of 12 districts (originally 13 – but one was obliterated for rebellion) that are held together by a powerful metropolis called the Capitol. Every year, as punishment for the rebellion against the Capitol, each district must offer as tribute a boy and girl between the ages of 12 and 18, selected by lottery, to compete in the Hunger Games, a televised survivor-like fight to the death where the last one standing wins. The protagonist is Katniss Everdeen, a sixteen year old girl, from the poverty-stricken District 12, who then faces the impossible choice of killing or being killed. (Here’s one reviewer’s take on Collins’ situational ethics).

Ok, now for the random thoughts.

1. The gospel is the Story to which all stories point. God is a Creator and the Author. So human beings who are made in His image and likeness reflect His creative nature through their own. Only, He owns the copyright to the greatest story that has ever been composed. It seems then that glimpses of His story are reflected in the stories we tell. If you’re paying attention, there are trails to the gospel-story, all throughout The Hunger Games.

For example, Katniss is not the one who is selected by lottery to essentially die in the Hunger Games. It is originally Prim, her younger sister’s fate. And yet, in love for her, Katniss volunteers. She willingly offers herself as a substitute to take Prim’s place. Think about that. The penalty for rebellion is death, and the entire story is built on the willingness of one to assume responsibility for another and accept death so that the other might live. Sound familiar? Only in The Hunger Games, victory is gained by the one who survives and lives cheating death. The paradox of the gospel is that our victory is gained by the One who dies and lives again beating death.

2. Grace is so hard to receive. Throughout the story, Katniss is the recipient of undeserved favor. As a little girl, her life is spared by the mercy of a boy named Peeta (who later becomes a fellow competitor/friend/love-interest). His kindness produces in Katniss an overwhelming sense of indebtedness. It’s interesting. Her reaction is not gratitude for the free gift, but a deep desire to pay him back somehow so that she can be even. Another character in the story is willing to accept death rather than live with a feeling of indebtedness. To be indebted to another, to receive something you didn’t work for or earn, to know you can never pay back what you owe – this is something that as a Christian, I get.

3. What does it mean to be feminine? Katniss is as conflicted as you get in terms of what it means to be a woman. She’s daddy’s little girl until his death forces her to take on the role of hunter, provider, and protector. She’s breathtakingly beautiful in a dress, until she’s in the arena as a fierce warrior shooting an arrow through a competitor’s throat. She’s longing to receive and reciprocate Peeta’s loving acceptance, but is sure she never wants to get married. She’s instinctively and superbly motherly to every young child she comes across and yet is committed to not having children of her own. And much of this is the result of past experiences, circumstances in her life, and the time and culture in which she lives. Katniss captures well how complex, confusing, mixed, and muddy our vision of womanhood often is.

4. I hate love-triangles. One girl. Two potential boyfriends. Barf. That’s all I have to say about that.

5. How dark would a society have to become to promote the slaughter of it’s own children? I’ve read some of the reviews of smarter people that say that Collins’ future-based novel is a commentary and warning for the present day. There are all kinds of socio-political points that I imagine the author intended to make. As I read, (and I read this as a Christian, I know) I couldn’t help but wonder, how can a society get to the place where the killing of it’s own children is permitted? Or worse, promoted? In Panem, children are slaughtered for the twisted pleasure of adults. It’s a horrible practice and yet it is accepted as just the way things are. The people who might want to end it are powerless against the laws that keep the practice in place. Thank God Panem is just a made-up place and things would never get that bad. Right? Or is a womb in America as unsafe as an arena in Panem? God help us.

Just some thoughts. Sue said she’ll give me book two on Sunday.

Gospel Hope in the Midst of a Miscarriage

An entry by Katie Powell.

Our apartment is blooming with signs of our baby…stroller, car seat, baby bath tub, pack n’ play, baby onesies, baby socks, baby blankets… it’s a joy to be surrounded by these things!

But a little over a year ago, the scene was very different.

If you peered into our lives at that time, you would have seen Jeremy and I sitting on our couch, eyes red with tears, faces crumpled in pain over the loss of our first baby, miscarried at 10 weeks.

People who haven’t experienced a miscarriage (and even some that have) like to point out that “it happens all the time.” Miscarriages are normal. But they are not. Death is not normal. Death is not natural. It is not part of God’s original design.

But praise be to God, He has conquered death and one day, we trust we will see our little baby alive and well in heaven.

“Women received back their dead by resurrection.” Hebrews 11:35

In 2 Kings 4, Elisha prophecies that a faithful, but barren Shunammite woman will give birth to a son. And, like so many barren women in the Bible, she does. But tragedy is lurking around the corner:

When the child had grown, he went out one day to his father among the reapers. And he said to his father, “Oh my head, my head!” The father said to his servant, “Carry him to his mother.” And when he had lifted him and brought him to his mother, the child sat on her lap till noon, and then he died (v. 18-20).

How sad. How unfair. It makes us beg, WHY GOD? WHY? Jeremy and I certainly did in the weeks and months following our miscarriage.

But here is where the Shunammite woman becomes a hero of faith…

Without a moment’s hesitation, she puts her little boy down, gets up, and goes to find Elisha. When she finds Elisha, Elisha unknowingly asks, “Is all well with the child?” and she says, “All is well.” All is shalom.

The Shunammite woman is openly in distress (v. 27), but her first words, her first disposition, is to say “All is well” and do you know what happens next? It is actually very amazing… Elisha goes to the child and lies down on his little dead body.

Elisha puts his hands on the boy’s hands, his arms on the boy’s arms, his mouth on the boy’s mouth. Elisha touches the boy’s unclean, dead body and transfers life to him.

“… the flesh of the child became warm… then, the child sneezed seven times, and the child opened his eyes.”

A beautiful and profound picture of Christ, Elisha becomes unclean to make the little boy alive again. Because of Christ, death has no hold on believers.

Not only will each individual believer receive eternal life in heaven, but the things and especially people we once lost to death will be restored.

“Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”