application

JOMO & THE GOLDEN RULE

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Practicing What I Didn’t Get to Teach in BC

In my quiet time with the Lord this morning, I read this from William Jay’s devotional Morning Exercises:

A natural man is only concerned to escape from trouble, but the Christian is anxious to have it sanctified and improved. He is commanded to hear the rod. While God chastens he teaches. I must therefore be in a learning frame of mind. I must say unto God, “Show me wherefore thou contendest with me.” “I will hear what, by this event, God the Lord will speak.”

In my recent post JOMO NOT FOMO, I shared something of the same idea as a result of the providential curve ball which landed me in an Idaho hospital with aspiration pneumonia. Part of the joy of missing out on teaching at the church camp in Canada was the benefit of a sharpened focus on hearing what God is saying and doing in the change of events. I alluded to a conversation I engaged with my hospital roommate who just so happened to be suffering with head and neck cancer–the very same kind which afflicted me back in 2005. How my health troubles were “sanctified and improved” by that encounter centered on one of the messages I planned to give at the camp from Matthew 7:1-12.

Jesus closed his teaching on how to engage others constructively in relational conflicts with the well-known and so-called Golden Rule. “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.” Before I can share about the Golden Rule joy I gained from missing out in Canada through my roommate story, I need to unpack the message content from the talk I never gave, but Jesus led me to practice.

The Golden Rule has been called “the Everest of all ethical teaching.” The Reformed Study Bible entry notes:

This principle was stated in a negative form by various ancient thinkers as, “Do not do to others what you do not want done to you.” Jesus makes it a positive obligation, a requirement to proactively do for others the good one wants for oneself. Here it appears after the discussion of God’s goodness and His willingness to give.

Because God is this good to you, go and do likewise with others! Jesus stresses the importance of embracing this Golden Rule ethic in all our relationships at the end of v. 12: “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets” (emphasis added). In other words, this MO in treating others matters so much as a professed kingdom follower of Jesus because it distills into one sentence the essence of everything taught in the Old Testament. This is Leviticus 19:18 in action: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.” Jesus put it this way when asked which is the great commandment in Matthew 22:37-40: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” The Golden Rule puts radical greatest-of-these-is-love into action.

Ken Sande suggests asking ourselves some helpful questions to evaluate how well we do or do not embrace this: “Would I want someone else to treat me the way I have been treating him? How would I feel if I found out people were saying about me what I’ve said about her? If our positions were reversed, how would I feel if he did what I have done?”

Questions like those in application of the Golden Rule with my challenging middle-of-the night hospital roommate made all the difference in whether or not I sanctified and improved that trial and, as a result, more thoroughly experienced the joy of missing out.

Lest this turn into an interminably long post, the rest of the story must wait for the next edition!

Dealing with Serious Threats to Our Peace

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happy-reformation-day

I blew through the application section of this morning’s message. You can listen to the audio here.

I promised to post this portion of my manuscript on the blog for the convenience of anyone who wanted to pay closer attention.

I promise, I fulfill.

Warding off serious threats to peace in the church requires a decisive plan for their defeat – watching out for them, staying clear of them, being smart about them, and expecting the God of peace and the Lord of grace to help us fight them. Takeaways are plain. One, relish being part of a confessional church with Reformation roots. Your best friend to guard against error is an orthodox, articulation of sound doctrine. Two, embrace the stewardship of guarding the go0d deposit of the gospel. Three, expect error to hunt us to destroy our unity. Don’t be caught by surprise. Leaders and followers alike stay on the alert. This is why you don’t teach any class at OGC unless you are a member and have been appropriately vetted in terms of sound doctrine. Four, be decisive in dealing with error in the majors. We can’t afford to pussyfoot around with heresy in any form given the costs to our unity. Five, be careful what you read, watch on Christian TV, and to whom you listen to on the web. Be smart – wise in the good, innocent in the evil. Spend more time learning the truth than you do at all in dabbling in the deceptions. Six, rely on the God of peace and the Lord of grace to fight the battle against the arch deceiver. Pray, pray, pray. And, seven, preserve peace knowing you’ve been saved by the God of peace and are helped by the Lord of grace.

I look forward, Lord willing, to continuing the peacemaking theme next Sunday with Psalm 133 – Unity’s Song. 

 

What's On Your Heart?

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Or should I say, “What’s in your chest pocket?”

If you heard last Sunday’s message, you get the picture. I’m talking about meditation as a means of treasuring up the Word of God on our hearts. If you missed the message, you can listen to the audio here.

By way of reminder, I wanted to put two things from the message in this post.

The first is Don Whitney’s definition of and helpful analogy about meditation:

Let’s define meditation as deep thinking on the truths and spiritual realities revealed in Scripture for the purposes of understanding, application, and prayer. Meditation goes beyond hearing, reading, studying, and even memorizing God’s Word. A simple analogy would be a cup of tea. You are the cup of hot water and the intake of Scripture is represented by the tea bag. Hearing God’s Word is like one dip of the tea bag into the cup. Some of the tea’s flavor is absorbed by the water, but not as much as would occur with a more thorough soaking of the bag. In this analogy, reading, studying, and memorizing God’s Word are represented by additional plunges of the tea bag into the cup. The more frequently the tea enters the water, the more effect it has. Meditation, however, is like immersing the bag completely and letting it steep until all the rich tea flavor has been extracted and the hot water is thoroughly tinctured reddish brown (Spiritual Disciplines For The Christian Life, Colorado Springs: Navpress, 1991, 44).

The second is my eight-step plan for doing meditation:

1 M MAKE a text selection by reading Scripture.
2 E EXAMINE a text’s details by questioning Scripture.
3 D DETERMINE a text’s meaning by studying
Scripture.
4 I INTERNALIZE a text’s content by memorizing
Scripture.                             Psalm 119:97
5 T TAILOR a text’s content by personalizing Scripture.
6 A AMPLIFY a text’s ideas by paraphrasing Scripture.
7 T TAP a text’s power by praying Scripture.
8 E EMBRACE a text’s impact by applying Scripture.

May the Lord help us store up His word in our chest pockets for the storming of our doubting castles and the slaying of our giant despairs.