Godgrown

Updates from March, 2011 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

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  Mark 9:46 am on March 21, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

  Stupid Faith 

  Hutz-pah is the Hebrew notion of “guts.”  It means that you’ve got the gumption to do the unthinkable.  Though related, it is more than bravery – it is bravery mixed with foolishness, with just a dash of genius.

  Abraham had this sort of hutzpah when he came before God and began negotiating with him in Genesis 18:22-33.  The fear…the absolute penetrating fear of standing before the Living God and questioning him!  And yet, God was pleased with this kind of faith – in fact, we call Abraham “the father” of our faith.  It is in large part because he had real hutzpah.

  Jesus too mentions the notion of hutzpah, this wild, brazen gall – promising those that “seek and keep on seeking will find; those that knock and keep on knocking, will have the door opened…”

  He tells a story of someone banging on the door of his friend’s house in the middle of the night, demanding the friend get up and get him what he wants.  It isn’t necessarily out of kindness, but out of sheer exhaustion that the friend will do exactly as he asks.  It is this strength-in-persistence that Jesus says qualifies as real, healthy faith.

  What might a hutzpah faith look like today?

  • It is praying…without ceasing.
  • It is this borderline STUPID insistence that God cares enough to respond to your requests.
  • It is begging that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven, then going about in God’s power, being the answer to your own prayers.
  • Want to see heaven on earth?  Then put your whole life on the line to see justice accomplished, to see salvation for the oppressed, sight for the blind…
  • Pray desperately for more workers in God’s harvest fields, as there is so few workers and so much work to be done.  These are things that God wants far more than you ever will, so go ahead and pray boldly – then go about seeing it done!

  Don’t forget, when a child asks for bread, his father will not give him a stone…and how much more wonderful is God?  When we pray with hutzpah; when we ride the line between audacity and reverence in our prayers…we can see the boundaries of hell pushed back - and God comes rushing to our aid.

  

  Rbfuzzyqjones845, Mark W, and Greg are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Greg 4:00 pm on March 21, 2011 Permalink

    Interesting post. Would love to have you explain this part of it a bit though: “It is begging that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven, then going about in God’s power, being the answer to your own prayers.”

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    Mark W 12:55 pm on April 2, 2011 Permalink

    “Being the answer to our own prayers” sounds a bit counter-intuitive, but I believe one (not the only) reason why we pray is to seek how God wants us to live. When we beg God for workers in his harvest field (Lk 10:2) then we get up off our knees and get to work…we in essence are saying “Here am I, send me!” You can see this in Luke 10 when Jesus asks his disciples to pray for workers, and then he sends them out 2 by 2 to be the workers they just prayed for. There is a HUGE danger in simply praying, and not doing. We need “contemplative activists” in our churches.

    Great to “see ya” Greg! How is everything?

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    Rbfuzzyqjones845 2:37 am on April 28, 2011 Permalink

    Great article mark…… Street ministry here in Detroit in the month of July. We’re working on it know……
    Fuzzyqjones845

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  Mark 3:49 pm on January 29, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

  Functional Saviors 

  Know anyone who takes out a double policy of insurance?  That’s when you have insurance on something, then you wrap it in another blanket of insurance.  What’s up with that?

  It just means the first insurance you bought wasn’t good enough.

  We do the same thing with God – if God is our ultimate trust – more than just an insurance policy, but the largest thing we can hold onto in our lives, and we toss in some “functional saviors” (coined so perfectly by pastor Tim Keller) are we really content with the power of God?

  What are your “functional saviors?”

  For the Jews, it was all the things they couldn’t have under the Law of Yahweh.  According to the Law, they couldn’t eat pork, so what’s the first thing you go for when life turns sour?  You got it – a greasy bag of pork rinds!

  God laments in Isaiah 65:

  65:3 All day long they insult me to my face

  by worshiping idols in their sacred gardens.

  They burn incense on pagan altars.

  4 At night they go out among the graves,

  worshiping the dead.

