When I don't know what to do

One of the things that has been on my mind lately is the overwhelming feeling that I am completely at loss with what to do in my ministry and in personal situations for which I have no answers. Yesterday in prayer before our choir rehearsal, the words of this song that I've heard only a couple of times started to ring in my head and lifted my spirit. I hope that they are of encouragement to one of you.

One of the only things that I am sure of these days is that my job as a minister is to speak directly to people like me that have uncertainty looming in their lives. This is an especially important ministry in our city where everybody puts on the facade of having everything about their lives in order and nothing is wrong. The silent struggles with faith, finances, family, and the future are things that we as a society almost never admit to and so my hope is that this song will be of encouragement to you as it has been to me.

It is from Tommy Walker's "Breakthrough" album and here are the lyrics to it:

When I Don't Know What To Do

Tommy Walker WeMobile Music ©2005 CCLI #4556332

Verse 1

Lord I surrender all to Your strong and faithful hand

In everything I will give thanks to You

I'll just trust Your perfect plan

Chorus

When I don't know what to do

I'll lift my hands

When I don't know what to say

I'll speak Your praise

When I don't know where to go

I'll run to Your throne

When I don't know what to think

I'll stand on Your truth

When I don't know what to do

Verse 2

Lord I surrender all

Though I'll never understand

All the mysteries around me

I'll just trust your perfect plan

Bridge

As I bow my knee

Send Your perfect peace

Send Your perfect peace Lord

As I lift my hands

Let Your healing come

Let Your healing come to me

You can check out Drew Grounds' version on youtube below or listen to the original HERE

Justified

Justified me

Glorified me

Paid my ransom and

I've been redeemed by his blood

Because of calvary

I've been made free

Despite my enemy

I thank God I'm justified

What happened to the prayer?

Let me state the things that we can agree about concerning prayer

1. Prayer is an important cornerstone in the life of any Christian

2. Prayer is an important cornerstone in the life and health of any Church

3. An investment of prayer is necessary for an effective, spirit-filled and life changing ministry

4. It is important to have a personal prayer life

5. It is important to gather together in prayer because there is power in the unified prayer of the children of God as we see throughout scripture

So why is it difficult to get people to gather together to pray? Why must we beg, guilt, bribe and prod people into gathering together to spend time with the source of all life, strength and power?

Every time I have read the words to the post on this blog called "I have a dream", I am overwhelmed by the undeniable reality that it will remain a dream until the members of the worship ministry make prayer a priority...

Several years from now will we look at the month of September 2009 as an anomaly in which we had prayer gatherings every week or shall we look back on it as the birth of a prayer movement in the worship ministry that ushered a new season of God's transformational work in Woodvale?

I would like to say this to everyone of you that takes the time to read this blog:

Every picture of a preferred future for this church - Woodvale - that does not involve the collapse and total demise of the church is not achievable without prayer. Do you want to see more people come to Christ during our services and outreaches? Do you want to have a deeper and more meaningful sense of God's presence in our corporate gatherings? Do you want to see our congregation released in unrestrained worship? Do you want to see people hunger and thirst for more of God? Do you want to see Woodvale's impact on her community increase in leaps and bounds? Do you want to see your pastors take risks and challenge the church to leave their comfort zones? NONE OF THESE THINGS IS ACHIEVABLE WITHOUT PRAYER!!

So my question to you all is this: What is going to happen after September 2009? Are we going to get to some point in the not to distant future and ask the question,

"What happened to the prayer?"

Help Me Believe

Verse 1

I wanna believe

But I'm having a hard time seeing past what I see right now, I see right now

I wanna be free

But when I try to fly I realize I don't know how, no one showed me how

Wish I could see

That this mess I'm in will really work out for my good, you said it would

So, if you can hear me,

Can you give me a sign cause I dont feel you like I should, please if you could

My faith is almost gone, I can't hold on much longer, take this cup from me

Chorus

Help me Believe

Can I believe

Let Me believe

I wanna believe

I'm no good on my own, please give me another chance

Its hard to believe in what I can't see

to give you my will cause you're whats better for me

you can look in my eyes and see I wanna believe, believe, believe, believe

Verse 2

I wanna believe

If I never hear Im sorry I can let it go, gotta let you go

Cause, its killing me.

Jesus you know how it feels cause you've been hurt before, dont wanna hurt no more

Im trying to hear you speak, but my heart is growing weaker, take this cup from me

Verse 3

I wanna believe

When I close my eyes on this side I'll wake up with you, more in love with you

And, and finally,

You will say my race it is over and my work is through, cause I believed in you

I know dark nights will come and some days there'll be no sunshine and you're too far to see

Never would have made it

Uncommon sense - Where Life and Faith meet

Last week, I spoke at my previous church and shared from a passage in Matthew 5 that is an account of some of Jesus' teaching that greatly challenges me. Here is the text from the message that I brought:

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Ever since I agreed to come and share this worship service with Greenbelt several weeks back, I have been filled with excitement over the opportunity. For those of you that do not know me, the funny accent that you hear is as a result of 20 years in Uganda and I find myself excited to be here for nearly the same reasons that I get excited about going to Uganda.

