A lot of life is a journey. Moving from one place to another, leaving one thing behind and looking forward to what’s ahead. Sometimes these journeys are physical. Actually travelling from one location to another. Other times they are relational journeys, spiritual journeys,  developmental, ideological, or emotional journeys. Some are short. Others are long and arduous. Sometimes we don’t know how long the journey will take; but that doesn’t matter. A journey isn’t really about the destination.

A journey is about the movement.

It’s about the distance travelled. Life in motion. The in-between. In a journey there are no shortcuts because the destination isn’t as important as how you arrived. We spend a lot of time in-between. Between jobs, between relationships, between events, between due dates, between experiences, between pain and healing, between what you’ve learned and are learning, between doubt and faith. These are the times in which we find ourselves having picked up and left from where we once were and travelling into the new and unknown. The journey is not as concerned with where and when we end up as it is about about what happens to us along the way. The kind of stuff that can only happen in the in-between.

Journeys challenge us.

Journeys shape us.

Journeys humble us.

A life of faith is a life lived in unending wonder, awe, joy, trust, and a willingness, like Abraham, to go forth from all that you knew to the place God shows to you. A life of faith is a life of journey.

We stop growing when we decide to remain where we are.

Settling in one place for too long is the surest way to stunt us and confine ourselves to a life of dullness, comfort, and inner-centeredness. We begin to provide for our own needs, pursue personal gain and pleasure, and trick ourselves into thinking “I have arrived.” Self assuredness and entitlement replace our need to trust and wonder. Settling is easy, comfortable, and altogether tempting.

Settling will put an end to any forward movement in your life.

We were made to keep moving. To keep being challenged. To keep pushing, as C.S. Lewis says, “further up and further in.” We were made to step forward in childlike dependence, wide eyed with wonder, discovering more and more about ourselves, our world, and our creator each day. This is journey. This is what we are made for.

“From my… work with the Hebrew of Exodus 20, two facts are clear to me: the first is that honor is not a synonym for obedience and the second is that the Decalogue is not addressed to children.”

Honouring one’s parents is not a command directed at little kids. It is a command for everyone. This is an active choice made by those who are capable of making it. Which means we can choose to follow, or not follow, the command to celebrate the worth and value of of our parents.

“When a man or woman honours their father and their mother, the LORD says ‘I ascribe it as though I dwelt with them and was honoured myself.”
- Rabbinical teaching

My family likes to laugh. We like to laugh at books and tv commercials and movies and funny stories and good jokes and the things that take themselves far too seriously;
but mostly we laugh at ourselves.
We laugh at one another’s quirks and habits and the insecure and absurd within each of us. We laugh because we understand. We laugh because we relate. We laugh because I think if we didn’t we’d probably kill each other.
Because we choose to celebrate rather than to condemn.

I don’t know, I just think this is a good way to live.

“We are human after all. Much in common after all.” – Daft Punk

This idea was sparked while I was reading through Ephesians 3 this morning. Paul writes, “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family on earth is named…” Then he goes into this amazing section on the power of the Spirit in understanding the love of Christ and the fullness of God and just breezes right on by those first two verses which become understandably overlooked against the rest of the passage. So that’s where I backed up and got hung on this naming stuff.

In the Hebrew culture a name meant something. It said something about you. [Isaac - "he laughs", Noah - "rest/comfort", Benoni -"son of my sorrow."] Your name was not just something that sounded nice to your parents, it was directly related to who you were. Often it was representative of where you came from. Other times it was something to be earned; to live up to the name your parents gave you. Whatever the case, there is something very important we can understand.

To be named is to be be given an identity.

So what does it mean when Paul writes that we have been named by God? To be named by our heavenly Father?

We find a really amazing picture of someone being (re)named by God in Genesis 32. Jacob is out in the wilderness fleeing his past and hiding from his brother when he has an interesting encounter with God. It says that during the night he was alone and “a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day.” This man is unable to defeat Jacob and asks to be released but Jacob replies, “I will not let you go until you bless me.” The stranger asks Jacob for his name (who he is) and then says something that changes Jacob’s entire identity.

“Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.”

Through this encounter Jacob finds a whole new life. He is given a whole new identity. He is changed. He is remade. He is restored. He goes from being called Jacob ["Heel-Catcher" or "cheater"] to being named Israel ["He strives with God"]. And this name is given to him by the very God he struggled with and demanded a blessing from.

I can’t help but enjoy the significance of that. Through struggling with the divine, his father’s God becomes his God and he finds a whole new life in the process.

To be named by God is to be given a whole new identity. It is to be remade into a new person. It is to come face to face with the creator and walk away changed.

