by Elizabeth | Feb 10, 2012 | Learning Story
Our Sarah Sisterhood Bible study again yesterday had a powerful discussion about God’s grace working in hearts of Bible women. One point that struck me hard was how God does not edit out lament, even wrongful accusation lament from the Bible. Read the verses, what a commentator has to say, and then a few thoughts. The gospel gives hope for our hearts even when they are not soft!
Ruth 1:20–21 (NIV)
20 “Don’t call me Naomi,” she told them. “Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. 21 I went away full, but the LORD has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The LORD has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.”
“God sometimes takes away the things that have become precious to us because they are supporting us in our life of sin and hardness of heart toward him. Alternatively, he sometimes takes away things that were good in themselves because he wants to use our lives as a powerful testimony of the sufficiency of his relentless grace in the midst of our weakness and loss. Invariably, though, he has not brought these trials and losses into our lives because he hates us or is seeking to afflict us, or to get even with us for our sin. On the contrary, if we are his children, he loves us and through this loss wants us to receive something far more precious than all of the trinkets to which we become so desperately attached. He wants us to give us more of himself.” Iaian Duguid
This is all true. But notice the biblical narrator leaves Naomi’s statement in. He doesn’t edit it out, nor does he insert this commentary. Can we leave it? Can we recognize that the Author of our lives and the Author of Scripture knows and loves our hearts enough to see the bitterness and hear the accusations and still send his Son to die for these same hard hearts? This is what the Book of Ruth, and indeed the entire Bible is about — the God who changes our hearts from bitter to soft; who allows us to be empty that he may fully fill us.
by Elizabeth | Feb 6, 2012 | Learning Story
In eleven days, I’ll be at First Presbyterian Opelika leading an interactive workshop on community. I’m way done with preparation, but I keep finding more and more excellent teaching on community. Found this article by Tim Keller today as I was studying Matthew 18.
“But one could argue that the biblical teaching on forgiveness and reconciliation is so radical that there are no cultures or societies that are in accord with it. It may be here most of all that we see the truth of Bonhoeffer’s statement, “Our community with one another [in Christ] consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us.Christian brotherhood is a spiritual and not a human reality. In this it differs from all other communities.”
1In its most basic and simple form, this teaching is that Christians in community are to never give up on one
another, never give up on a relationship, and never write off another believer. We must never tire of forgiving (and
repenting!) and seeking to repair our relationships. Matthew 5:23–26 tells us we should go to someone if we
know they have something against us. Matthew 18:15–20 says we should approach someone if we have
something against them. In short, if any relationship has cooled off or has weakened in any way, it is always your
move. It doesn’t matter “who started it:” God always holds you responsible to reach out to repair a tattered
relationship. A Christian is responsible to begin the process of reconciliation, regardless of how the distance or
the alienation began.” Tim Keller, “Serving Each Other through Forgiveness and Reconciliation”
by Elizabeth | Feb 3, 2012 | Learning Story
When my children were young, I remember a mom telling me that she always prayed that if her teenagers got in trouble, they would be “caught.” I hadn’t ever really thought of it before, but her point was an excellent one — if they were caught, they could experience discipline and consequences, forgiveness and redemption. On a rather interesting side note, one night when my husband was coming home from a late night on call, he ‘caught’ her son with several others rolling a neighbor’s tree in grand style. When he called her, she was completely gracious and grateful to him for telling her:).
I love this quote from Sharon Hersh on being caught…
“This book considers the gift of getting caught, because this is when we have the chance to experience being known, loved, and still wanted….we will examine the gift of humiliation that leads to the gift of surrender…we will look at the unlikely gift of woundedness, because wounds, no matter how painful or unsightly, are where Love gets in with the healing gifts of mercy and forgiveness.” Sharon Hersh, “The Last Addiction”
by Elizabeth | Feb 2, 2012 | Learning Story
… Read more
by Elizabeth | Feb 1, 2012 | Learning Story
The End of Memory by Miroslav Volf
This rainy afternoon, I’m thinking about peacemaking, and inevitably that takes me to those who have suffered grievous wrongs and yet continued to hope. So, today a word from one of my all-time favorites, Miroslav Volf:
“Grievous wrongdoing doesn’t just wound the body and soul, and it doesn’t just worm its way into our identity. It also entraps us. Like a ball chained to a prisoner’s leg, it drags heavily on our spirit and prevents it from roaming freely, stretching itself into the unknown, playing with new possibilities. Susan Brison describes with deep insight how a wrongdoing endured robs a person of the future. “The past,’ she writes, ‘reaches toward the present and throttles desire before it can become directed toward the future.’
“Even more definitively, in Jesus Christ God has promised to every human being a new horizon of possibilities – a new life into which each of us is called to grow in our own way and ultimately a new world freed from all enmity, a world of love. To be a Christian means that new possibilities are defined by that promise, not by any past experience, no matter how devastating. If the traumatized believe the promise — if they live into the promise, even if they are tempted at first to mock it – they will, in Kelsey’s words, enter a world ‘marked by a genuinely open future that they could not have imagined in the living death of the old world they have constructed for themselves.’”
Volf is also quoting in this section David Kelsey, Imagining Redemption
by Elizabeth | Jan 30, 2012 | Learning Story
Putting the final touches on an upcoming workshop on community — what is it and why do we do it — here are two great quotes — the first from Jesus, the second from Mother Theresa. I challenge us all — let’s not just read them — let’s look at the faces of three people we come across – at least two strangers, and think about what it truly means to incarnate the love God created us to receive and give.
“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21 that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— 23 I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” John 17:20-23
“People today are hungry for love, for understanding love, which is…the only answer to loneliness and great poverty. That is why we are able to go to countries like England and America and Australia, where there is no hunger for bread. But there people are suffering from terrible loneliness, terrible despair, terrible hatred, feeling unwanted, feeling helpless, feeling hopeless. They have forgotten how to smile, they have forgotten the beauty of the human touch. They are forgetting what is human love. They need someone who will understand and respect them.”
Mother Theresa