I first came to work at Greenbelt in late 2003 in a position that was 20 hours a week and even though most of you did not know it then, those months were a time of incredible healing for me. If you have never immigrated to another country, you do not know how incredibly difficult it can be to have all your experience - both professional and life experience - valued as zero... especially for somebody like myself who had taken great pride in the work that I had done to improve the lives of people in some of the world’s least developed countries. More than taking great pride in my work, I love to create moments where people can connect with God through music and yet until I came to greenbelt, the answer to my request to join the worship teams of the churches I had attended had been no.

Greenbelt is a church at which I have made some deep friendships and I am extremely thankful to God for the friends that I made here. Even though I had made some deep friends by the time I came to work here, their words of encouragement did little to lift me out of the funk I was in because of the constant rejection I received both in the workplace and in the communities of faith. By handing me the job of worship leader and coordinator which eventually came to be a full-time worship pastor position (something I was highly unqualified for and proved it over and over again), it was a powerful statement of acceptance of the gifts that God had placed in me that I so desperately wanted to use and of my ability to be a contributing member of this community. It took me some time to heal from it all and I made some HUGE mistakes in my relationships with people here, but God’s work of healing was evident through the unconditional acceptance of the members of this congregation and just like I said on my last sunday here, I will ALWAYS talk about Greenbelt Baptist in glowing terms not just because my close friends go here, but because of the healing and restoration that happened in my life during the time I was here.

When I started the numerous series of interviews for the position I now hold, there was continual amazement at the fact that a church - ANY church - had hired me as a worship pastor without the necessary education and credentials for the position. During those interviews, I must have said at least 100 times, “I have stopped trying to make sense of how God works”. It really makes no sense in a culture that places a premium on qualification that somebody who is unqualified by the agreed-upon standards would get placed in a position of authority - especially one that is of spiritual leadership... TWICE!

This is not just true for my life, but for the lives of many people that I know in Canada and all over the world. The more you peruse through the bible, the more you come to realize that God is constantly in the business of turning what is considered to be “common sense” on it’s head in order that his work may be done and it is all the more evident as you look at the characters in the bible that he chose to associate with and work through.

It therefore makes sense - by logical extension - that when God walked this earth, his teaching, illustrations and challenges about the interaction between our faith and our lives that SHOULD form the basis of our faith communities would not be filled with regular thinking - common sense. Rather, it would be filled with UNCOMMON sense... and Jesus does not disappoint!

Chapters 5 - 7 of the book of Matthew contain a compilation of teachings and sayings that Jesus made that have famously been dubbed “The sermon on the mount” and have come to epitomize his moral teaching - the intersection between faith and life. As many of you know, this portion of the book of Matthew is (and has historically been) widely regarded to contain the central tenets of Christian discipleship and has been made famous in contemporary society by the adherence of of many religious and moral thinkers such as Leo Tolstoy (a russian writer and philosopher), Mahatma Ghandi (an Indian political and spiritual leader), and Martin Luther King Jr.

Many of the teachings in this “Sermon on the Mount” are in fact UNCOMMON sense, but they are regularly distorted by many in our churches and in North America’s post-christian society so much that even though we may be familiar with the wording, we may not realize how still today, the teachings of Jesus back then are still UNCOMMON sense today even though we may not think they are.

I will focus the rest of my thoughts in the remaining time I have this morning on a few verses in Chapter 5 of Matthew’s gospel and I invite you to turn to it in your bibles if you have them and if not, you can follow along with the text on the screen.

Matthew 5: 38 - 42

“You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.

And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.

Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

The first words of this section are a reminder of something that Jesus assumes his listeners already know,

"You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’

This principle was the basis of much of near Eastern justice, and you can find references to it’s origin in Exodus 21: 23 & 24, Leviticus 24: 19 &20 and Deuteronomy 19: 21. Everything that I have read about this particular principle was that it was put in place to restrain unlimited blood vengeance so that the damages one could expect for wrongs done would be considered proportional, equal and fair.

As much as this dictum was instituted to ensure justice, more often than not it led to a tit-for-tat kind of thinking that permeated all relationships and even to this day with a supposedly improved justice system, this attitude is still pervasive. So the very thing that was supposed to ensure that violence did not escalate became a favorable environment for the perpetuation of revenge and so fulfilled what a great philosopher once said, “Built into the foundation of every great idea are the seeds of its demise”. This eye-for-an-eye thinking creates an inescapable cyclical, restrictive way to live that in the end fails to keep things “even” and robs us of our freedom making us bound to a perpetual cycle of action and reaction.

I am persuaded that this is the point that Jesus is trying to make by making reference to what was already established as law and rewriting it in a way that must not have made sense back then and to this day continues to be UNCOMMON sense. And so in this account of his teaching, he uses three illustrations of direct personal offense to illustrate how this new way of thinking should impact and transform the lives of those that follow him. These three illustrations that Jesus uses strike particularly close to home for me because when I experience any of these personally or when I see somebody going through them, I get MAAAAAAD and have been known to react in a, shall we say, less than civil manner.

