Here are reflections from a recent quiet time with God. I try to do this five days a week, letting God's Word speak to me in a dynamic, relational way. To see how I approach quiet time, read here. I hope that these journal entries are helpful to others. But nothing can replace your own personal quiet time encounters with God!
Look: “...And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.” (Exodus 3:6)
God has just revealed Himself to Moses in Midian at the burning bush. When Moses realizes that he’s in the presence of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, he hides his face. Moses understands the infinite distance between God and himself: God is immortal; Moses is mortal. God is perfect; Moses isn’t. God is the Creator; Moses is the creature. God is sinless; Moses is, like the rest of the human race, sinful.
No wonder Moses hid his face. His response is appropriate, understandable. Centuries later, Isaiah was conscious of the infinite distance between God and himself when he encountered God. He knew that for an unclean human to dare to look at God meant death. He cried out after God had initiated His call to Isaiah to be His prophet: “ “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!” (Isaiah 6:5)
Theologians and experts in comparative religions say that Moses and Isaiah experienced “numinous awe,” awe, respect, terror, fear in the presence of the God of all creation.
Neither in Biblical history nor in the history of Jews and Christians since would this be the first time that people experienced awe or terror in God’s presence. During their wilderness wanderings, the people of Israel, who God called Moses to lead, caught a glimpse of God’s holiness and were terrified. They asked Moses to act as a go-between so that they wouldn’t have to look at God and be killed by the infinite distance. "Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die." (Exodus 20:19)
Decades later, Israel would marvel at how Moses enjoyed an intimate relationship with God. Deuteronomy 34:10 says, “Since then, no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face…”
Here’s what strikes me in this passage: Where is my numinous awe?
I often seem to treat God as an afterthought.
Or I take Him and, maybe worse, His grace for granted.
I often ignore Him or treat Him like a buddy.
Listen: Of course, with Jesus, the new covenant or the new testament has come. God has revealed Himself to all people in Jesus Christ. John writes in the prologue to his gospel: “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.” (John 1:19)
In Jesus, to use Martin Luther’s phrase, all are able to see God’s friendly face, the same friendly face Moses, Isaiah, and others came to “see” as their relationship with God developed.
God IS perfect. God IS immortal. God IS sinless, righteous, and, in Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich’s phrase, “wholly other.”
But God loves us, cares for us, and wants a relationship with us. If these things weren’t true, God wouldn’t have met Moses and Isaiah. And if these things weren’t true, He wouldn’t have reached out to Gentiles as well as Jews, to the whole world, in Jesus Christ.
God wants to be reconciled to us, to forgive us our sins, to give us new life, and to shower His love on us for all eternity. Jesus told Nicodemus: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”
To all who repent and believe in God as revealed to us in Jesus, God offers life, forgiveness, citizenship in His kingdom, and intimacy with God.
Through Jesus, we can speak with God and ask of God anytime, anywhere. “Until now you have asked nothing in my name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full,” Jesus says (John 16:24).
“...we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin [God has been subjected to temptation and death when He shared in human life in Jesus]. Let us then approach God's throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” (Hebrews 4:15-16)
Citizens of God’s kingdom, believers in Jesus, are to approach the God revealed in Jesus, our “high priest,” “with boldness,” the preacher in Hebrews says. But it’s interesting to see where Jesus is as we approach Him: “God’s throne of grace.”
No matter the intimate friendship with God that Jesus opens to those who believe in Him (John 15:15), He is still the King of all creation, my God, my Creator. He still deserves our honor, praise, and submission. When unbelieving Thomas finally realized all of Who Jesus is, he fell to his knees and confessed Jesus, “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28).
The God Who seeks intimacy with me is also owed by submission, surrender, awe, and praise. In fact, His desire for intimacy with a sinner like me, along with His desire to cleanse me of sin and make me fit for living in His kingdom, should incite me to the deepest and most reverent of fear, honor, and praise.
But too often, I turn Jesus into a buddy.
Or my prayers are like emails dashed off to an indulgent uncle, an easy mark.
Not only does such an approach to God mock Him and His desire for closeness with us, it risks turning God into an idol, a good luck charm. Instead of being an expression of an intimate friendship with God, my “prayers” risk becoming messages to a false god I’ve created in my own head, a god I use for my convenience and comfort. I don’t want that! I want real intimacy with God! And I never want to forget that God is God and I am not!
Forgive me, Lord! For taking You for granted. For forgetting, in the words of the preacher of intimacy with You, that it is nonetheless, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31). Forgive me for forgetting that only You are God and I am not. With the saints in the heavenly city, help me to say and believe, “Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!" (Revelation 5:12).
I realize that this is a practical issue. If I don’t reverence, fear, honor, praise, and glorify God, it indicates a deficiency in my understanding of You, a deficiency in my relationship with You.
