by Elizabeth | Jul 5, 2010 | Learning Story
“In the first year of Darius, son of Xerxes…I, Daniel, understood from the Scriptures, according to the word of the Lord given to Jeremiah the prophet, that the desolation of Jerusalem would last seventy years. So I turned to the Lord God and pleaded with him in prayer and petition, in fasting, and in sackcloth and ashes. I prayed to the Lord my God and confessed…” (Daniel 9:1-4)
Why is THE STORY, the grand and true narrative of Scripture, so important? Does it even matter? Is it outdated, irrelevant? Is there even such a thing as one universal story? Since the nineteenth century, people have been asking these questions. I’ve been reviewing Daniel as I finish a study based on Scotty Smith’s recent sermon series, and today I came on Daniel 9 and these words about the radical nature of what God does through Scripture. My suggestion is — read all of Daniel 9 to see what comes out of Daniel’s reading of Scripture, and then read these words by Tremper Longman III:
“How do human beings communicate with God? Daniel 9 provides an illustration. God speaks to us through the words of his representatives, the prophets…Though dead and gone by this time, Jeremiah’s written word still speaks God’s word to his people. Daniel hears God’s words in Jeremiah and responds through prayer….
God speaks to his people in his written and spoken Word. This principle is simple on the surface, but is really at the heart of biblical religion and contrasts with the modern ideas of Christianity. Since the nineteenth century philosophers Feuerbach and Nietzsche, it has commonly been believed that the God of Christianity is the product of human imagination. Human beings desire a God, so they have constructed him in their own image. The Bible, however, claims to be the revelation of God to human beings. God uses human language to make his existence and nature known to us. In the Bible, he makes his will known to his people.” Tremper Longman III, NIV Application Commentary: Daniel.
It’s pretty radical stuff when you think about it.
For reflection:
Read Daniel 9 aloud. Join with Daniel in the prayer of confession and repentance he prays.
by Elizabeth | Jul 3, 2010 | Learning Story
My precious friend writes true, poignant, and funny posts about the realities of daily life as a mom. Having just returned to the online world after several days of such deep engagement with the face-to-face world, I was deeply touched by her blog about a MWYC (Mom-with-Young-Children) moving to Phoenix in the June heat that I had to repost it. By the way, let me know if you know any other MYWC’s in the South Mountain area of Phoenix. Click to read:
The Daily B:
by Elizabeth | Jul 2, 2010 | Learning Story
Today, a guest post from Jackie, my elder daughter, who is in Camden Town with World Harvest Mission doing a summer internship. I’ve put abbreviations for the real names — probably a good idea, as you’ll see from the story.
“Story time. During Sonship week, we had prayer in small groups after dinner and then we’d go over to Jl’s flat to hang out. Since it stays light here till after 10, we sometimes just sat around outside in the back for a while. We ended up meeting these elementary-school age girls who live in the same complex, so a lot of nights they would see us out there and ask us to play “it” (tag) or frisbee or something. So much fun…So, one of the girls, Fi (10 yrs old), and I were sitting one night, and somehow it was brought up that she’s Muslim, and I asked her a little about it (like did she have to wear a head covering) and she told me “I’m a different kind of Muslim, I’m Kosovan.” I don’t know much about that but I know there was some kind of genocide in Kosovo and that’s probably why her parents moved to London. I asked her some more questions because it was really interesting but eventually the subject died.
Anyways, that’s the background info.
So, a few nights ago, my prayer group decided to walk to Jl’s and pray in the green behind the building. I think the girls (F and her sister, E, 7, and their friends P and M, who i think are 7 and 10) started to expect us so the moment we sat down, out they come. We told them that we would be able to play but not for a few minutes because we were gonna talk and pray a little bit. F goes, “P can pray she’s Christian!” and we told her if she wanted to she could, and then of course E (F’s sister) wants to sit down too, and M. We told them they were all welcome to listen if they wanted, and after hesitating for a sec F sat down too, saying, I’m sure it’s okay if I just LISTEN I mean i’m not actually PRAYING. We were a little worried because we didn’t want to start any tension with F and E’s parents, but even when we made it clear there was no pressure, they still really wanted to listen. So J, L and I all prayed like we normally would and the girls just listened.
After we finished, they asked some things like about calling God “Father” and how to pray, and then they all wanted to do it! It was the cutest thing. So we went around in a circle again. F was the first of the little girls to pray, and when she was praying all i could think was, Sweet Jesus. This girl GETS it. She was talking to God so personally and so naturally, asking God for a baby boy for her mother, and to help her when she’s at school and being bullied and to make good “marks.” I have to believe that talking to our Father is in our DNA.
