Monday Morning Music Ministry

10-31-11

Oft times, when we are in deepest state of anguish before the Lord, or attempting to draw closer and closer, and closer, to Him, we cry out for Him to examine our hearts.

There are times – precious few, in some of our cases – when we feel, not prideful or self-righteous, but close to Jesus in love and devotion. We want Him to search our souls, to see that we love Him as we never have, that our repentance is real and our dedication is pure. We can never reach these spiritual levels apart from the Holy Spirit, and we ask the Spirit to bring us to the Throne of Grace and address God in these ways.

At these passionate moments we feel like inviting God to plumb our innermost thoughts… but at the same time we dare ourselves to be worthy.

We must always be mindful that our righteousness is like dirty rags to a Holy God. We must be secure that we will never exhibit a “shadow of turning.” Matthew Henry once cautioned: “The heart, the conscience of man, in his corrupt and fallen state, is deceitful above all things. It calls evil good, and good evil…. the heart is desperately wicked; it is deadly, it is desperate…. We cannot know our own hearts, nor what they will do in an hour of temptation.… Yet whatever wickedness there is in the heart, God sees it. Men may be imposed upon, but God cannot be deceived.”

So we must proceed carefully! The spiritual pitfalls do not make this spiritual attitude toward God spiritually futile. Holiness and purity must be our goals. But awareness of the inclinations of human nature should keep us in the Word, and reliant on the Holy Spirit.

“I the Lord search the heart and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.” – Jeremiah 17:10

The real truth is that God is searching our hearts always, and testing our minds, anyway. So an attitude of inviting God “in” is useful, and humbling, and spiritually disciplining.

But it is probably better that we devote ourselves, first, to our knowing God’s heart.

It is more important to our faith than God knowing our hearts.

Understanding God’s heart, and ways, and will, is essential before our own hearts can approach any state of preparation to invite God’s examination. Without seeking His heart we cannot know how to reach that point. Without knowing His heart we cannot find our own, to have that Closer Walk with Him.

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Click: Just a Closer Walk With Thee

10-24-11

All of the Bible is inspired, and useful for teaching, pointing out error, correcting each other in love, and training for a life that has God’s approval, as it says in Timothy 3:16.

Yet (as with “3:16” verses!) every once awhile in Scripture, you come across a verse that has special meaning, or a personal application, or multiple layers of implications for us.

I consider Psalm 46:10 to be one of those verses – Be still, and know that I am God.

I invite you to break that one sentence of God into parts. Each part will open a door of His presence, His will, His peace. Taken together, they are greater than the sum of its parts.

Perhaps you can meditate on each of its parts, one on each day of the coming week. Every phrase has uncountable lessons for us:

Be.

Be still and know that I am God.
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Be inspired! The song with this message is performed by Nicol Sponberg of Selah: the immortal hymn Be Still My Soul. This version has an echo of What a Friend We Have in Jesus, of which we become aware when we meditate upon this gentle but powerful verse from the Psalms.

Click: Be Still My Soul

10-17-11

Rational discourse in America seems to be an endangered species. Activists should be working to preserve Logic, not only snail darters and old trees; and if we were to rescue Reason it might become easier to rescue unborn babies.

Look at all the stuff in the news these days. People proclaim their “rights” when they don’t acknowledge anything as wrong. TV interviewers answer their own questions before they ask them. Interview subjects routinely answer questions that are not asked. The “Occupy” mobs are walking oxymorons: they shout “Anarchists Unite!” and they are endorsed by politicians whose policies the protestors supposedly despise. Circular illogic. Rationality has moved and left no forwarding address.

Common Sense is, itself, a member of those Unemployment Figures we hear about. The current flap over Mitt Romney’s Mormonism and other candidates’ opinions of it – and issues surrounding their own faiths – blow across the landscape like a big sand storm, blinding everyone in its path.

