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Abraham & Isaac: Why?

11/29/2014

Last Sunday we had a really neat dialogue, recapping on the session Kelvin & Veronica led us through. The key theme we picked up together was recalling that the biblical words for worship (proskyneo & shachah) mean 'to bow down to' or to be 'in submission to' - so much more than merely singing songs.

The key theme we picked up from this is that if worship is a practice of being in submission to God - living in constant acknowledgement that He is God and we are not - then things that have value for our meditational or devotional life are those which lead us into a state of recognition that he is God and we are not. That is worship. The awesome thing about this is that state of 'worship-ful' reflection can be prompted by anything that speaks to us...a powerful moment in a Hollywood film, a glorious sunrise, lines in a poem that shift your perspective, the powerful harmonies of one of Bach's compositions, or the social justice lyrics in the protest songs of Billy Bragg, Bob Dylan, or even Rage Against The Machine. It doesn't have to be a 'Christian' song or movie to lead you into true worship...in fact when this point really sinks in you realise there is actually no such thing as 'christian' music. If it leads you to acknowledge He is God and we are not, it can lead you into worship. Don't judge movies and music by whether they're 'christian' or not - evaluate them based on whether they lead you to a greater acknowledgement of who really is God here (oh...and of course whether you enjoy them or not too!).

Every piece of beauty we appreciate, every skillful talent that's displayed, and the humbling wonder of creation all point to One far greater who is the source of it all. This concept offers an almost limitless world of things to appreciate and enjoy as 'worship' in recognition that He is God and we are not...
So depending on our tastes, we should feel free to draw from and enjoy the world's entire art, film or record collection. And wherever and whenever it leads you to moments of true worship - soak it up!

From there, we made some popcorn and watched the Abraham & Isaac sequence from The Bible DVD Series, which everyone seemed to agree could only be described as disturbing. So...why did God put Abraham through that? Why is it recorded in scripture for us? Here's a quick summary of where we got to...the slides from the day are copied below too.

This was a much heavier discussion as it began to dawn on us that God was actually revealing something about himself here...The story of Abraham and Isaac is typically taught as a lesson for us...almost as if it's about us: we're meant to learn from Abraham's model of faith and we are supposed to trust in God as much as he did...'God will always provide, if we just trust him' and so on.
The problem, again, is that we seem to have forgotten the main character in the Bible is not actually us :)
What if we read the story of Abraham and Isaac through God's perspective - as if it is actually about God?

In Genesis 15, we have an astonishing story where God makes his covenant with Abraham - promising that he will have an heir from his own loins and that his descendents will outnumber the stars (referred as the Abrahamic covenant, predating the covenant with Moses that was superceded by Christ). They make the covenant together by slaughtering animals and preparing to 'walk down the aisle' between the halves of the slaughtered animals (I bet you thought walking down the aisle had a romantic tradition!!!). However, before they can do that together and seal the covenant, God places Abraham into a sleep and appears himself as two fiery symbols and walks through the aisle.
It's an ancient tradition of sealing a covenant together and essentially saying, "If I break this covenant, may it be done to me as it was to these animals." Here God is already beginning to forecast that the covenant will be broken, but that it is He and He alone who will pay the price for it. Heavy stuff.
Then we get to Abraham and Isaac...and God begins to explain how he will pay the price for the covenant we break with him: by sacrificing his own son for our sake. The story with Abraham is God walking us through the experience he is about to go through...he seems to be inviting us into an understanding of what we've put him through - what it is going to cost him.
It is a disturbing story - even more so when you see it portrayed on screen. The truth is, it's supposed to be disturbing. This is not a cute Sunday School story for us to sanitise for children to encourage them to trust God more. This is an agonising and disturbing story that is supposed to give us some empathy for God's experience in his covenant with us. And lead us to worship him more!
Heavy stuff...give it some thought...

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Worship: An event or a lifestyle?

11/19/2014

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Huge thanks to Kelvin & Veronica for leading us through part one of our discussion on what worship is. It was a really enlightening time together - fun and challenging - taking us back to scripture and the roots of what worship is in the Bible. It would be fair to say we seem to have lost a few things along the way!