So then what is this name that Paul is referring to that God has given all of us?
I think the answer is found in the wording. “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family on earth is named…” God has named us his children. He has named us his heirs. This is who we are. This is where we find our significance and where we find our calling. In being named God’s child we are named his own. This is intimate and personal and life changing kind of stuff. And it means something that should change the entire way we view ourselves.

To be a child of God is to be loved by God.

Learning to see the world in terms of the divine is not easy. Our minds are preoccupied with every distraction and we have been taught to be skeptical in all areas of faith. From childhood we have learned how to answer questions and solve problems rather than bask in the tension that comes from wonder. In doing so we have shut our eyes to the divine mysteries all around us. If we are ever to encounter God, we must begin by recognizing where He is trying to get our attention.

It is out of the miracle that God calls to us.

When Moses drew near to the burning bush in Exodus 3, God called out to him by name, “Moses. Moses!” In this moment the divine act became personal. The sunset hangs in the sky as though it was painted just for you. The rain falls and refreshes you exactly when you need it the most. The gentle breeze comes and fills you with a sense of peace in the midst of a troubled time. The stars strike you with a reminder that God is there listening to your prayers. This is faith; the sense that God is present and calling out to you by name. It’s personal. It’s familiar.

“Moses, Moses!”

This is the call from a God who knows you. It’s a call that invites you to come face to face with the depths of his love that he has just for you. It’s the experience of the bride being called upon by her beloved. “I slept, but my heart was awake. A sound! My beloved is knocking. ‘Open to me!‘” (Song of Songs 5:2) This is the terrifying language of love. As we seek the divine and are drawn towards him through wonder and awe we realize something truly unbelievable. This God is actually calling out to us. This God is seeking us.

This is a God who is pursuing you.

The call of God is an invitation to encounter his presence. It’s an invitation to commune with the creator of the universe who welcomes you as a loved one. It’s an invitation to experience the unending love of God.

Lesson 2: But You Have To Respond.

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.” (Rev. 3:20)  We can’t encounter the presence of God if we don’t answer his call to let him in. We have to respond. The scary thing is that this isn’t just surface level belief that we are being invited to. This is the life changing, unrelenting, soul-exposing depths of the  passionate love of God that we are being called to experience.

The lover of our soul is desperately crying out to us for union. “Open to Me!” Inviting us deeper and further into a relationship with this God who says that we have “captivated [his] heart.” (Song of Songs 4:9)

The question now is whether or not you are willing to surrender to his invitation.

What does it mean to encounter God? What does it look like? Feel like? How will I know when it happens? I confess I still struggle with these questions even this many years into my spiritual journey. We all go through times of spiritual dryness. Times when, like the Psalmist we can say, “my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” (Ps 63) So often we desperately need an encounter with the living God because everything else is failing to quench our thirst. It’s often in these desert experiences that we find ourselves humble enough to cry out to the one who we really need.

The experience of Moses in Exodus 3 is one of the best pictures of what it is for the human soul to encounter the divine. The story begins with Moses in Midian. Having fled from his past and seeking safety; he’s now in exile, running from his failures, his sins, and the conviction that his own people are in slavery in Egypt. He’s hiding out in this foreign land and it says that “he sat down by a well.” (Ex 2:15). Sitting by a well. This is a beautiful picture of settling, resting, getting comfortable. It’s here that he finds a wife, raises a family, and gets a job for the next 40 years. And what seems like a perfect ending to a story is actually just the beginning. There is actually a grander narrative taking place.

God is at work to rescue his people.

When Moses encounters God in Exodus 3 we find him tending to a flock of sheep in the wilderness. Presumably this is something that he does often; yet this is important. Moses meets God in a seemingly insignificant, ordinary place. He’s at his day job in the middle of the wilderness and “the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a burning bush.” (3:2) Moses witnesses a divine act, a miracle, but God doesn’t speak until Moses pays attention.

Lesson 1: Open Your Eyes

Moses was able to see the divine act because he had his eyes open. He saw the miracle taking place in the ordinary and named it for what it was. “He looked, and behold, the bush was not consumed, And Moses said, ‘I will turn aside to see this great sight.’” (3:2-3) I am convinced that God is at work doing miracles all around us each day. We are simply failing to notice them as divine acts. We need to open up our spiritual eyes in order to see them for what they are. Abraham Heschel writes,

This, indeed, is the greatness of man: to be able to have faith. For faith is an act of freedom, of independence of our own limited faculties, whether of reason or sense-perception. It is an act of spiritual ecstasy, of rising above our own wisdom… to think in the world in the terms of God. To have faith is not to defy human reason but rather to share divine wisdom.

