Being Saved a Fool

Something was missing from our study in Ephesians 4 last Sunday.  The bible calls us to forgive as Christ has forgiven us, but the passage is silent about the one who hurt us.  So what to we do about the bump-er?  What if we have hurt someone else, can’t we just ask for forgiveness and it makes it all better?

The truth about the bump-er is that he has a serious sin issue to deal with.  The back side of forgiveness and the process of reconciliation is something some offenders may never be willing to confront.  But ours is to forgive, to pray and to let God deal with the unjust.  Just as Paul had strong words for those who are unwilling to forgive others, Jesus has equally as challenging words for the bump-er.

You have heard that it was said to those of old, You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire. So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison. Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.  – Matthew 5:21-26.

For the bump-er, the road to reconciliation must begin with repentance.   Jesus warns the bump-er that any sin against another is no different than had you killed the other person.  That offense will be a barrier to worship and communion with God.  Sin is indeed the great separator, digging a canyon-like separation between us and God.  The bump-er needs to get right with the offended and bridge the gap of the offense, or God’s justice will come down hard and our worship will be hollow and in vain.

Now, the how of reconciliation is long, hard and laden with thoughtful theories.  A few thoughts and scriptures come to mind. The Bible calls us to repent, speak truth to God and ourselves about the offense and go to the offended and confess.   The word itself, reconcile, means “to change.”  The hurt and pain we have caused another us to change our ways.   We have to end the hurt and pain we are causing and ask God to change us.  We must examine ourselves.  Lamentations 3:40 tells us to examine our ways and test them, and return to the Lord.  Then, we must confess the “bump” to God and to the one who has been hurt.  James’ practical advice is to “confess your sins to each other, and pray for each other that you may be healed.” (James 5:16).

Jesus says the bump-er/bumpee relationship needs to be fixed, but the focus in Matthew 5 doesn’t linger long on the details of the changed earthly relationship, but instead turns the focus back on God.  Funny how Ephesians 4 turned our focus back on God and his great forgiveness (so we can in turn forgive others).  It should be no surprise that Matthew 5 also makes the object of reconciliation with the bumpee all about our relationship to God.  If our obedience to God in worship is to mean anything to Him, we cannot allow our sin against another to continue, lingering unresolved.

Seems too simple doesn’t it?  We forgive because we are forgiven and we repent to be restored.  Our proper understanding and perspective on how we relate to one another is a reflection of our proper understanding and relationship to the God of the universe.

Bump-ers and Bumpees unite!  Let’s not let anger, hurt and grudges keep us from knowing God’s forgiveness and the joy of a  relationship and communion with Him.

See you Sunday as we worship together,

Roger

It’s funny how easily we say “thank you” to God for his great mercy and grace, but then how easily we then take credit for the free gifts and good stuff God is doing in our lives.  God has been trying to teach me this in some not so subtle ways lately.

I am constantly being reminded that there is nothing I have done nor is there anything I can do to earn my position in Christ.  By God’s grace and love we were changed, we are being changed and we will be changed, and we can take NO credit for it. But oh how I do try to take the credit for what God is doing in me.  I pat myself on the back.  I seek the approval of others.  I then reach up and try to show God proudly – “look what I did/made/said/prayed/sacrificed for you.  See, God, I just grabbed my bootstraps, pulled hard and got some good stuff done all for you!”

But in Paul’s letter to the church at Galatia, we are reminded that our only joy, passion and our only boast should be in the cross of Christ.  Galatians 6:14 challenges us -  “May it never be that I would boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.”

Pastor and theologian, John Piper, said it best when he said it this way:

One of the reasons we are not as Christ-centered and cross-saturated as we should be is that we have not realized that everything – everything good and every thing bad that God turns for the good of his redeemed children was purchased by the death of Christ for us. We simply take life and breath and health and friends and everything for granted. We think it is ours by right. But the fact is that it is not ours by right.  We are doubly undeserving of it…  And who bought these gifts for us? Jesus Christ. And how did he purchase them? By his blood.

That’s the picture of God’s grace, his unmerited favor upon us, given to us by and for no other reason than than the cross.  This week as we worship and remember Christ’s sacrifice as we celebrate communion, let’s be reminded that his grace is indeed sufficient and that we can praise God, thank him in humble awe and boast of no one and nothing else but in Christ and in his redemptive work for us on the cross.

February 7, 2010 Set List for Church on Mill

Awake My Soul (McCracken) – This song is a few years old and originally was recorded by Caedmon’s Call.   They lyrics are theologically rich and pierced me as God’s been working on me in recent weeks.  It is a song that cries out our boast in Christ and humbly asks God to awaken us to His work in and through us, not our own efforts.