The first one is:

“Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”

When I first read the phrase “do not resist an evil person” I did not quite understand this until some digging helped me to see that it is set up in contrast to the previous line and so could mean that we are not to pay evil back with evil or that we are not to resist evil with evil means. The strike on the cheek was not just about physical violence, but in the culture was considered to be a great insult and so by extension, not only are we to resist paying evil back with evil, we are to take it one step further and refrain from trading personal insults or physical abuse. The reason I am extremely sensitive to personal insults is because the country I grew up in - Uganda - is split along ethnic sectarian lines. Everybody, and I do mean EVERYBODY had to deal with insults that were usually extremely personal, and people usually made fun of your language, skin color, accent, social status or even access to education - things that you could not even change! I love Canada and I am continually impressed at the lengths to which most of us go to make sure that we are not offensive and yet even in a country with a cornerstone value of tolerance, there are still rare pockets of antagonism across racial lines and I even though I know that I should not, more often than not I am unable to refrain from trading insults or getting physical when I am insulted or see somebody as the victim of racial abuse. Turn the other cheek? Not pay evil with evil? Resist trading personal insults? PUH-LEASE!!

As you can tell, this is an area in which I still need to grow.

Jesus goes on to say:

“And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.”

In this context, I am led to believe that this lawsuit that Jesus is talking about is not based on truth, but on trumped up charges.

Some of you may know that my father retired a year and a half ago after over 35 years as a pastor. Somehow, on an extremely small salary, my parents managed to scrape together the money to purchase the land on which they now live and as they were making preparations to build their retirement home and the leadership training centre that shall be housed on the property, they got dragged to court by somebody that claimed that the land they were preparing for construction was in fact her inheritance and that it had been acquired through fraudulent methods. If you knew my parents, you would know that this was a ridiculous claim and I was especially incensed because they are not wealthy at all. This land purchase had taken EVERYTHING they had scraped together. During the time that we were walking through the court hearings and investigation, to add insult to injury, she went so far to build a house on the property which, thankfully, we were given permission to destroy once it was confirmed that her lawsuit was empty. I was so elated at the court’s decision that I wanted to pick up a sledge hammer on the way back home and personally destroy the house because this lady had kept our family in court or over 5 years! My parents intervened before I could go ahead with my plan and they told me that God had spoken to them to purchase another piece of property - equal in size to their own - for the lady that had dragged them to court for over 5 years. I was FLABBERGASTED! This made absolutely NO SENSE in my opinion and to this day I continue to shake my head at their offer. Supposedly, God confirmed his word to them by leading them to this very passage in Matthew 5. Jesus’ terms of justice and retribution are on a completely different playing field than the justice that I thought my parents deserved and they were willing to allow their faith to intersect with their lives and do the unthinkable in an eye-for-an-eye construct.

I honestly do not know that I could be as forgiving as my parents were and this is another area in which I definitely need to grow.

The third illustration that Jesus uses concerns another situation that makes my blood boil. He says:

“If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.”

I initially did not understand the gravity of this until some digging helped me find out that a Roman soldier could legally make you carry something (usually all his military baggage) for him for one mile. Obviously this had to have been an unbelievable proposition to the people of Jesus’ time that lived in a state of perpetual enemy domination by the Romans. This therefore could mean that Jesus was basically speaking about the misuse of power and instructing those that listened to him to go beyond finding ways to retaliate against those that would abuse their power.

We live in a world in which those in power lord it over those without power and our governments and power structures are rife with corruption and injustice. Usually the people that suffer because of the misuse of power and positions of authority are the very people that those in power are supposed to be looking out for. In the country of my descent, the most recent scandal has been the misappropriation of an enormous grant that was to have been used for research and procurement of drugs for malaria and HIV. While people die by the thousands daily, the perpetrators of this crime are living in lavish estates free of any charges that could be leveled against them. Right here in North America the big news is that there are companies that are being bailed out by the taxpayers and yet the funds that are received are not even being used for the purposes for which they were given... and NOBODY is going to jail for that! The world over is rife with injustice and I get physically choked up every time I have to speak about it because I am unable to mete the same amount of distress to those that have power and misuse it.

I understand at a cerebral level that what Jesus is trying to help people like myself see through this UNCOMMON sense teaching is that by walking an extra mile, I am actually saying, "You may think that you are forcing me to do this, as if I have no choice. However, I choose to to show you that I am free from your tyranny and that I freely do this, because I serve an even higher Authority and I will go with you even further than you expect me to." I understand this at a cerebral level, but I struggle to make my head and my heart... my faith and my life intersect so that I may live it out as well.

Verse 42 of Chapter 5 says this:

“Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.”

Jesus’ charge to his listeners to be generous is an extension of the contrasts that he has been trying to show in the previous phrases about slapping, coats and walking. Generosity is a strong statement of a person’s willingness to do more than just focus on themselves and their perceived injustices and look out to the world and counter injustice, evil and poverty with generosity. So not only should we refrain from paying evil back with evil in ones life, we should look to the lives and communities around us that may be suffering under the weight of injustice and evil and through the power of generosity, pay evil with good.

As a small side note, I’ve recently began to wonder whether this is in fact the ultimate test of our acceptance of Jesus’ UNCOMMON sense teaching. If you concern yourself with the eye-for-an-eye construct and get trapped by the cycle of revenge, you are not able to see the evil around you save for the one that you perceive is done to yourself. By turning this construct on it’s head, not only do you break free of the cycle of revenge, but you become a liberator in the lives of others not just by your example, but by the good you proactively do in their lives and I think that this is what Jesus was talking about when in another instance he says that we, his followers, shall be known by our fruit; by our ability to do good in the face of evil and injustice.