An encounter with God begins first with an awareness of the divine acts in the ordinary, unexpected places of life. Choosing to wonder in the midst of the miracles of creation and being drawn in by awe and faith is the first step. God is at work all around us. There is this grander narrative taking place and He’s always trying to get our attention and bring us into it.

We just need to open our eyes and see.

I was wrestling my way through Romans 1 the other day and got hung up on the notion that “the righteous shall live by faith.” (v 17) Righteousness [gr. - dikaiosune] means our right standing with God, or our  justification. Faith [gr. - pistis]  is our conviction or assurance that we have been saved by God. What interested me is the idea that our right standing with God is found through our ongoing conviction that we are saved through grace.

The gospel, that Paul writes about previously to this, reveals “the righteousness of God from faith for faith.” We understand the gospel. The good news that we have been saved through Christ alone. We accept this salvation in an act of faith. However, what stands out is that our continued righteousness is found through this same faith.

The faith that saves us also justifies us.

If we are to be righteous, to be in right standing with a holy God, we must live by faith. We must live, each day, in an awareness of our salvation. To live a life of faith is to live a life of daily humility and surrender. To offer ourselves before a God who saves us from ourselves. It’s not obedience that makes us holy, it’s faith. Our obedience is merely a reflection of our daily surrender.

This is why remembering is so necessary to a life of faith. It is through our memories that we are able to relive our need for salvation each day. We recall what it is to need to be rescued and through that we find humility. Then as we surrender ourselves to our rescuer we discover the joy of our salvation all over again. If we are to return to God we must remember what he’s done for us. Our memories serve as our witness and testimony to the gospel of grace in our lives. That we have been saved through the unrelenting love of a holy God who gave himself to make right standing between us and him, and that this is something we can live in perpetual and daily awareness of and participation in. Perhaps this is why our Lord tells us to “pick up our cross daily“; because a life of faith is a daily return to the salvation given freely through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Have you ever found yourself wondering if the payoff is really worth all the effort? I can recall a summer a few years back when I was working long hours at a particularly harsh and dirty job. Early mornings, late nights, and sore muscles had me often asking that very thing. Was the $12.50/hour I was making actually worth it?

The writer of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes asked a similar question during his search for meaning in the world. He also wanted to know if the payoff was really worth it all. “What does a man gain for all of his toil?” Is there even a point?

It’s a good question.

The Hebrew word for ‘toil’ is a great word. Amal. It literally means wearing effort. It’s a word most often ascribed to the idea of hard labour. Drudgery and misery in work. While this is correct, it actually has a broader meaning that I believe carries a much more significant weight for us today.

Amal. Wearing effort; whether of body or mind.

The writer of Ecclesiastes was on a journey to find meaning by looking at all the efforts of humanity. Pleasure and money and wisdom and fame. They all fell short in providing any lasting satisfaction or significance. Each is meaningless, a chasing after the wind. A striving after something you will never catch and have no control over. And yet we pursue anyways. Spending our days trying to control the uncontrollable. This is amal.

Having [the illusion of] control over our lives is an important thing to most people. Where we go, what we do, how it all happens. This is what we strive for. This is what we chase; and yet, it can never be caught. Control can never be had. This is a terrible thing. And it is affecting millions of people every day.

Including you.

Worry, stress, anxiety. These are the symptoms of the desperate pursuit of the uncontrollable. We suffer from overstress, ulcers, panic attacks, sleep problems, and other anxiety disorders because of this need to control that which can never be controlled. We are ultimately helpless when it comes to our own lives and are absolutely terrified to admit it. Did you know that the word worry comes from an old English word for ‘strangle’? It means to seize by the throat and tear. Those of you who suffer from anxiety understand that feeling exactly. Helpless and terrified. Wearing effort. Amal. What do we gain for all our worry? Is there a payoff for all our stress? What is the point of all the anxious thoughts?

Meaningless. A chasing after the wind.

It strikes me that amal, this wearing effort, this worry, stress, and anxiety, these feelings of terrified helplessness, all stem from humanity trying to control our own lives. When we strive to satisfy our wants. When we seek to complete our feelings of incompleteness. Worry is the result of humans playing god.

But what happens when we let God be God?

What happens when, rather than desperately and anxiously trying to control our lives, we pause in complete trust and surrender to God and let him have the control? We cease our worrying and toiling and experience the exact opposite of amal.

We discover peace.

This is another great Hebrew word. Shalom. It means wholeness. It means to be completed or finished. It stems from a root word that insinuates safety in body and mind. Peace of body. Peace of mind.
Peace within.

If amal is what we get when we try to control our lives; shalom is what we find when we surrender the control to God. While one brings a choking sense of terror and helplessness, the other brings a sense of safety and wholeness. One is a frantic attempt to catch the wind, the other is rest and trust and peace.

