Thoughts on Life and Worship

In my life, I’ve had the opportunity to engage with a few cultures different than my own.   I grew up in the Southwest and got an early taste of Mexican-American customs, food, and language.   I took a mission trip to Eastern Europe in the 1990’s and on two occasions had the opportunity to minister in Kenya.   Each cross-cultural engagement brought challenge, learning, and surprise.   But by far, the biggest surprise I experienced was the Labor Day celebration service that I was privileged to attend at a Karen (Burmese refugee) church.   Somehow, they didn’t get the memo about long-standing labor and management tensions in America.   They had invited their supervisors to the service and were honoring their bosses by giving them lavish gifts!   They got it all wrong.   But I wasn’t going to tell them.   What a delight! According to the Bible, work is a blessing from our Creator to be embraced rather than an obligation to be shunne...

There is no greater theme in all the world than love.   The church has always celebrated it in song and it will forever be our anthem throughout eternity.   Love has the power to change lives – indeed to change the world.   We all want to be loved.   It’s not just that.   We all need to be loved.   And no one loves you more or better than God. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? ...No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8: 35-39). Nothing can get between you and God’s limitless love.   You are loved! http://www.fbcgalesburg.org/messages ...

What if I asked if you were interested in buying a luxury condo in Chernobyl?   It would be very affordable.   Would you be interested?   Of course not!   Today’s text is nearly the equivalent of God asking the prophet Jeremiah to do the same thing.   God told Jeremiah to buy a piece of real estate near Jerusalem while the city was already surrounded by a terrifying enemy destined to raze the city and carry most of the people off into captivity.   Scripture doesn’t record Jeremiah’s thoughts but, reading between the lines, you know he was thinking the Lord must be crazy.   Cutting a real estate deal under those circumstances made no sense at all! Sometimes, God pushes us into a corner.   It doesn’t make sense.   You didn’t deserve it.   There seems to be no escape except to throw yourself on the mercies of God.   No one wants to be in that situation, but it is a blessed place to be.   God has promised to take care ...

I’m sure you know many of jokes about changing lightbulbs.   For example, “How many Harvard students does it take to change a lightbulb? Just one to hold it while the world revolves around him.”   There’s even one for us: “How many Baptists does it take to change a lightbulb….”” CHANGE??? (It’s not in our vocabulary.) Most people don’t like change on some level.   But the world is always changing…and that’s a good thing.   If change weren’t possible we’d be stuck in our current miseries.   Change, for the Christian, is normal and expected as we should becoming more and more like Christ.   Change is our hope: “When Christ appears, we shall be like him…” (I John 3:2). The only thing that doesn’t change is God himself.   A wise theologian once said, ““All that God is He has always been, and all that He has been and is He will ever be.”   God’s steadfastness without change is called his immutability.   God will never change in hi...

One of the most urgent cries of the human spirit is to be fully known and understood.   The love-sick pursuit of a young person for a life-partner is driven, at its core, by the drive to know and to be known.   That is the cry that only true self-giving love can answer.   The trouble, however, is that no one can know and love you perfectly.   The man and woman who have forged a beautiful and committed marriage for over fifty years still experience misunderstandings.   The yearning to be known and understood can only be met by the One who made us.   The psalmist sang,           O Lord, you have searched me and you know me…           Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. God knows.   He knows everything about you and yet he loves you completely and without reservation.   Like the psalmist, I know enough of my...

A philosopher once said, “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan: The proper study of mankind is man.”   He could not have been more wrong.   While the study of man and of all creation is a worthwhile endeavor, such a seeker will lie frustrated on his deathbed because he will not understand the source of his own nature. We are unique in Creation.   Only humans are made in the image of God.   The greatest enterprise in any person’s life is the contemplation of God.   What we think about God is the most important thing about us.   But thinking about God is challenging because He is unlike any other thing in his Creation.   When we begin to get a glimpse of who God is we will experience moral shock just as the prophet Isaiah did and we considered last week.   Our sinful moral bent is to avoid contemplation of God.   It is too painful.   It is much easier to put ourselves in place as god and master of our fate.   But su...

I don’t recall a time in my lifetime when our country was more politically polarized than it is today.   I engage political news every day but even I am growing increasingly weary.   As a nation, virtues of goodness, justice, brotherhood, and love are rarely seen in our national discourse.   With political sides chosen and polarized media allies cheering their team on, we seem to be able to accomplish nothing except raise the level of animus against each other.   And it’s all in the name of gaining the upper hand - acquiring more and more political power to achieve the party’s end and enrich the primary players. Psalm 2 asks “Why do the people so furiously rage together?”   “God,” the psalmist writes, “laughs and scoffs at them.”   I bet.   We think we’re in charge.   We’re not.   Only God is sovereign.   God is in charge.   Not Congress. Not the President.   Not the UN.   Not political parties.   N...