So if you were to leave this service this morning and reflect on everything that was shared, I would hope that it would sound something like this:

Jesus’ charge to us as his followers is that as our faith intersects with our life, we are not to repay evil with evil, but good with evil. Why? The greatest force for Justice in the face of evil is not the punishment that should be issued, but the good that we do in response that should overwhelm the evil and its intent.

During my time as a staff member at Greenbelt, I started to have a conversation with a lady who eventually became my wife about the overly prescriptive nature of the teaching common in evangelical circles. I had not noticed that I too had become a perpetuator of this prescriptive kind of teaching that sets up the teacher or pastor as the source of information and life lessons by which the congregation should then pattern their lives. I believe that this is the reason why congregations get severely devastated when their leaders fail because by constantly telling people how to live their lives, leaders create the unspoken extension that their lives and choices are the example by which the congregations should live. The folly of such a construct is revealed when the flawed, human nature of the leader causes them to falter in their judgement.

Eventually when I screwed up - and I did screw up a lot while I was here - the thing that was always thrown back in my face was that I had no right to stand before the congregation and prescribe how they should live their lives if I myself was not the greatest example. I was stripped of my moral authority to speak authoritatively into people’s lives and so I realized that I would have to change the tone of the messages I brought and move from an elevated position in which I possessed all the answers to the questions of life and faith and bring myself right down to the level of those that I addressed as a person that was just like them - investigating, growing and learning what it means to be a passionate follower of Jesus.

And so this morning I stand before you and all I can do is share with you the challenge that Jesus’ UNCOMMON teaching has been to me. I dare not tell you how to live it out or mention things that should challenge you because as I have admitted earlier and will admit again, everything that I have spoken about is something that I know at a cerebral level but I’m still working on at making what I know and how I live congruent.

If there is a challenge this morning, or a call to action, it would be to go back to this passage of scripture in Matthew 5 and individually see how Jesus’ teaching affects you personally and allow him to use you in extraordinary ways to be a force of good and justice in a world pervaded by evil and injustice. I’m certain that I do not know for sure how that plays out in anyone’s life this morning, but I am confident that as we wholeheartedly seek to allow Jesus’ unconventional teaching, which forms the basis of our faith, to intersect with our lives, God shall ignite in our hearts and minds what we need to do.

Faith...

Three weeks ago, we had a worship team retreat and I shared on the topic of faith as an encouragement and area of building us up in God. This is the text from my talk

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Is God good and can he be permanently trusted with our lives?

As people that call ourselves Christ-followers, we like to think and speak of ourselves as “people of faith” and yet more often than not, we do not necessarily count the cost of what it means to be people of faith. One of the things that I have had to struggle through and learn for myself is that there is in fact a risk that we take by being people of faith and placing the fate of our lives in the hands of somebody else other than ourselves. I think that part of the reason why Christianity is such a stumbling block to many is because of the charge to put one’s life in somebody else’s hands.

Society today is very self centered and the great deception of self centeredness is the notion that you can be self sufficient that you are therefore completely in charge of the events of your life. It is laughable to even think that there is a God up there silently behind the scenes orchestrating the events of the world. And so as Christ-followers we have to learn to buck the commonly held school of thought and hand the purpose and direction of our lives over to somebody other than ourselves.

This, I think, is part of what describes the so-called “leap of faith” - a paradigm shift in the understanding of who is in control of your life and for some people, that leap is too daunting.

If putting your faith and trust in God is a risk, therefore, then persons of faith take a huge risk. Not only do they take the risk of trusting in him, they take the risk of obeying him when he comes at them with outrageous requests and in the times that they call out to him, they take the risk of waiting for him in the hopes that he will do the right thing at the right time. Unfortunately, the more we become professional Christians, the less in tune we are to the risk of faith and the greater the tendency to take our lives back into our own hands.

The thoughts I shared earlier about the descent of a believer into a place of mistrust also have the propensity to wear away at our faith in the fact that God is in charge of our lives and his plan for us is good. The less convinced we are about our faith, the more we take back the control of our lives and instead of laying down our lives in risky faith - the kind that God calls us to - we start to do things the way we originally did and play things safe.

As believers in God, we have to bring ourselves to the point where we are certain that we can trust Jesus with our lives and with our futures even without the guarantee of success. In his word, he guarantees it, but our faith and trust in him has to grow to the point that we can say with confidence “Even if he slay me, yet will I still trust him”.

This is obviously easier said than done and in truth, the journey to this place of certainty about God’s character and plan for our lives is not an easy one.

In chapter 11 of hebrews, the writer makes mention of a bunch of people of faith. What the writer does not mention, however, is their transformational journey to the place of complete faith in God. The character that I love investigating and thinking about the most is Abraham and I would like to read the remarks that the writer makes about the faith of Abraham in this chapter of the book.

Please follow along with me from verse 8 of Chapter 11.

By faith Abraham, even though he was past age—and Sarah herself was barren—was enabled to become a father because he considered him faithful who had made the promise. And so from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore.

