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When it comes to recognizing the truth of our own identities, most of us experience a symbolic version of blindness that keeps us from seeing ourselves for who we really are. We live unawakened lives marked by self-perpetuating lies about
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“Alongside this Israel-and-God story there runs the deeper story of the good creation and the dark power that from the start has tried to destroy God’s good handiwork. I do not claim to understand that dark power. As I shall suggest later, I don’t think we’re meant to. We are simply to know that when we are caught up in awful circumstances, apparent gross injustices, terrible plagues – or when we are accused of wicked things of which we are innocent, suffering strange sicknesses with no apparent reason, let alone cure – at those points we are to lament, we are to complain, we are to state the case, and leave it with God. God himself declares at the end that Job has told the truth (42.8). He has clung on to the fact that God is just, even though his own misery seems to deny it. Jesus not only drew on that story. He lived it. He died under it. That brings us, then, to the story of Jesus himself.”
― God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath
― God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath
“Sometimes (and perhaps more often than not), the best ideas for church culture transformation arise from the congregation. Unfortunately, many pastors, elders, deacons, and other leaders dismiss, disagree with, dispute, and silence those best ideas—which may well be a form of quenching the Spirit. Those who embrace (as we do) “the priesthood of all believers” should be the ones who listen the most to others in the congregation.”
― Pivot: The Priorities, Practices, and Powers That Can Transform Your Church into a Tov Culture
― Pivot: The Priorities, Practices, and Powers That Can Transform Your Church into a Tov Culture
“We expect God to be, as we might say, ‘in charge’: taking control, sorting things out, getting things done. But the God we see in Jesus is the God who wept at the tomb of his friend. The God we see in Jesus is the God-the-Spirit who groans without words. The God we see in Jesus is the one who, to demonstrate what his kind of ‘being in charge’ would look like, did the job of a slave and washed his disciples’ feet.”
― God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath
― God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath
“Prayer is a means of bringing our authentic self to God and meeting him in these mysteries. We pray because we hope and believe that surrender can be forged there, on our knees. We pray because sometimes this is all we can do when desire and the undesirable have us knotted inside. We pray because, when the woods have gone dark, when the distance between God’s Word says it and I believe it feels like impossible terrain to travel and our only companions are doubt and fear, we need words as simple as these: Your will be done.”
― Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith
― Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith
“Prayer is the courageous act of bringing our authentic desires before God. Prayer is the place where, in Jesus’ name, we meet a holy God with all of our humanity hanging out. In our bravest moments of unscripted, unedited prayer, we find ourselves telling God what we want, how we’re afraid to want this, how we fear he’ll withhold, how we fail to trust and to worship and to reverence. We allow ourselves to see—and be seen. In this struggle, prayerful and raw, we willingly wait for the mercies of God to deliver us into the abiding belief that he is good. Prayer, bold and beautiful and brave, takes on the quality of our struggle to surrender to the God who is holy, to the God whose holiness produces our surprise. This kind of prayer is courageous because as we pray, we enter the throne room of God, just as Isaiah did in Isaiah 6. As happened to Isaiah, one glimpse of holiness can produce knee-knocking terror. “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!” (v. 5). The threads of Isaiah’s humanity unravel and fall into a clumsy, ugly heap. Standing painfully aware of the gap lying between human and holy, his own reflection in the mirror undoes him. This is the double vision of prayer: we see God and we see ourselves.”
― Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith
― Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith
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