MicahJohn

Last night I was with a group of people praying for a very sad conflict within the church in Cambodia. One of those present prayed (in reference to John 17) “Lord Jesus, may we answer your prayer.” It reminded me of Matt 5:24. It would seem that one reason God doesn’t answer our prayers is because we fail to answer the prayer of Christ.

This seems similar to The Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” That is a scary prayer to pray. Honestly, I don’t want God to answer that prayer literally. I want him to forgive me my sins more quickly, more completely, and more deeply than I forgive those who sin against me. I rather hope this prayer is meant to be a reminder to me of 1 John 4:19-21, a reminder that

We love because he first loved us.  If anyone says, “I love God,” yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.  And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.

Not that these verses do much to let me off the hook. I still had better love my brother, but I do so following God’s lead. For me personally it feels safer to be reflecting God’s love to others, than to have God reflect my forgiveness back to me.

I think scripture consistently makes the serious reader squirm. I don’t know if it is possible to pray the Lord’s Prayer earnestly without squirming at several points. I don’t want my desire to “understand scripture” be synonymous with a desire to explain away my need to squirm.

Both of these paragraphs remind me again of my utter dependence on the grace of God. I depend on God graciously enabling me to live right, to live a love bigger than myself; and I depend on God to graciously re-enfold me when I fall short.

Yesterday was a good day.  Rather Sabbathy. I think in general Christians today are too ready to throw out the Sabbath baby with the legalistic bath water. Jesus didn’t tell people to stop obeying one of the ten commandments, he just pointed out that (like all the other commandments) the call to cease for a day is a gift from God to us. It should be a source of life, not a source of added legalistic toil. I don’t mean to indicate that I wholly entered into Sabbath yesterday. I’m just saying that the partial taste of Sabbath I experienced yesterday encouraged me to better honor this commandment. 

For readers in Waynesboro, part of my good day yesterday included a dinner with Lexie. We live in rather different parts of Bangkok, so visiting is not an entirely simple proposition. It was good to hear some of one another’s experiences. It was good to sit down and talk in English for a while with someone who looks at the world through a similarly informed set of eyes.

If the title of the sermon makes you curious check it out here

It was a good reminder to delight in the realization that Jesus is more than I might sometimes want him to be, not less. Jesus has come to do more than make me comfy.

While I’m commenting on Sunday mornings, allow me to share a question that really rattled some of the foundations in my brain:

“How much are you willing to pay to give up your rights?”

Don’t get me wrong, I know on the surface (and even a little below the surface) that God’s way is the best way and that surrender to him is worth far more than anything else, but something about the way the question was asked last week brought that truth deeper into my being.

To borrow Steve Saint’s expansion of an old analogy, rather than feeding the world spiritual fish, I want to “Distribute spiritual fish samples and then train all those who want more to fish for themselves AND teach them to teach others to fish.”

I won’t claim that this is the best quote from The Great Omission, Saint’s book that I just finished reading, but I will say that you should read the book. Perhaps part of the book’ allure was my engineering mind’s connection with his good number pictures. Saint’s effective use of stories that were both entertaining and illustrative also contributed to the excellence of the book. But the bottom line of the book, its driving force, was that the wealthy western church needs to facilitate rather than hinder ministry by indigenous believers.

The wealthy west needs to stop nurturing dependence. Rather than working to give people what they need on a limited scale, we should focus on making it possible for people everywhere to acquire what they need. Rather than building a church for one group of people (and in so doing discouraging all other churches in the area from sacrificial building projects, encouraging them to wait for the infinite wealth of the west) we should find ways to bolster their economy and we should engineer new, more efficient means of building churches.

Steve Saint told a story of one church built for the Waodani. They didn’t know to whom the church belonged (because it had been built by someone else), so they didn’t know who to ask for permission to repair it. It therefore fell to pieces. Further, they could not reproduce the initial grandeur of the donated church, and therefore ceased building their own churches.

The west needs to come to grips with the reality that the broad education we value is not practical in all settings, that requiring it prevents work from being reproducible among the indigenous believers. Practical, focused training may be much more valuable. Steve Saint was able to get practical training in dentistry for a few Waodani. They have not been through all of dentist school, but they now can do much more than just pull a tooth. They can meet a very felt need among their people.

The church needs to think in terms of multiplying the kingdom rather than adding to the kingdom. Multiplication starts slower, but is much more effective in the long run. Saint uses the analogy of choosing whether to accept $100,000 a day for a month (31 days) or $.01 doubling everyday for the same month. Believe it or not, the penny doubled every day has a better return. On the last day alone the incoming funds total $10,737,418.24. The last day alone is greater than the $3,100,000 received over the whole month through addition.

If we want the world to know, we must reproduce a reproducible gospel among the world. We cannot simply add to our numbers.

So, not surprisingly my young, non-smoking, fit self tested out OK. The EKG and the chest xrays looked normal. The weird, unexplained part were the chest pains while running that preceded the tests.

It did provide an opportunity to sit and talk with my Dad for 2 and a half hours.

Tape removal hurts worse than IV insertion.