Help me, Lord, to heed the words of the preacher in Hebrews 12:28: “Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe,”
Respond: Lord, to help me to get in the habit of acknowledging Your holiness and giving it to You, help me to spend time next week contemplating several passages of Scripture for five consecutive days: John 9:16-24; Revelation 5; psalms of praise. Help me to note reasons to honor and praise You. Help me to understand more fully the depths of Your love and grace. Teach me to honor You more fully as God. Help me to not be flippant. Help me to know You more fully as my best Friend, but not my buddy. In Jesus’ name I pray.
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
Showing posts with label Paul Tillich. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paul Tillich. Show all posts
Friday, January 26, 2018
Monday, September 06, 2010
The Fear We Desperately Need
The great 20th.-century Lutheran pastor and theologian, Ole Hallesby, wrote about the fear we need in a sermon based on Luke 12:5*:
ELCA Lutherans are failing to speak and act in concert with the will of God because they fear everything more than they fear God.
For many in the ELCA, God is an abstraction, not a real living Being, the Ground of All Being, as Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich put it. For many, the Bible is not the Word of God, the authoritative record of God's self-disclosure, first "in many and various ways," to the people of Israel and ultimately in the Person of the Word made flesh, Jesus.
Bishops stand idly by, failing to exercise their pastoral responsibility to correct, rebuke, and discipline those pastors and theologians who deny Christ's virgin birth (even the ELCA's official web page that our confession of Jesus' virgin birth is not "a gynecological assertion," which no doubt comes as a great surprise to Jesus and would to the Biblical writers and to the early Christians, including Jesus' own family, who spent some energy denying the allegations made by many that Jesus was a "bastard," conceived by the usual means), who deny that Christ was physically resurrected or that Christians who believe in Christ will physically rise with Christ, and who, even on the official pages of the ELCA, uphold the universalistic notion that since Christ died for all, all will be saved, whether repenting or believing in Christ or not. (Although "saved" is a term meaning little in some universalists' hands, if there is also no resurrection.) The Bible, and Jesus Himself, teaches that faith in Jesus is the means by which God's grace is appropriated by believers and that there is no other way to God but through Jesus. (See here, here, and here.) (Also see here and here.)
The ELCA countenances pastors who teach that while there may be a heaven, there is no hell, in direct contradiction of Jesus Himself.
It countenances, in the presence of and with the complicity of participating bishops, the offering of flagrantly un-Christians prayers in "celebratory" rites. (To see a recent "rite" at which three ELCA synodical bishops were present, in which several alternative versions to the Lord's Prayer and in which there is a refusal to acknowledge God's power and might, see here. Warning: It's deeply depressing reading, especially because it so slyly displaces Biblical truth with plausibly phrased heresy and sin.)
The presiding bishop of the ELCA stands idly by at a conference called Sharing the Gospel (a conference supposedly about sharing the good news of Jesus, the one and only Savior and God), while Muslim and Buddhist prayers invoking other deities or "ways," are offered, ostensibly to allow participants to appreciate the beauty of the prayers***
And, of course, consistent with all of these acts of outright rebellion against God and lazy complicity with heresy, the ELCA, last August, officially denied the authority of God to declare what behaviors are acceptable and what are sin, when it granted congregations the right to ordain practicing homosexuals.
All these sins of commission and of omission are perpetrated by a denomination and by complicit congregations who fear the world more than they fear God.
God's will and Word on all the sins and errors enumerated above, which hardly represents an exhaustive bill of particulars, are crystal clear. A reading of the Bible in which we allow it to speak in its clear sense, untouched by rope-a-dope theology will tell us that the ELCA has wandered far from God.
The ELCA and many of its congregations fear the world; fear being on the outs with those to whom we look for what is politically correct; fear appearing "fanatical" if we side with God rather than the arbiters of contemporary mores and attitudes; fear offending people; fear hurting people; fear breaking up somnambulant clubs masquerading as churches, clubs that have forgotten that the Church belongs to Christ, not to church members.
The truth of God's Word always hurts when we let it tell us the truth about our sin and our need of God. But the truth of God--the truth of Jesus Himself--can also set sinners who repent and believe in Christ free from sin, death, and futility for all eternity.
Jesus tells us to fear God alone. Fearing God leads to freedom and life. Fearing anything else leads to slavery and yes, hell.
Are we listening?
*[Jesus said:] "But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him!" 5
**This is cited in By What Authority: Confronting Churches Who No Longer Believe Their Own Message.
***Obviously, it's a good thing to learn about world religions and to interact with those of other faiths. We Christians want to live in peace with all people AND, by our servant hearts and Christians love, we want to earn a hearing for the good news of Jesus, which can lift people out of darkness into God's marvelous light. But when Christians are gathered to worship God, they should turn their attention to the God we meet in Jesus Christ. Period.
