Secret Snickers

Have you ever watched a movie or tv show where a group of people were stranded somewhere for an unforeseen amount of time and one of them had some food they were trying to hide from the others. Maybe because they knew there wasn’t really enough for everyone, or maybe because they were just greedy and didn’t want to share…

Have you ever had food when someone else was hungry and offer it to them? Or were you selfish and kept the food all to yourself? I’ll admit I have been on both sides of this equation, I have offered and I have retained the food I had.

I wonder if Jesus carried a secret snickers? Read the passage for the day from John 4:31-38:

Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” So the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him something to eat?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work. Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’? Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest. Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”

Jesus says he has food the disciples don’t know about. Does he have a secret pocket in his robes where he has stashed some snickers for the road? This of course is not the case. Jesus was not hoarding food, or eating anything at all. The gospel of John is full of double meanings and makes us look deeper at our faith and what God is saying to us. Jesus was physically hungry, yet that was not the purpose of the food. The food Jesus spoke about is doing the will of the Father.

See the ending of the passage, “Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.” Others have started the work here, but it isn’t done, so we must enter in and continue the labor. Notice He did not say finish the labor, but we have entered into their labor, and now it is our labor and someday someone else will enter into our labor and it will become their labor. See we are doing the work of the Father. It is not our job to bring the whole world to Jesus, Jesus is already there! It is our job to help them see He is there and continue the work that Jesus himself started to love the world and show them what it means to be in a relationship with Jesus.

So don’t hide your snickers! Share it so others will share with you!

Perfect Harmony…

Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. (Colossians 3:12-17 ESV)

Have you ever heard a choir sing in perfect harmony? Even if you are not a music person, able to sing or play, you can hear it when a group is singing in harmony. It is a sweet sound like none other…

And of course there is the flip side of this. We all know when we hear something that is not in perfect harmony. This is a sound much like a pack of cats running from a little girl trying to pick them all up and love on them… You know the sound…

Which sound would you rather hear?

Which sound would you rather contribute to?

We all have the ability to sing together with all of the world in perfect harmony. SInce we are God’s beloved we need to put on compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience… That should be easy enough be kind and humble, meek and patient, and compassionate, looking out for the other, those who we think are less than us, and those who we think are higher than us are ones we need to serve and do all of these things to.

If one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. We have to forgive as God forgave us. Even when we did not and do not deserve His forgiveness He still forgives us. As the Lord’s prayer says, forgive us as we have forgiven those who have sinned against us. Do you really want to be forgiven the way you have forgiven?

And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. Love binds everything together in perfect harmony. If we can love one another the sound that will be made will be perfect harmonious and the most beautiful sound in the world!

Love as God has loved you and participate in the making of beautiful music!

Review ~ The Church Creative ~ how to be a creative gathering in the 21st century by John O’Keefe

The church as a whole has been in a decline for quite some time.  It seems we are looking for the new program that will turn everything around. The cookie cutter that will make all of our gatherings be like they were in the ‘good old days’… But will we ever get back to those days, if we could ever actually agree on when those day were?

John O’Keefe has given us a work to help us move away from thinking about things in a box, to re-imagining they way we look at issues and ministry. The book The Church Creative is a wonderful work on leadership in the gatherings of the 21st century.

John helps us to look at life in a different way to to image leadership in a different way. This book does not claim to have all of the answers to make you the perfect leader. I think, and believe John would agree, it raises as many or more questions as it answers. It is a method to help us understand what Jesus meant when He said we must enter the kingdom of heaven as children, because as adults we have lost our creative imaginative selves. We are so hung up on fear of doing something different we would rather let the gathering die around us then risk being the person God has called us to be. In John’s words:

This is where many start to buy the stories of limits real adults place on the world around them. This is the time in our lives where we say things like, “Oh, I can’t do that.” It is a time when we’re told that we can no longer see ourselves as an innovator, a knight or a superhero. This is the time in life where we leave behind the “childish” idea of the little train that could and replace it with the adult idea of “I Think I Can’t, I Think I Can’t, I know I Can’t.