E and P’s prayers were equally precious, 7-year-old prayers, (‘Ohhh please God I would really love a puppy”, in a British accent of course. Imagine.) yet they understood that they could ask God for things they wanted, which is SO beautiful. After we played a little they sat down with me on the grass and somehow they just were asking me questions that were actually pretty theologically heavy… but either way I just got to tell them what i believe about Jesus. It was so so so sweet. “Thank you for that interesting information” says F.
I was a little nerviosa that we would get in trouble with F and E’s parents, but what was so sweet was that the girls were asking, and they were interested, and I think they heard something in our prayers that they wanted. Like hello, God just provided the opportunity for us to teach these beautiful girls how to pray. How sweet is that. The following night F sat down with me and asked me “Can we do what we did yesterday?” All I can think is, Jesus, I don’t know what you just did, but I’m pretty sure that these girls want to know more about you, and I can’t believe that you just used us to plant seeds in their lives! GOSSSSSSHHHHH i love these girls so much and want them know him so bad, and as frustrating as it is that we won’t be in Ealing anymore to build relationships with them, I have to believe that God is going to bring more people into their lives to love them and show them Jesus.
The good news is, it’s not up to me to do that. Praise the Lord, he uses us even in our weakness and unpreparedness and messy hearts.”
I love the story, and I really really love the last sentence!!! May we all remember. If you want to read more of Jackie’s musings from the “Mother Country,” check out “Camden Town, or Life across the Pond”: http://jacksnack91.wordpress.com/
by Elizabeth | Jul 1, 2010 | Learning Story
Days of seeing faces known and newly known run into nights, so again, I think this blog is a day late. Still, as promised, the second part of my musings on how God’s vow-keeping impacts our vow-breaking.
In Scripture, the story of marriage goes like this – God created male and female, two impossibly different beings (‘as opposite to’ as the Hebrew prepositional phrasekenegdo suggests in its description of the woman (Gen. 2:20)), to join together as one flesh and image him. Even more gloriously, he called these two very opposite beings to labor together in managing and multiplying His glorious creation. He created us with awe and gratitude and sent us into the world to become allies living out that awe and gratitude for one another, for His creation, and for Him.
As the story is told, within a short time the man and the woman lost that awe and gratitude. The serpent tempted Eve to believe that God was holding back, and indeed, she began to doubt the wealth of gifts she had received. Adam stood there like a dumb donkey and the first failure of communication between the two led to the shattering of shalom. Hiding, blaming and shaming were the short and long-term fallout. Then they hid by covering themselves with fig leaves; now we hide by covering ourselves with trendy clothes, fast cars, and the right schools for our kids. Eve would suffer loneliness and would want to absorb her husband to make her life work. Adam, overwhelmed with the chaos of wife and weeds, would run and hide in silence and work. The covenant between man and wife is already broken, and we’re only in the third chapter of the Bible.
Now the story goes out of sequence, and this is good news for us vow-breakers. Even as the fallout of the Fall is occurring, God, the vow-creator and the vow-keeper, is in hot pursuit of His shalom-spoiled Creation. “Where are you, Adam?” is His invitation to Adam to remember his makeup, to come out of guilty conscience into forgiven consciousness. Conversing with His vow-breaking creation, God knows that only His work of reparation, reconciliation, restoration, relocation, and all the other R’s of redemption (that’s for another article), can restore these broken things (seeRestoring Broken Things). So God speaks His vow to the serpent: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” This promise to crush evil is only the beginning of a story that follows many strange plot twists and turns. As the story develops, God continues making vows, also called covenants – all redemptive, all fulfilled, and all leading to the culmination of the story – the great consummation of the PERFECT MARRIAGE.
God’s vow to crush evil is fulfilled oddly by sending His perfect Son to death on a Cross; in Christ’s death, we vow-breakers are transformed into vow-keepers. As Steven Curtis Chapman sings it, Christ “took the hopeless, the life wasted, ruined and marred — and made it new.” And in the stunning conclusion in Revelation, the biblical Story of Marriage reaches its Consummation with the Wedding Feast of the Lamb in which we the Church become Christ’s bride, “bright and pure.” At this wedding Feast, there will be no antagonistic in-laws, no drunken uncles, no rained-out receptions. In this marriage, there will be no more tears because God has wiped them away, no more loneliness because God will be with us, no more frustration because our work will be fruitful and multiplied. We will flourish in the fullness of the intimacy of his kingdom.