It all is characteristic of our contemporary culture’s moral confusion and intellectual cowardice. Mitt Romney is a Mormon, in fact descended from church hierarchy; being an overseas missionary and relatives recently living in Mormon “communities” in Mexico are part of his resume. A large number of Christians are curious or suspicious – or outright reject – a religion with core beliefs that are separate from the Old and New Testaments; with practices that are airlock-secret; with recent tenets that include denigration of blacks and women, and the embrace of polygamy.

Now that Mormons are running for president, Christians are thinking about Mormonism in the same way (maybe more carefully) that they consider candidates’ positions on, say, the capital gains tax, or free trade with Southeast Asian nations. Many are saying “I would not feel comfortable voting for a man who believes those things.” Or, maybe, “I would not feel comfortable with the kind of man who could believe those things.” It is reasonable to reach such conclusions, and is legal to state them. But it is being called bigotry.

Christians who decline to vote for Mormons do not confess to hatred, nor to anti-Mormon laws nor persecution nor deportation. They just declare they will vote for another person. If some use the word “cult,” it should be recognized that for decades evangelicals and Pentecostals have taught that cults are non-Christian sects that were started by, or still revolved around, an individual human. That would be Joseph Smith, in the case of the Mormons. No one claims that Mitt Romney is going to command his followers to drink Kool-Aid en masse. Objections to someone using the term “cult” over-reach.

There are tender threads of reason and clarity that might redeem a controversy that should not be a controversy.

1. The Mormons are in a horrible dander that people do not recognize them as Christians. “Look, our name is ‘Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,” said John Huntsman, rolling his eyes in a “duh” response about LDS. A movement that believes what it does about multiple gods, and the afterlife, and Jesus’ appearances on earth, and so forth, ought to be able to understand the reservations of traditional Christians, especially when all of Mormonism’s tenets are not even shared outside LDS. If the Mormons can disavow the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the sect of Warren Jeffs, convicted polygamist and child rapist) as a distorted off-spin of LDS, why cannot Christians be free to regard Mormonism as a distorted off-spin of biblical Christianity?

2. When Michele Bachmann’s traditional Lutheran synod holds to ancient characterizations of the Pope, the media called its members bigots; the implication being that other voters should reject members of that denomination. But when citizens decline to vote for a Mormon because of its beliefs… they are the ones labeled incipient bigots. The only constant, if you will notice, is that Christians are always painted as the nasty haters. Millions of liberals reject any candidate who opposes abortions, but they are never portrayed as haters or bigots in the press.

3. If it is bigotry to act, as a citizen, according to your convictions, then how soon do the Thought Police arrive, and how will they punish our opinions? And what a topsy-turvy world this has become. Christians are being murdered and sentenced to death for their faith in Pakistan, our ally. There are no Christians churches left, all having been closed or razed, in Afghanistan, another ally. In Iraq, after thousands of Americans died and billions of American dollars spent, two-thirds of a substantial Christian population have fled the country because of persecution, or have been murdered for their faith. All subsequent to Saddam Hussein. We can look at our ally Egypt, too, where since the Arab Spring, Christians churches have been invaded and Christians attacked, sometimes with the Army watching, sometimes by the Army. And the US Administration reserves its policy objections and sanctions for other countries, other causes.

The relation to the Mormon controversy, so-called? The media would paint those who decline to vote for an LDS candidate as virtual Taliban Trainees. In truth it is the opposite. Clarity of Thought informs Responsibility to Act, which both undergird the Duty to Vote, all of which are necessary prerequisites of Freedom of Religion. The Thought Police, with their Compassion meters, would strip-search everyone’s standards and consciences at the curtain of every voting machine.

Mormons are free to run for office in America. Who questions that? Nobody. And the rest of us are free to vote. Or not to vote. And, for the moment, we are still free to think.

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A traditional hymn of the church is here sung by the boys’ choir Libera. As we have noted, traditional, evangelical, and Pentecostal Christians seem to be the culture’s last remaining faith to denigrate. Any exercise of their own biblical beliefs is routinely called “hate speech.” This hymn is from a time when Christians asserted themselves more bravely and with assurance, not from hatred of men but love of God.