All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.

By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had received the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, even though God had said to him, "It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned." Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead, and figuratively speaking, he did receive Isaac back from death.

Listen also to what Paul writes about Abraham when he is speaking about his walk of faith to the Romans in chapter 4 of his letter.

The story of Abraham, his journey of faith and his interaction with God can be better seen in its context in Genesis and I would like to pick out just a few of those moments of interaction to give you a little bit of a snapshot into the life of this man of faith. So walk with me through Genesis and let’s start at chapter 12 of the book.

Genesis 12: 1 - 8

The LORD had said to Abram, "Leave your country, your people and your father's household and go to the land I will show you.

"I will make you into a great nation

and I will bless you;

I will make your name great,

and you will be a blessing.

I will bless those who bless you,

and whoever curses you I will curse;

and all peoples on earth

will be blessed through you."

So Abram left, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Haran. He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all the possessions they had accumulated and the people they had acquired in Haran, and they set out for the land of Canaan, and they arrived there.

Abram traveled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. The LORD appeared to Abram and said, "To your offspring [a] I will give this land." So he built an altar there to the LORD, who had appeared to him.

From there he went on toward the hills east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. There he built an altar to the LORD and called on the name of the LORD.

This is the first account of God’s interaction with Abraham. They MUST have had other interactions in the past and the only way I am able to hypothesize this is from Abraham’s reaction to God’s word to him. He obeyed.

But then something happens. All of a sudden, this man of faith who just left his home and moved far away under the presupposition that God was going to take care of him and bless him was suddenly scared when he got to Egypt. We read about this from verse 10 of the same chapter

Genesis 12: 10 - 20

Now there was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to live there for a while because the famine was severe. As he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, "I know what a beautiful woman you are. When the Egyptians see you, they will say, 'This is his wife.' Then they will kill me but will let you live. Say you are my sister, so that I will be treated well for your sake and my life will be spared because of you."

When Abram came to Egypt, the Egyptians saw that she was a very beautiful woman. And when Pharaoh's officials saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh, and she was taken into his palace. He treated Abram well for her sake, and Abram acquired sheep and cattle, male and female donkeys, menservants and maidservants, and camels.

But the LORD inflicted serious diseases on Pharaoh and his household because of Abram's wife Sarai. So Pharaoh summoned Abram. "What have you done to me?" he said. "Why didn't you tell me she was your wife? Why did you say, 'She is my sister,' so that I took her to be my wife? Now then, here is your wife. Take her and go!" Then Pharaoh gave orders about Abram to his men, and they sent him on his way, with his wife and everything he had.

What happened to this magnificent faith that the New Testament writers were talking about?

Lets take a look at another interaction between Abraham and God

Genesis 17: 1 - 8, 15 - 17

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to him and said, "I am God Almighty; walk before me and be blameless. I will confirm my covenant between me and you and will greatly increase your numbers."

Abram fell facedown, and God said to him, "As for me, this is my covenant with you: You will be the father of many nations. No longer will you be called Abram; your name will be Abraham, for I have made you a father of many nations. I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you, and kings will come from you. I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. The whole land of Canaan, where you are now an alien, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God."

God also said to Abraham, "As for Sarai your wife, you are no longer to call her Sarai; her name will be Sarah. I will bless her and will surely give you a son by her. I will bless her so that she will be the mother of nations; kings of peoples will come from her."

Abraham fell facedown; he laughed and said to himself, "Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?"

By this time, Abraham had been walking mostly in obedience to God and even though he had had a few slip ups, God ups the ante and makes a covenant with him which is the covenant that we look to as gentiles grafted into the family of God. God even takes it several ridiculous steps further and promises that he shall reverse the effect of aging in both 100 year old Abraham and his 90 year old wife to the point that they shall have a child of their own. It is so ridiculous that Abraham falls to the ground laughing.

If he were instant messaging God, he would have typed the acronym ROTFLMBO!

The writers of Romans and Hebrews make Abraham out to seem like he was a person of incredible faith, but even he struggled through moments of unbelief, disobedience, and dishonesty and yet somehow he was able to come out on the other side and really trust God to do the impossible in his life. By the pretentious standards of many in the church, his unbelief would have been intolerable and his seeming lack of answers would have been attributed to his dishonesty. However, I am persuaded that the fact that he was able to move from a place of a lack of total trust in God and move to a place where he could trust him to give him a son at over 100 years of age truly is a leap of faith and perhaps this is why his story still lives on.

You see, while your personal circumstances may seem to invalidate the promises of God, Abraham’s life tells another story. It is so easy to get people fired up with a message about God’s promises over one’s life, but the truth of the matter is that the excitement quickly wanes when the journey from promise to answer takes a little more than a few years and countless hours of prayer.

Talking in abstracts sometimes makes it seem like the lessons are not applicable, so I would like to share with you a story from my own life.