Your Grace is Enough (Maher) – At COM we have long loved this song, even before it hit the Worship Top 25.  It is a great reminder of God’s sufficiency and the great gifts of his love and mercy.

Every Move I Make (Ruis) -We have to give God the credit for every move we make.  Without him, our lives and our praise are just noisy and chaotic.

You Are Here (DeShazo and Neale) – God’s promise is that where two or three of us are gathered in His name, He is there with us.  The reality is that if we are followers of Christ, God is always with us – his Spirit lives inside us.  But this song is a great reminder of God’s presence and our thankfulness for his presence with us.  The rest of this live album, Shine Out, by Michael Neale and the People’s Church is a great collection of worship songs.

Mighty to Save (Fielding and Morgan) – Thank God Almighty that He saved you and me!

Man of Sorrows (Bliss) – A couple of weeks ago, Pastor Chuck talked about a big word called propitiation.  This means that Jesus took God’s wrath for us.  He took our guilty verdict upon himself and took it to the cross.  Isaiah’s prophecy about the coming Messiah talks about this same idea and calls Jesus the “man of sorrows” as Jesus would be despised and would bear our griefs.   And so we say…

Jesus, Thank You (Scezebel) – I hope this song is becoming one of our favorites as we say thank you to Jesus!

For many of us, Christmas is all about the food, and in the Wood family my sisters and I all celebrate our birthdays in December.  Cake was in abundance and it is no shock that those sweet Decembers birthed in me an affinity for all things confectionery, especially cake frosting.  This week for my birthday, a friend gave me a copy of a new cake cook book.  If you are so inclined, check out All Cakes Considered and enjoy (I’m already one recipe ahead of you).

One of the things that I love about baking a cake is the utter transformation of a few lonely, humdrum ingredients into this amazing sweet, soft and delicious frosting delivery device.

Jesus and the apostle Paul both used food to talk about spiritual things and several times the bible talks about bread and yeast.  But give me a bit of leeway here and let’s consider the preparation and baking of a cake as being an illustration of how God is changing your life and mine.  We get tossed into this a pan of a new life in Christ, raw and kind of gooey.  The gospel gives us all the ingredients for life abundant and eternal – His righteousness, a clean heart, justification, the Holy Spirit in us, etc.  Yet, we are not mature, ready and fully formed to the shape and design of the pan.  Then, this sticky bowl of potential and promise, is pushed into oven.  Here, the refining work of heat and time does the hard work.  It is that heat and time that ultimately brings about the change.  As the timer buzzes, we come out of the heat and time of this life and are presented as mature, complete and perfect in Christ.  Jesus saved us but it is the the fires and just the right amount of time in the oven changes us (and the cake) completely.

This week we celebrate worship and advent celebration is about the joy of Christmastime and the power of God to transform our lives, everyday.  And remember, this joy isn’t about our happiness or an artificial smile on our faces, true joy is about God’s influence on our heart, no matter the circumstance.  That’s where the heat and time come in.  None of us truly enjoy the flames of suffering and the pressures of great change in our lives, and all of us are learning patience.  But the joy of the reward and the promise of the harvest (of cake) is where God’s transformation power takes hold and works on us until completion.  This process, though sometimes painful and at times it seems without end or reward, gives us true joy.  God’s constant and certain transformation of those who belong to Him is something sweeter than any three layer chocolate cake.

Can’t you just taste it?

I’m not promising a piece of cake as we worship this week, but I am thrilled about God’s plans for our worship.  We will hear stories of transformation, we will hear from our children about what God is teaching them, we will study God’s word and we will sing songs together.  I hope you can join us this week and be excited about what God is doing to transform your life, everyday.  Our set list for Sunday follows:

Roger Wood

Blessed Be Your Name (Redman) – One of the standards of our worship, Pastor Chuck mentioned it last week in his sermon.  It’s not a Christmas carol, but this reminder of our joy and praise as God is transforming us and changing us is never out of season. The lyric is a lament but that attitude in our worship is one we can so easily overlook.

Feliz Navidad (Feliciano) This may seem an odd selection for our worship, but the simplicity of the bilingual lyric reminds us that our Christmas greetings and encounters should not be superficial.  As believers, we need to take wishing someone a Merry Christmas from the “bottom of our hearts”  as serious, kingdom business.  It’s probably the one time of year that our daily encounters with coworkers, fellow students, friends, neighbors and complete strangers can be seasoned with salt and light.  Greet someone with Merry Christmas from the bottom of your heart.