Shalom. Be still and let God be God.

“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing. Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather in barns, and yet your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?…But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added to you.” (Matthew 6)

The children are the future.

This morning I began a study through the minor prophets. They’ve kind of become my most neglected part of scripture. I have a great love for the Old Testament and am often drawn to books like Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel; but never really move much past that. There’s a lot of unmarked and scarcely read pages between Hosea and Matthew in my bible.

So this morning I began in Joel. I’ve put no time limit on myself, I just want to dig through these at my own pace and let God saturate my soul with his words as I savor them. I did a little background research on the book to give myself some context and then began with chapter one. Several things stood out but the most significant was the prophet’s call to remember what has happened. The nation is in a state of turmoil and sorrow. The land has been torn apart by locusts and the prophet is pointing to this as a the coming judgement of the Day of the LORD. It is a time of sorrow. It is a time for lament. But it is also a time to remember what has happened.

“Hear this, you elders; give ear, all inhabitants of the land! Has such a thing happened in your days, or in the days of your fathers? Tell your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children to another generation.“

One of the things I’ve come to love and respect is the Hebraic oral tradition. Simply writing things down wasn’t enough. If you really wanted to get the message across you had to tell it. Telling a story captures the emotional intensity and personal investment in a way that reading it never could. So when God was sending Israel a message that he wanted remembered – you would teach your children to never forget it. Recite it over and over and pass it on to their children, generation to generation so that Israel would always remember. We see this same principle applied when God first gives his commands at Sinai. “…And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children….” (Deut. 6: 6,7)

Teach the children.

Our children need to personally invest in these stories of faith. If they don’t enter in and become a part of this tradition it will get lost. How do you pass on the emotions and life changing power of these biblical narratives in such a way that the next generation adopts them as a part of their own history? Perhaps a better and more prevalent question is, how do we?

We need to find our own voice amidst the many other voices of the bible. These are the collected stories of our faith, our history, our roots (see Gal. 3:29). We need to feel the emotional ties and seek to understand the cultural mindset of our ancestors and when we read these stories buy into them every bit as much as they did. If we don’t, how do we expect our children to?

Tell your story.

If it is to be remembered it needs to be told in such a way that reflects its significance; passionately and with personal connection to the story. Otherwise it is doomed to be forgotten. This is the way God’s truth and love will be passed on into the next generation. Know God’s story. Make it yours. And tell it.

“Let your heart hold fast to my words; keep my commandments, and live. Get wisdom; get insight; do not forget, and do not turn away from the words of my mouth.” (Proverbs 4: 4,5)

Why are we as a people so reluctant to forgive?

Scratch that, I already know why. I’m far more interested in pursuing forgiveness as an alternative than getting lost in a debate on how entitled we are or are not to our hurts and resentments and bitterness. I know you’re wounded. I realize you’ve been offended. I recognize that your pain is very real and very deep. And truthfully and fairly, I would probably agree that you have a right to feel the way that you do.

But then there’s the way of forgiveness.

Unfortunately there’s been a pretty poor attempt in defining this thing we call forgiveness. I’ve heard sermons, read books, listened to everyone’s ideas of the when and the why and I gotta admit, it’s vague. We kind of leave it in the background, just below the surface, aware of it’s existence but not really deciding on how it should be used. This is the case for many of us, we avoid forgiveness because it’s easier and demands little.  Yet, avoiding the depth and scope of the way of forgiveness has stripped it of its power in the church today.

The troubling thing about the nature of forgiveness is that it’s simply too demanding. It costs us something very important; our justice.

We all want to see people get what they deserve. What’s coming to them. It’s human to want justice for wrongs. It’s human to hold on to offenses. Karma is an incredibly human creation. Our struggle with forgiveness is that it’s just so un-human.

Which is why we need a similarly un-human example to learn this from.

In Colossians, Paul writes, “…and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the LORD has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.” As the LORD has…so you also must. As the LORD has forgiven us so we also must forgive others in the same way. We are called to forgive the same way God has forgiven us. The word “forgive” in the Greek essentially means to freely give pardon, rescue, or deliverance from what is deserved. It stems from the word for graciousness, as the divine influence upon the human heart.

Forgiveness comes from the divine influence upon the human heart.

The scope and ability of your forgiveness for others stems from how you choose to interpret the scope and ability of the forgiveness that you have received from God. “When we realize that we are all sinners needing forgiveness, it will be easy for us to forgive others. We have to be forgiven in order to be able to forgive.” (Mother Teresa)

As the daily realization and acceptance of God’s great grace and ongoing forgiveness transforms my heart, I am compelled to to say yes to the powerful and transforming nature of continual and freely given forgiveness to those who have wronged or hurt me.