When I first moved to Ottawa, I was on FIRE for the Lord. I had been commissioned by my home church in Uganda to come to North America and be planted as a catalyst for the advancement of the Kingdom of God. I also moved to Canada to further my education in computer science, and for a little bit of adventure, but primarily because I had responded to the call that had been made from the pulpit of our church to be a part of bringing the Gospel back to the continents that brought it to Africa. However when I got here, I found that the church - in particular the church leaders - were not willing to even let this overly presumptive Ugandan man serve in any capacity on one of their teams. I will readily admit that I thought I had all the answers to all the problems besetting the church and I needed to go through a period of having the hot air removed from my balloon, but it was incredibly crushing to be told time and time again that I would not even be allowed to play the keyboard in the church that I belonged to.

When I look around me, I see congregations emptying, churches being decimated by pride and power grabbing and I can honestly say that what I see with my eyes is not encouraging. I pray weekly that we would have a service that is not a duplicate of services that we may have had in the past and even though the songs and sermon titles change, there seems to be a nagging sense of sameness that is, frankly, discouraging. All these things around be have the paralyzing effect of invalidating the promise of God to me that I would be a part of his work of transforming his church.

I have spoken about my transition to Canada quite frequently and so it is no secret that the adjustment that I had to make to my life by moving here and the dreams I had for what I wanted to do with my life had to take a back seat to what God is still taking me through. I do not say these things in order that I set myself up as the example that you should look to and pattern your lives after... I’m not the greatest role model for faith, but what I do know is that every time I have chosen to walk by faith, I have had to take the risk of placing my life, my plans and my future in God’s hands and sometimes, his plans differ greatly from mine. However, even if his plans drastically change my life, I do so because I choose to have faith in God and my faith - being sure of what I hope for and certain of what I cannot see - can only be anchored in God’s character as a good and trustworthy master.

The toughest lesson that I have had to learn and work through which is clearly mirrored in the life of Abraham is that I will never know what God can truly do until I come to the end of myself. For as long as I have the power to control the events in my life, there is always a sense in which I do not have complete hope and faith in God’s ability to work in me because I can always fall back on my own ability. I find, therefore, that God brings us periodically through situations in our life that are beyond our control to glorify himself through our lives. His glory is truly manifest when we trust him and he comes through in the stuff that only he could have done in us and our circumstances.

I’ll be the first to admit that this is a TOUGH lesson to learn because nobody wants to go to the place where total trust in God is no longer a cerebral concept, but a day-in and day-out final and only resort.

Without divulging too much detail, I will just let you know that even right now I am walking through a situation that is going to require a miracle to reach the other side of. I have tried everything that conventional wisdom says I should do and I have come up empty and so the real test of my faith is on - the test that I can be certain that God will pull me through even though I cannot see how in the world he is going to pull it off.

When I was thinking over what I should bring as a word of encouragement and refreshing to this incredible team of people, I felt increasingly that we should talk about the question of faith and seriously pose this to us this morning:

Have you settled the question that you can trust God with your business?

The reason for this question is this: the way you live your life, the choices that you make and your personal willingness to follow God, put your trust in him and cling to him even without the guarantee of success is a very telling starting point of an honest personal dialogue. More to that, in order that your faith may grow, it WILL be continually tested and therefore you have to settle the question within yourself. This testing is not because God is insecure about his place in our lives; rather it is that our faith will grow and that we shall become more firmly established in our relationship with almighty God. Listen to what James says about the trying of our faith:

James 1: 2 - 8

Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.

Friends, God CAN be trusted with our lives and even though I started out this sharing by talking about our walk of faith as if it is risky business, the truth of the matter is that there is no risk when we choose to follow God wholeheartedly. We may not always understand what he is doing, how he plans to do it or how he is going to work things out, but we can always rest in the assurance that what he promises, he will do. Just like his promises to Abraham continued to be fulfilled even long after Abraham had passed on into glory, we who serve him can rest assured that he shall work in and through our lives whether we walk this earth or whether we pass on into our rest.

Following at a distance

This is the text from the teaching I gave three weeks ago at the worship team retreat... for those of you that were not there, and for those that might want it as a recap.

Blessings!

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My family moved from St Catherine's Ontario back to Uganda in the 80’s and the country was plunged into civil war for most of the early to mid 80’s. Talk about a great time to move back home! One of the main insurgency groups - the National Resistance Movement - moved from being a rag-tag bunch of dissidents to a major military force that contained many people that defected from the army and government. Their leader was the former minister of Defense Yoweri (the Ugandan translation of the name Joel) Museveni who has been the president of Uganda since 1986 - first as a military dictator and then as an elected president.

1986 was the year when the National Resistance Movement finally overrun a major defense post about 70 km outside the capital city that then led to the quick fall of the government that had only come to power 18 months before through a military coup. During the days that followed, there was the sound of heavy shelling and gunfire throughout the city and all the schools and businesses were closed and we hunkered down in our small house and ate crackers and soup for weeks on end.

One morning, we were woken up suddenly by the sound of a huge explosion unusually close to our house and the crescendo of explosions that followed for the next 30 minutes kept building. One of my uncles who lived close to us burst into the house and yelled out, “They are going from house to house and bombing them!!”

My mother decided almost instantly that we were going to grab a few clothes and leave the house and my father, who had only recently recovered from major reconstructive surgery on his hip and leg decided that he was going to remain in his house. His exact words were, “If I die, I die!”

We were all too terrified to stay with my dad and so we left the house with my mother and found all our neighbors hastily leaving their homes - probably because of my uncle - and running to safety. I did not know where we were really going, but I assumed that it would be somewhere safe out of the range of the mortars and explosions that seemed like they were almost upon us at the time.