Angels We Have Heard On High (Barnes, Chadwick) – What great joy we know because of our Savior’s birth!  We sing Gloria, in excelsis, Deo!  We sing Glory to God in the Highest!

The Glorious Impossible (Cartee) – This is one of my new favorite seasonal classics and we will sing it a few times as Christmastime draws near.   I first think it’s important you don’t misunderstand the title of the song.  It’s poetic and a reference to a Madeleine L’Engle story title.  Click on this link to read an interview where the songwriter discusses the “Glorious Impossible”. It isn’t that we are singing about how God can’t do something, we are praising God because he did the impossible, what we could never do for ourselves – He came to us and he redeemed us.  In my opinion, few other songs capture this great truth and  impact of the incarnation, and then carry that through to help us praise God for sending Jesus to suffer and die for us.  The great news of the birth of our savior is meaningless unless we understand the Good News – that God sent Jesus to redeem us from sin by dying on the cross.  And so we sing “Hallelujah”.

This week we share in our advent time by being prepared for Christ’s coming and we focus on our pursuit of the cross being at the core of all we do.  One of my favorite books of all time is C.S. Lewis’ classic, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.  Early in the tale, the Pevensie children stumble into the land of Narnia, a land under the control of the evil White Witch.  They quickly learn that the White Witch’s spell has made it “always winter, but never Christmas.”

What a terrible predicament!  It seems to me that our world is often without any true hope and real expectation at Christmastime (it also explains some of the let down once December 25 comes and goes).  Life without knowing the Savior is a perpetually frigid and solitary existence, no matter how much tinsel and holly we hang.  But thanks be to God that the interminable winter of our separation from God has been thawed by the work Jesus did in coming to earth, living as one of us and dying a terrible death on the cross for our sin.   As we worship God together this week, let’s prepare ourselves and make ready the way for God to work in our lives.  We needn’t be frozen in fear and despair, let’s make ready the way and celebrate Emmanuel, God with us!

Here’s the worship set list for this week, December 6:

Our Great God (Ortega, Powell) – Hallelujah, we serve a Great God!

Hark the Herald Angels Sing (Mendelssohn, Wesley) - This carol has a classic (truly) melody and some rich lyrics.   One of the deeper verses we often don’t sing at Christmas time reminds us of God’s master plan: “Mild He lays His glory by, born that man no more may die, born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth.”  God’s plan and Jesus’ obedience to the cross makes me want to sing!

Meet with Me (Heibert) - Prepare our hearts to be ready to meet with God!

Emmanuel (McGee) A simple chorus that reminds us why the promised Messiah was not just good guy and not just some eloquent prophet, Jesus was God’s son, sent to us.

Jesus Messiah (Tomlin) - A new classic that helps us remember Jesus’ deity and humanity.  Literally translated “Jesus Messiah” means the Lord is Salvation, the anointed one.  He is so much more than just a guy.

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel (Coffin, Helmore, Neale) - A carol we know but not one of the popular favorites even though it should be.  Jesus, the anointed one, has come to rescue us from the clutches of sin and death.  Rejoice, God is with us!

Last Christmas we put up a parchment banner above a window in our family room and the script reads, “Merry Christmas.”  We forgot to take it down in January and once the sweltering spring temperatures rolled around, we just kept the sign up.  It lasted through the long summer and into the fall.   Then, last week, when we erected our tree and trimmed the house, the sign once again appropriate.  All year long, that simple banner reminded me that we want it to always be Christmas in our home and in our hearts.   See you Sunday, Roger

God is leading us to a better understanding of His plan for our congregation (and for all of us) in the coming year. Last week we learned about five pursuits. Here, in these five things, we are desperately and prayerfully seeking Him, both individually and as a church. Let’s remember the five pursuits Pastor Chuck helped us with last week:

1. Faithful to scripture
2. Gospel-centered
3. Devoted to each other
4. Transformation minded
5. Passionately concerned for both our immediate community and the world.

This week, God is going to check our hearts and prepare us for these five foci. Psalms 51:17 says that “the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” Our plans, our great ideas, and our focus on these five concepts are all empty unless we do so with a contrite heart. Our “sacrifice of praise” means nothing to God when we come with proud, sinful and worldly hearts.

As we worship this week, my prayer is for God to rid me of sin and distraction from His plan and that I come broken. Such preparation seems exactly opposite of how we gear up for earthly pursuits. Expecting church to always “pump us up” or for a Sunday service to be like a pep rally is misguided and limits what God can do when we gather together. Our worship this week and God’s message to us will center around coming to Him with that broken and contrite heart.

Here’s this week’s set list.