Click: Onward, Christian Soldiers

10-10-11

Steve Jobs died this week. For many years to come, the assessments of his remarkable career will scroll down the screens of our lives. In fact they will be innumerable as his inventions and innovations. For he did not teach people how to speak, but he taught how to communicate in new ways. And how to compose, to organize, to perceive, to create, to share… to dream in new ways. He simultaneously enabled people to realize the existence of new horizons, and believe they actually could reach them. At the same time he developed of array of devices that drive people into “virtual” monastic cocoons.

Things he did in the tech world were not only innovations in concept or manufacture: they were seeds planted, sure to grow and grow… perhaps even in ways that America’s Dreamer-in-Chief would never have dreamed.

But another reason he will be written about with increasing avidity is the simple reason that, ultimately, very little was known during his lifetime about his lifetime. He was very private, which is refreshing in this celebrity-addicted culture. What do we know of the man apart from Apple, the iColossus catalog, Pixar? It is reported that Jobs was adopted, and that his natural father, an immigrant from Syria named Abdulfattah Jandali, never was able to receive responses from Jobs after reaching out by many letters and e-mails. Turning from the preceding to the following generation, Jobs fathered an illegitimate daughter whose paternity he denied for years, even swearing in court that he was infertile. He eventually acknowledged being his daughter’s father.

We know that he was a college drop-out. We know that he married Laurene Powell in a Buddhist ceremony at Yosemite. We know that they had three children. Some people are drawn to the fact – in this economy such things have relevance – that Apple did not start or subsist on government handouts and bailouts. We hear that he left at least four years’ worth of new ideas and agenda items as a part of his legacy. But we also hear that he was a workplace monster, employed police-state tactics (on his staff, not the competition), and not only outsourced from the US to China, but that Apple’s exclusive factories in China were disgraceful, overcrowded sweatshops.

Speaking personally – and I love everything in the App Store – two impressive things about Steve Jobs’ life (personal, not professional) are that when he was fired from his own company in its “down” days, he persevered, believed in his visions – in himself – to the extent that he not only roared back, but roared back at the helm of his own, former, company. Further, at least from meager accounts, it seems that in nervous start-up days, periods of risky experimentation, good times, public skepticism, several setbacks, triumphs, wild adulation, harsh criticism… his wife and children always believed in him. Sycophants, stockholders, nor investors cannot replace such a thing. Without it, a man fights insecurity, emotional emasculation, and uncountable stumbling blocks in life. Jobs evidently was blessed in ways that were not apparent to the public.

Perhaps it was that precious gift that led to reports we have of Steve Jobs’ last days. The writer Walter Isaacson was chosen by Jobs to write a biography, knowing his days were numbered. And from what that book will tell, a priority of Jobs’ last weeks was to draw a few friends, but especially his wife and children, around his deathbed.

Isaacson quotes Jobs in his last meeting: “I wanted my kids to know me. I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.”

And a friend, Dr Dean Omish, quoted one of their last conversations to The New York Times: “Steve made choices. I asked him if he was glad that he had kids, and he said, ‘It’s 10,000 times better than anything I’ve ever done’.”

Would billions of MAC users and iPhone, iPad, iTunes users (and on and on); would they exchange their toys and tools for the chance that Steve Jobs could have been closer to his kids, that he could have “been there” more often? It is an artificial alternative: it’s not a choice anyone has to make, but it sets us to thinking. It set him to thinking in his last hours. There were choices he made.

We come into the world naked, and we leave just about the same way. “Accomplishments” and resume aside, we just have our family on one side of the line, and eternity on the other. I don’t know the state of Steve Jobs’ soul. If biographers and friends write 100 books, I still would not know: that was between him and the Supreme Friend we can know, Jesus. Surely during his 56 years Steve Jobs had that choice presented to him.

Neither do we know the answer to a question that ought to challenge us. When he said, “I want my kids to know me,” and having kids was “10,000 times better than anything I’ve ever done,” were those the satisfied words of a man writing the codes of his last earthly chapters? Or an anguished cry of a smart man who could program everything except his own peace?