After about 15 minutes of running through people’s compounds and ducking under fences, trying to follow my siblings and my mother, I realized that I had been separated from them. So I tried running faster thinking that they were only a few meters ahead, but I could never seem to catch up to them and eventually realized that while I was still with a group of about 10 people, I had been separated from my family. I decided that I would stay with the people I found myself with and we ended up finding a well hidden spot in some bushes where we stayed in silence and hunger till late in the afternoon when the sound of gunfire and explosions reduced.

The people I was with did not really know my family and so were only partially helpful with me finding my way home, but I eventually did and got there at about 8.00 in the evening. Our house was still standing... in fact EVERYBODY’s house was still standing and my family was home terrified out of their minds wondering what could have happened to me. It turns out that unbeknownst to our community, the army had set up a storehouse for arms in our neighborhood that comprised mostly of families that worked for the church of Uganda, and the explosions we were hearing all day were from a stray bullet having found its way into the house and igniting the explosives. My uncle and his big mouth!

While I was relieved to learn that the situation was not more serious and that we still had a home, I was never able to get past the knowledge that I had been separated from my family and in my mind, I did not think that they had done enough to find me. Because I was not able at the time to see my separation from the family as an honest mistake, I began to see myself as an outsider - unwanted - and this continually fractured my relationship with my parents. I began to increasingly see everything that they did through the dark colored lenses of the betrayal I perceived and even though I was going along with my family, I was following at a great distance unable to bring myself back into a close relationship with them.

A few weeks ago I was studying scripture trying to put together the passion week series that we shall be having during the week leading up to Easter and as I was reading through Luke 22, I began to see part of the story in a different light. Perhaps it is because I had resurfaced the memory of my 1986 experience or something… but I felt that I saw something in the passage that I had not seen before. Let’s read through the verses that I am talking about and then I shall share some thoughts with you.

Luke 22: 47 – 62

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than a crowd showed up, Judas, the one from the Twelve, in the lead. He came right up to Jesus to kiss him. Jesus said, "Judas, you would betray the Son of Man with a kiss?"

When those with him saw what was happening, they said, "Master, shall we fight?" One of them took a swing at the Chief Priest's servant and cut off his right ear.

Jesus said, "Let them be. Even in this." Then, touching the servant's ear, he healed him.

Jesus spoke to those who had come—high priests, Temple police, religion leaders: "What is this, jumping me with swords and clubs as if I were a dangerous criminal? Day after day I've been with you in the Temple and you've not so much as lifted a hand against me. But do it your way—it's a dark night, a dark hour."

Arresting Jesus, they marched him off and took him into the house of the Chief Priest. Peter followed, but at a distance. In the middle of the courtyard some people had started a fire and were sitting around it, trying to keep warm. One of the serving maids sitting at the fire noticed him, then took a second look and said, "This man was with him!"

He denied it, "Woman, I don't even know him."

A short time later, someone else noticed him and said, "You're one of them."

But Peter denied it: "Man, I am not."

About an hour later, someone else spoke up, really adamant: "He's got to have been with him! He's got 'Galilean' written all over him."

Peter said, "Man, I don't know what you're talking about." At that very moment, the last word hardly off his lips, a rooster crowed. Just then, the Master turned and looked at Peter. Peter remembered what the Master had said to him: "Before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times." He went out and cried and cried and cried.

We all know who Peter was and from the accounts in scripture, he tends to be viewed as a passionate and borderline impulsive person. When he saw Jesus walking on water, he jumped out of the boat and gave it a try. When they ran to the tomb, even though John was faster and got there before him, John was too afraid to walk into the tomb, but Peter charged right in… and similarly in this account of the events surrounding Jesus’ arrest, Peter sprung to action and tried to defend his buddy and in the process chopped off the ear of the high priests servants.

Passionate people are often perceived as being unfeeling perhaps because they are relentless in the pursuit of their passion and yet many are actually very sensitive and so they are just as quick to get discouraged as they are to get fired up about anything especially if the object or focus of their passion shuts them down or ignores their work.

Instead of Jesus using Peter’s actions as a distraction and making a swift getaway, he instead rebukes Peter and heals one of the people that were there in the first place to arrest Jesus. If Peter was as passionate AND sensitive as we think he could have been, it makes sense that the rejection of his display of fearlessness in the face of obvious danger and arrest must have felt like humiliation.

As Jesus was led away Peter followed, but this time not in close proximity as he had been doing in the past – partly because of the guards that were taking Jesus away, but I also think because he could have been taken back by the perceived rejection from Jesus.

The more I read over this passage and thought about my own life and the betrayal I had conjured up in my mind, the more I began to see Peter’s denial of Jesus in a different light. Most commentaries I have heard about this particular part of scripture say that Peter’s denial of Jesus was rooted in his fear of being discovered. I can understand why this would be the consensus among the commentaries I have heard, but would I be wrong to hypothesize that perhaps his denial was rooted in the hurt that he felt because of how Jesus had treated him?

Put yourself in Peter’s shoes. Wouldn’t you have said, “Woman, I do not know him!” just like he did after innocently trying to defend somebody you had spent the last three years hanging out with only to be shut down? I know I would!