Call to Worship – A Mighty Fortress (Jarnagin, Neale)
None of us would care to come to expose the depths our depravity if we were not first reminded of God’s protection and security. Salvation has delivered us from death and now we can come to God unfettered by the yoke of sin. This song prepares us to worship God in total dependence upon Him.

O Praise Him (Crowder) – This song puts us in a right position as we worship. He is so holy and blameless, we have no other choice but praise his name. This song is a reminder of God’s transcendence and holiness. That means He is higher than all things and he cannot even look upon sin.

Create in Me a Clean Heart (Green) – Straight from Psalm 51, this 1980s classic so simply reminds us to fall on our knees and ask that God work in us. We are helpless and sinful.

Lead Me to the Cross (Fraser (Hillsong)) – Our only hope in this helplessness begins and ironically was completed at the cross. This prayerful song is a cry to God to push us to confronting and confessing that of “first importance” – the work and of Christ on the cross.

All I Have is Yours (Elliott/Giles) – My new-found fondness for some of Sojourn Music’s worship stuff continues and why/how someone hasn’t written this song before, I do not know. So often we simply sing a song about God’s sovereignty and providence, and do not really think about the words. But few songs help us better understand His sovereignty and our humble position as His creation. Even fewer songs help teach us about how we show our thankfulness and humility in our giving. This is a song puts our giving into a rich and wonderful perspective as we commit and acknowledge that all we have belongs to God.

Worship In Our Giving – All I Have Is Yours

Join us as we worship God in spirit and in truth.

Here’s the set list for October 25 at Church on Mill. It’s going to be an incredible Sunday this week as God is going to challenge us with some vision-casting, goal setting and ideas for the future. Our prayer is to hear His voice through Pastor Chuck and understand our role in how God intends to continue to use Church on Mill. Exciting stuff.

Come Now Is The Time To Worship (Doerkson) – Right now is the time we worship. Kick starting a service with this kick in the head helps me remember that anytime is the right time to give honor and thanks to God. It’s our job now and into eternity, worshiping the living God will be our eternal reward.

The New Song We Sing (Andrews) – This is a great call to worship that reminds us that God has put a new song in our mouths. It both praises God for his mighty work and leads us straight to the cross as our place of redemption and justification.

You Are Here (Neale/the People’s Church) – This worship album really has given me great encouragement and challenge. This song uses one simple idea – God is here with us. He’s here because He promised He would be. Because of Christ’s death on the cross, we have access and He’s here with us. And, He brings with Him all of those good things – grace, mercy, love

Scripture Reading – II Thessalonians 3:1-5

My Faith Has Found A Resting Place – This old hymn has come to mean much to me in recent months. The chorus rings so true, “I need no other argument, I need no other plea. It is enough, that Jesus died, and that he died for me.”

Communion Time and Reflection – Often a bit of quiet during our corporate time has a profound impact on many. (It also has a great humbling effect on the worship leader and team when someone says “thank you for having quiet time during worship today, it was so important to me as I talked to God.” In other words, thanks for shutting up so I could hear God speak!

Before The Throne Of God (Bancroft) – There are few modern hymns that so eloquently and accurately speak of our deplorable and depraved condition and God’s redemptive cure. The cross. The power of His blood. Our debt. His purchase. Our position in Him. The priesthood of the believer. All of these critical theologies are packed into this rich and wonderful hymn.

Whether its the season of life or the absolute blank canvas of youth, the music that we listen to and love from our adolescence sticks. It was the Spring of 1985 and an acquaintance handed me two cassettes: U2 and the Altar Boys. Under a Blood Red Sky and GLM played in my Kmart walkman-wannabe player over and over and over again. It’s no wonder that U2 stuck hard. Last night, I was reminded how those songs and even some new ones still stick.

In the early moments of the concert, I heard God speak and remind me of His great love. Even amongst tens of thousands of folks, God reminded me of his masterful plan: the cross was the means and love was (and still is) His motivator. As Bono crooned, I listened and prayed that 60,000 of my fellow concert goers were understanding God’s master plan for redemption of the world wrapped up in this one U2 lyric:

Only love, only love can leave such a mark
But only love, only love can heal such a scar
Justified, till we die you and I will magnify,
Oh, oh Magnificent, magnificent, oh, oh

Only love, only love can leave such a mark
But only love, only love unites our hearts
Justified, till we die you and I will magnify,
Oh, oh Magnificent, magnificent, magnificent

I have been put to death on the cross with Christ; still I am living; no longer I, but Christ is living in me; and that life which I now am living in the flesh I am living by faith, the faith of the Son of God, who in love for me, gave himself up for me. – Galatians 2:20