As adults we want the limitations that children seem to push aside. We as adults want our worlds in nice boxes so it is all contained. We spend a lot of time as leaders telling people to think outside the box, and John in The Church Creative asks us to completely get ride of the box!

This book is a must read for every leader in the gatherings of the body of Christ. John helps us all see a new way of looking at things and really unpacks the meaning behind Jesus’ statement of new wine in old wine skins in a way that helped me to look at leadership in a new light. God is a Creative and he needs Creatives to lead his gatherings, and John can start you down the road to being the Creative you were created to be.

Greg Von Wald ~ 18 year old speaker at the 2012 ELCA Youth Gathering

Greg is 18 years old and will be attending James Madison University next fall. He will be majoring in Integrated Science and Technology and hopes to change the world through clean energy technology. He attended the ELCA Youth Gathing in 2009 with his home congregation, Prince of Peace Lutheran Church, and is excited to return this year as a participant and a speaker.

who has qualified you

And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. (Colossians 1:9-14 ESV)

The author of Colossians tells us as Paul does at the beginning of most of his letters that he is praying for the community. This letter says that from the day they heard that Christ/the Holy Spirit had come to them they were praying for them. Isn’t it a wonderful feeling to know that people are praying for you? Even if you don’t know it at the time, but find out later that people were praying for you during a time of trial, or just any time makes a sort of warm fuzzy feeling well up inside of you (at least it does me). And I believe that there are people praying for all of us every moment of every day. Anytime we pray that God’s will be done, we are praying for all of the children of God and all those who still are seeking where they belong… God is doing wonderful things in and through His people when they pray.

But then if others are praying for you, are you praying for others? And when you are praying for others how are you doing that? I mean really who qualified you to be able to pray in the first place?

Did you see what the author of Colossians said? “May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father,…” They are praying that the Lord would give the believers strength with power and might and that they might have endurance and patient in all things with joy and always giving thanks to God. Power, might, strength, endurance, patient, joy are wonderful attributes and are reasons to give God thanks, but the real reason in my mind is what follows this and this is also what qualifies you to be who you are and a child of God. “…who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” You see God, the Father, has qualified you to be a part of the inheritance, and He has delivered you from darkness and given you redemption and forgiven your sins!

He has qualified you to share the good news and to build up the saints!

So pray hard saint of God we all need it!

Lost Sheep…

Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him. And the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled, saying, “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” So he told them this parable: “What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open country, and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’ Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. (Luke 15:1-7 ESV)

We talk about Jesus telling this story all the time and about the sheep the shepherd goes looking for, but what about those the shepherd left behind? Here in Luke the 99 are left in the open country, where predators can get them and the one who protects them is not to be found. They can get into all kinds of trouble and follow each other off a cliff… Jesus says the shepherd leaves the sheep in the open to go and look for the one that is missing. They are left in community, but unprotected by the shepherd. They have to look out for each other.

This story is the first in a chapter filled with stories of lost things, but it is not really about the lost things. Or about those who need to repent repenting. Not that we all do not need to repent, but I do not think this chapter is about the lost things. This first story is not about the sheep that is lost. I mean really how does a sheep repent if it is about the lost thing repenting?

So how does a sheep repent…

They say “I’m sorry I’ve been baaaaad…”

And the next story in the chapter is about the woman who has 10 coins and loses 1 of them and she tears the house apart looking for it. If this is a story about the lost repenting how does the coin repent?

They say, “I promise I’ll change!”

Neither of these stories is about the lost item repenting. They are about the person who has lost them searching for them. Risking everything or staying up all night and moving everything and doing everything possible to find that thing that was lost. It is not about the item repenting.

And the third story in chapter 15 you may know as the prodigal son…

Again this is not a story about the son repenting, or being lost. Yes the son repents and is lost, but that is not the story…

I mean does the story start ‘there was a boy who had a brother and a father…’

No the story starts ‘there was a man who had two sons…’

The story is about the father! It is not the story of the prodigal son, but it is the story of the loving father who goes to great lengths to search out the son he had lost!

So worry not lost sheep, God your heavenly father is searching for you, and all you need to do is turn around and he will be right behind you waiting to welcome you home.