My experience with my family bears some resemblance to this series of events because the more I allowed the hurt that accumulated over the years to fester, the more disconnected I got from them to the point that I was ready to disown them and I ran away from home. While I never once said out loud “That is not my father, I do not know him!” I certainly thought it!

My experience with my family is no different from my experience in my Christian walk and just like Peter, there are things that have happened in my life that cause me to move from being a passionate follower of Jesus to being a distant follower disillusioned by the hurt that I may still hold over events in the past. It could be anything from the way people in the church have treated me to the petitions that I feel were ignored or even the fact that it seems like I am stuck in a situation that will not change and I am frustrated that God knows I am powerless to change anything and yet he still does not step in as I think he should. I have found myself sitting through many worship services and being both amused and annoyed at the same time at the display of affection for Jesus that is fleeting in my life because I have been following at a distance for so long. So I may continue to follow – but at an increasing distance till I finally reach the place where my previous persuasions are on such shaky ground that I am unwilling to be associated with the Savior that I may still love.

In my many journeys, I have come to discover that there are many more leaders in the church that are struggling with disillusionment than those that actually confess that it is real for them. The reason for this is because we have built our churches to revolve around personalities and so if the conviction of the leader wavers, it tends to have drastic effects on the people that are being led and so even though the leader may be struggling in their walk with God, they would be greatly loathe to admit that they in fact are no longer following closely but rather at a distance.

When I first changed career paths from Information Technologies to working as a music minister, I joined a small church that was struggling with the fact that one of their prominent and influential members was dying. Our pastor felt, at the time that we needed to have a 24-hour period dedicated to praying for him and so for 24 hours people went to his home or showed up at the church to pray for him. One week later, however, he died and everybody went into a spin… but none more than my pastor because this prayer-for-healing-thing in such a grandiose manner was not really done in the history of this conservative Baptist church. I was privy to the private struggle of a great pastor working through the discouragement and disappointment of the unanswered prayer and I know that what must have hurt the most for him is that he had felt led by God to pray for healing and then God did not heal the person we were praying for.

Just like Peter, I would not be surprised if he began to hang back and follow at a distance instead of continuing in a close and intimate relationship with Jesus.

What is your story this morning?

As ministers in Woodvale, there is an unspoken assumption that we are expected to be in a place of close intimacy with God and yet just as I am sure that there are people here in this room that are in a place of closeness, excitement and sensing God’s presence, there are those that have been hanging back for so long that the whole Christian walk is dry and meaningless. I do not know where you are in the spectrum, but this morning I felt that we should start by encouraging those who like myself have been hanging back.

I have been to enough worship team retreats to know that asking people to really admit where they are at in their walk with God is a tough thing to ask. Conventional thinking says that if you gather people together in the same place that share the same kind of experiences, they shall be more open to talking frankly about them... but instead what happens, is that there seems to be a competition to see who is the first among equals and there is little-to-no meaningful dialogue about anything. I have seen worship team retreats deteriorate in the same manner and so I want to caution against it during the times that we get to respond to the thoughts that I feel God would like us to share today. This is why I will be the first to say here in front of all of you that there are challenges in my life that I am struggling through - challenges that have caused me to follow Jesus at a distance and not as closely as I could. While I am still in this Christ walk, I openly admit that it has been a trudge and not a race as is described by Paul

So what encouragement is there for people like myself? How do we find our way back to a place of intimacy with Jesus in the face of great adversity and disappointment?

I’ll show you where I started to turn a corner and find encouragement. Turn with me to John 21 and lets read from verse 15

After breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, "Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?"

"Yes, Master, you know I love you."

Jesus said, "Feed my lambs."

He then asked a second time, "Simon, son of John, do you love me?"

"Yes, Master, you know I love you."

Jesus said, "Shepherd my sheep."

Then he said it a third time: "Simon, son of John, do you love me?"

Peter was upset that he asked for the third time, "Do you love me?" so he answered, "Master, you know everything there is to know. You've got to know that I love you."

Jesus said, "Feed my sheep. I'm telling you the very truth now: When you were young you dressed yourself and went wherever you wished, but when you get old you'll have to stretch out your hands while someone else dresses you and takes you where you don't want to go." He said this to hint at the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. And then he commanded, "Follow me."

This is probably one of the most touching stories of Jesus’ interaction with his disciples because it shows how Jesus reached out and restored Peter. Not only had Peter’s relationship with Jesus suffered the blow of possible humiliation, but I think he was also eventually wracked with guilt from the memory of his denial of Jesus. I can identify with Peter when he says “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you” - you were there when I tried to defend you and even when you shut me down and I subsequently denied you, I am still here... conflicted, but still here because I love you. I may have followed at a distance, but I still followed because I love you... Yes, Lord, you KNOW that I love you!

Just like he did with Peter, I believe that Jesus calls out to us today: “my servants at woodvale, do you love me?” I do not believe that he asks this as a redundant question... rather that he may draw us to himself through our own acknowledgment of our love for him in spite of our disappointment over previous events. As we are drawn back to him, he affirms our restoration with the renewed charge to feed his sheep.

So I must ask again: What is your story this morning?