It is this Perfect Marriage created by the covenant of a vow-keeping God that gives this vow-breaker hope in the meantime. Perhaps our marriage ceremony twenty-seven years ago would have better defined the contours of reality if I had spoken the vows I have truly lived, promising Kip I would fail him every day. Then the Reverend could have added two questions, one for me and one for Kip: “Elizabeth, will you promise to repent regularly, to feel godly sorrow over your unrelenting penchant to have your way in your marriage?” And to Kip: “Will you promise to forgive Elizabeth every day?” And to those questions, we could have said “yes” with hope. For indeed, because of God the vow-keeper, we are freed to acknowledge the reality of our vow-breaking hearts and live into the new reality our Groom Jesus has created in us – a heart redeemed and transformed to live in Holy Matrimony.
by Elizabeth | Jun 29, 2010 | Learning Story
A long, wonderful day at PCA General Assembly, lots of good conversation with women hungry for the good news of God’s story of grace really is written in individuals, community, and cosmos. As I mentioned yesterday, little time to post this week, so we are in a series of re-runs. Today and tomorrow, my Valentine’s post from this year. A repeat we all need to hear again I think.
God melts the iciest heart, even mine
Today, a Valentine about the best love we’ll ever know, the only one that won’t disappoint. I wrote this two years ago, and though some of the circumstances have changed, the only steadfast assurance is that while I continue to fail in my vows, our God never wavers.
I’ve done it again. I’ve broken my vows. I just turned my husband down for a date because it was easier to say ‘no’ to him than figure out how to get my daughter to volleyball and my son to piano. Having recently led a marriage conference, my vow to ‘forsake all others’ is fresh on my mind. In preparation for the conference, I reviewed the vows I purportedly recited on my wedding day. I confess that in the fog of lace and love, I don’t actually recall saying these, but witnesses tell me I did. I promised to love and comfort, honor and protect my husband, forsaking all others and being faithful to him as long as we both should live.
I didn’t remember the words – I had to google them; that fact in itself reveals a certain lack of attentiveness. And I have to be honest, as I read them, I shook my head in disbelief that I would ever utter them aloud. Not because they’re not lofty goals that seem in line with the Biblical understanding of what living out love in marriage should look like, but because I should have known I could never keep them.
The fact is, I’m a vow breaker. More honest vows for me would have run like this: Kip, I promise that every day of our married life I will fail you. I will put my needs before yours because I want to feel good about myself. I will fear disappointing my parents more than I fear disappointing you, so I will arrange our family’s schedule around their wishes at Christmastime. I will be too busy or too tired for sex on a regular basis, and whatever I do, I will NEVER EVER wear that lingerie from Victoria’s Secret. Now these are some vows I could keep (sigh,have kept).
This probably would have made for a most UN-romantic wedding, but it would have reminded us of the TRUE story of marriage which the Bible tells.
In Scripture, the story of marriage goes like this –
by Elizabeth | Jun 27, 2010 | Learning Story
I hit the road at 5:30 a.m. for PCA General Assembly — very excited about connecting with people who are excited about learning, living, and loving in the gospel…So this week’s posts will be hit or miss…here’s an oldie from the archives, calling us to consider how the way we were created affects the way we live.
“You are not allowed to hit your sister. It goes against everything you were made to be. God called you as a man to protect women, to honor them and fight for them.”
So went a diatribe I oft-repeated to my eldest son when he was about 4 – 7 years old and he had a tendency to pick on or even hit his sister, two years younger than he.
One afternoon, when he was about 13, he asked me to sit with him. He had a story to tell me. He had intervened in a friend’s self-destruction. Noticing how thin she was becoming, he asked her a few questions and learned that she was eating very little. He looked up eating disorders on the internet and realizing that her behavior was serious, he confronted her about it and insisted she tell her parents. She agreed, but asked him if he would be there with her when she did so. As he finished the story, he said, “Well, I just wanted you to know because her parents might be calling you.” After he told me, I sat stunned for a moment by a 13-year-old boy’s courage and boldness in fighting lovingly for a woman’s beauty.
How we live is directly related to how we were created. Though I could have just told my son that he couldn’t beat his sister up “because I said so,” I explained why he couldn’t do harm to a woman – because as a man, he simply wasn’t created that way. When we understand how God created the world and us, we live boldy in the story of grace written into us.