  They eat the flesh of pigs

  and make stews with other forbidden foods.

  11b …you have prepared feasts to honor the god of Fate

  and have offered mixed wine to the god of Destiny…

  Do you have to realize you’re dividing up your trust among idols – considering God “not-enough?”  No – I think there are lots of things that become our functional savior that we don’t even realize.  Let these questions from Darrin Patrick help expose the ‘other gods’ in your life:

  • What do I worry most about?
  • What, if I failed or lost it, would cause me to feel that I did not even want to live?
  • What do I use to comfort myself when things get bad, or difficult?
  • What do I do to cope?  What are my release valves?  What do I do to feel better?
  • What preoccupies me?  What do I daydream about?
  • What makes me feel the most self-worth?  Of what am I the proudest?  For what do I want to be known?
  • What do I lead with in conversations?
  • Early on, what do I want to make sure people know about me?
  • What prayer, unanswered, would make me seriously think about turning away from God?
  • What do I really want and expect out of life?  What would really make me happy?
  • What is my hope for the future?

  God is interested in being your only trust – your only investment – your only insurance.  Give it a try – throw off the other “blankets” that wrap around your trust in God – it is amazing how light the burden will become.

  
   
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  Mark 8:17 am on January 25, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

  Kicked Out for Good Reason 

  Sometimes going on a mission trip feels more like you’re just getting kicked out of the house.

  The writer in Isaiah 61 is depicting a nation of exiles, with some who have returned back to Jerusalem, and most others who have decided they will stay spread across the lands.  The writer is grappling with the changing definitions of what it means to be “God’s people” and it is slowly becoming more inevitable that we are never going back to “those old glory days where everyone is home in Zion” ever again.

  We long for what we had – we seem to only appreciate something or someone once they are gone.  And yet, the 5th Century prophet in this chapter is careful not to exclude the Diaspora Jews from the grand narrative God is weaving.  He seems to have an assurance that they still have a vital role to play.  The prophet is reminded of a promise God made to an ancient ancestor…”back in the glory days”… when he spoke to Abraham in Genesis, he made it explicitly clear that Abraham would be blessed, and that through Abraham all the nations of the earth would be blessed.

  This was spinning through the prophet’s mind as he wrote Isaiah 61.  In trying to reorient  his faith to the changing circumstances, in lamenting the hundreds of thousands of Jews that could not or chose not to return, what was to become of God’s people?  God’s promise to Abraham?

  Maybe this was exactly what God wanted.

  This “exile” – this humiliation and defeat – was exactly what God needed to propel the Jews out into every town and village and empire on earth. Like blowing on the head of a dandelion, the exile kicked the Jews out of the house, and put them unknowingly on a mission trip!

  How did that mission go?  Well – with no Temple to worship at, Jews began meeting in their homes for prayer and began studying the Torah as households.  Soon, they began setting aside parts of their house and then whole houses for prayer – they called these synagogues (Hebrew for “gathering together”).  They were public discussion forums on fearing God, and living a holy life.

  A few hundred years later, their Messiah came – but he came to the local region of Judea, and not all the exiled Jews had a chance to learn about the new age of grace – so more Jews, now committed to Jesus the Messiah, hit the Roman roads and traveled across the globe to tell Jews…and the rest of us… about this new Messiah King.  We are still on that project today!

  In the middle of what seemed like defeat, the writer of Isaiah 61 understood that there was a needed reorientation of his faith to understand God’s next chapter.

  —— ///

  Could you do the same? Is your faith strong enough in God’s promises that even a disaster would not shake them?  Would you fight to get things back to the way they were, or would you reinterpret what God’s promises really meant in light of the latest circumstance?

  If this prophet had demanded a hard line drawn between the remnant who returned home and those who remained abroad, we may not have had the infrastructure of prayer homes and synagogues ready for a the Gospel message to be shared across the Roman Empire.

  Keep your thoughts on the promises of God, not on “the glory days” which are always slipping away.  You’ll find his promises stick.