The disciples needed an admonition to fear God. We need it too. Yes, I often ask myself: Is there anything our generation needs more urgently than to really fear God? There is fear enough otherwise in our day and age. We fear illness...We fear poverty...We fear people...Yes, there is enough fear. Jesus tells us that this fear which stunts the growth of a person's character and contaminates the soul is all due to the fact that we do not fear the only one whom we should fear, namely, the living God.**If you want an explanation for why so many Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) congregations are failing either to rise up and demand that the denomination reform and repent or, in the knowledge that the deck is heavily stacked against the Word of God in the ELCA, leave it to join other Lutheran bodies, you need look no further than Hallesby's insightful quote.
ELCA Lutherans are failing to speak and act in concert with the will of God because they fear everything more than they fear God.
For many in the ELCA, God is an abstraction, not a real living Being, the Ground of All Being, as Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich put it. For many, the Bible is not the Word of God, the authoritative record of God's self-disclosure, first "in many and various ways," to the people of Israel and ultimately in the Person of the Word made flesh, Jesus.
Bishops stand idly by, failing to exercise their pastoral responsibility to correct, rebuke, and discipline those pastors and theologians who deny Christ's virgin birth (even the ELCA's official web page that our confession of Jesus' virgin birth is not "a gynecological assertion," which no doubt comes as a great surprise to Jesus and would to the Biblical writers and to the early Christians, including Jesus' own family, who spent some energy denying the allegations made by many that Jesus was a "bastard," conceived by the usual means), who deny that Christ was physically resurrected or that Christians who believe in Christ will physically rise with Christ, and who, even on the official pages of the ELCA, uphold the universalistic notion that since Christ died for all, all will be saved, whether repenting or believing in Christ or not. (Although "saved" is a term meaning little in some universalists' hands, if there is also no resurrection.) The Bible, and Jesus Himself, teaches that faith in Jesus is the means by which God's grace is appropriated by believers and that there is no other way to God but through Jesus. (See here, here, and here.) (Also see here and here.)
The ELCA countenances pastors who teach that while there may be a heaven, there is no hell, in direct contradiction of Jesus Himself.
It countenances, in the presence of and with the complicity of participating bishops, the offering of flagrantly un-Christians prayers in "celebratory" rites. (To see a recent "rite" at which three ELCA synodical bishops were present, in which several alternative versions to the Lord's Prayer and in which there is a refusal to acknowledge God's power and might, see here. Warning: It's deeply depressing reading, especially because it so slyly displaces Biblical truth with plausibly phrased heresy and sin.)
The presiding bishop of the ELCA stands idly by at a conference called Sharing the Gospel (a conference supposedly about sharing the good news of Jesus, the one and only Savior and God), while Muslim and Buddhist prayers invoking other deities or "ways," are offered, ostensibly to allow participants to appreciate the beauty of the prayers***
And, of course, consistent with all of these acts of outright rebellion against God and lazy complicity with heresy, the ELCA, last August, officially denied the authority of God to declare what behaviors are acceptable and what are sin, when it granted congregations the right to ordain practicing homosexuals.
All these sins of commission and of omission are perpetrated by a denomination and by complicit congregations who fear the world more than they fear God.
God's will and Word on all the sins and errors enumerated above, which hardly represents an exhaustive bill of particulars, are crystal clear. A reading of the Bible in which we allow it to speak in its clear sense, untouched by rope-a-dope theology will tell us that the ELCA has wandered far from God.
The ELCA and many of its congregations fear the world; fear being on the outs with those to whom we look for what is politically correct; fear appearing "fanatical" if we side with God rather than the arbiters of contemporary mores and attitudes; fear offending people; fear hurting people; fear breaking up somnambulant clubs masquerading as churches, clubs that have forgotten that the Church belongs to Christ, not to church members.
The truth of God's Word always hurts when we let it tell us the truth about our sin and our need of God. But the truth of God--the truth of Jesus Himself--can also set sinners who repent and believe in Christ free from sin, death, and futility for all eternity.
Jesus tells us to fear God alone. Fearing God leads to freedom and life. Fearing anything else leads to slavery and yes, hell.
Are we listening?
*[Jesus said:] "But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him!" 5
**This is cited in By What Authority: Confronting Churches Who No Longer Believe Their Own Message.
***Obviously, it's a good thing to learn about world religions and to interact with those of other faiths. We Christians want to live in peace with all people AND, by our servant hearts and Christians love, we want to earn a hearing for the good news of Jesus, which can lift people out of darkness into God's marvelous light. But when Christians are gathered to worship God, they should turn their attention to the God we meet in Jesus Christ. Period.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Not "a cosmic good buddy"...
but in Paul Tillich's phrase "wholly other."
Through Christ we know that God understands our every weakness and is slow to anger and filled with tough, unending love for us.
God is also a consuming fire, which is why the fear of the Lord--awe, respect, the constant quaking realization that God is God and we aren't--is the starting point of wise living.
"our God is a consuming fire"
Through Christ we know that God understands our every weakness and is slow to anger and filled with tough, unending love for us.
God is also a consuming fire, which is why the fear of the Lord--awe, respect, the constant quaking realization that God is God and we aren't--is the starting point of wise living.
"our God is a consuming fire"[Photo from Jose Maldonado]
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