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This video is a tender song about that last but most important question we will have to answer. It is not the old hymn of the familiar title, but a recent song with an age-old challenge… and a tender invitation.

Click: Tenderly Calling

10-3-11

It is a good thing to remember things we celebrate, especially the words and phrases surrounding them, at times of the year not associated with them. And I don’t mean “Christmas in July” used-car sales. Every day of the year we should be astonished anew by the Easter story, the miracle of the Resurrection. Or by the powerful mystery of God’s intervention in the course of the history and in the lives of His children, to become flesh and dwell among us, which deserves better than to be categorized as a theme of Christmas time. The “fact” of it, and the “why” of it, should be cause for daily, not yearly, celebration.

In the secular world, our civic life, the same threat of lassitude exists. We relegate so many observances and speeches about the American Revolution (if noted at all) to the Fourth of July, that we tend to consider the topic covered for the rest of the year. This penchant unplugs the healthy recollection of our heritage’s great audacity, however, and can suck the life out of patriotism.

The Founders did not merely want to be independent of England. It was about more than import duties and having a voice in the British parliament. Christian Patriots caught fire. They realized that America, a land set apart, could be a society set apart too: the world’s first experiment in self-government, a Republic (not a democracy, which is a subject for a thousand posts), and, when we read the documents of the time, a civil society built along biblical principles. Even “deists” – fewer in number than modern textbooks claim – looked to the Bible for blueprints.

Revolution? Jefferson wrote, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Significantly, he wrote this after the Constitution had been adopted.

These concepts have spiritual connotations and implications. For instance, the Roman lawyer Tertullian, after his conversion, defended persecuted Christians in Nero’s time, defiantly saying, “We multiply whenever we are mown down by you; the blood of Christians is seed.”

That the American Revolutionaries were largely of the comfortable classes – merchants, traders, lawyers, landowners – is instructive. They had grown prosperous during British rule. They easily could have remained comfortable without rocking the boat. The lower classes, no less freedom-loving, might be seen as having “nothing to lose” by rebellion. Yet patriots of all stripes knew what was at stake. They were willing to lose their comfort, their relative freedoms, indeed their heads, if they lost… or even during the precarious process of winning.

This stark choice was not a hazy implication of their actions. They boldly closed the Declaration of Independence with the famously defiant pledge: “With a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”

What Tertullian said of early martyrs, and Jefferson said of citizen patriots, must be the standard of today’s Christians. We must be willing to give all and lose all for the sake of the gospel; to spend and be spent, and to realize that persecution in some degree and at some time will visit us.

Some colonial patriots did lose their homes, businesses, and lives. What did it gain them? The answer is, knowledge of worthy sacrifice for a noble ideal, and liberty for their fellow citizens and descendants. What do Christians gain by “losing all”? That answer is, gaining Heaven.

But then, in one of the Bible’s puzzling points, we occasionally read that the saints who “go before” can gain treasures in Heaven; some will have “crowns.” Do we serve Christ in order to win gifts and prizes in the afterlife? No! This is one of the great truths of the end times – In Revelation 4, verses 4, 10 and 11, we read, “And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold. The four and twenty elders fall down before Him that sat on the throne, and worship Him that liveth for ever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne, saying, Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power: for Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are and were created.”

In other words, we gain all – eternity with Christ – by losing all. And if God graces some souls with “crowns” for having served Him in special ways, we will want immediately to lay them back at His feet!

Truly it takes losing it all, and being willing to lose all, in order to gain everything. That is true in a nation, and it is true in a kingdom – God’s kingdom. Let us appreciate that truth on more days than patriotic holidays, and at more times than in occasional sermons. It is how we should conduct our lives, daily.

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This video features the great Jessy Dixon, gospel singer, songwriter, and preacher, who died this week. The song is “I Have Everything,” precisely to our theme today. His amazing performances will be missed – what a talent he had.

Click: I Have Everything