We invited Kelvin and Veronica to contribute a blog column for us to recapture some of what we learned.
Firstly, here's links to the two hilarious (and perhaps sadly true) clips we watched:
1. What if worship was an NBA game?
2. Wrong worship (aka "I exalt me")
Over to you guys!....>>>

Worship – it’s not an event, it’s a lifestyle

Worship. Ask most people in your church what it’s about, and most will answer it’s about singing or music or the slow songs that make us feel close to God. As we are finding, what the scriptures have to say about worship is something much bigger … something much more intense ... but um … also quite challenging.

In Exodus 34:14, God says “You shall worship no other god, for the Lord whose name is Jealous is a jealous god”. We’ll get to the worship bit shortly, but God is … jealous? … really? .. is that in the bible? Yep, and what God is referring to is that he is simply not interested in sharing the limelight. He’s looking for it all.

When the Moses went up the mountain and was given the 10 commandments in Exodus 20:1, the first four were all about our relationship with God – 1) no other gods, 2) no likenesses of other gods, 3) no bowing down to other gods (and there’s that word jealous again), and 4) no irreverent use of God’s name. Put simply, God is saying “me and me alone”. As a side note, the other 6 commandments are all about things that we are susceptible to letting take the limelight like our work, a new car or the neighbour’s pretty wife.

I thought we were talking about worship?

Right so back to Exodus 34:14, the Hebrew word here that we translate as worship is shachah which means to bow down to, give reverence to, to submit to. We’ll look at some New Testament verses shortly, and here the greek word is proskyneo, which means the same thing as shachah, so this definition of worship is throughout the whole bible. The approach doesn’t change when Jesus comes along … sorry.

Words like submit and obey we struggle to include in our language these days. Many of us don’t like the implication that sits behind them. That we might have to do something we don’t want to, just because someone has power over us and makes us do it.

But … that’s not how God works … he gave us free will remember.

So what’s going on here? The very heart of worship, that’s what.

We have a choice whether we submit to, obey, bow down to, God. He’s given some very clear signals of what he is looking for, but as always God also wants us to make this choice for ourselves. If we don’t, that grieves him, but as we’ll see shortly there’s some pretty cool stuff that happens when we do make the choice to truly worship him.

This is heavy stuff, but important if we are to grasp, what it is to worship God.

The first mention of worshipping God is in Genesis 22. This is the story where God says to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac as a burnt offering. No kidding! Abraham and Isaac, together with a couple of servants, head into the hills, and after 3 days Abraham sees the place they are going in the distance. Imagine that road trip, but I digress.

Abraham says to his servants to remain while him and Isaac carry on and worship. Now, what was Abraham doing? Was he just throwing the servants (and Isaac) off the scent? There might have been a bit of this, but what Abraham was really referring to when he said worship was that he and Isaac were going to go and submit to God’s will”.

Imagine what must have been going through Abraham's mind. Here was the very son that God had promised him …now going to be killed …by his own hand …at God’s command. This can’t be true. Surely not.

So what is going on here? Back in chapter 17, God promised Abraham that he would be a father of many nations. His promised son Isaac was born and now God is asking something really hard of Abraham and Abraham is continuing to believe. Abraham is holding onto the first promise and his faith in what he believes God can do to get him (and Isaac) through this. Abraham undoubtedly had fears and questions, and it probably all seemed hugely illogical, but he trusted and had faith. Hebrews 11:17-19 also gives us some insight here, where it says that Abraham believed that God would raise Isaac from the dead.

Abraham submitted to God, even though he didn’t understand. And then look what happens in v16-18. In response to Abraham’s willingness to obey, God pours out his blessing and made a covenant with Abraham.

Is this worship? You bet! It’s relatively easy to believe God when it all seems logical and understandable. The true test comes when we just don’t get it and it all seems to be tumbling down around us. There’s also something about our worship testing us at the very core of our being, at what’s most important to us.

But surely it all changed with Jesus right, and it became about the songs?

Nope, the same pattern is followed in the new testament. Check out Matthew 4:8-10 when Satan tempted Jesus to worship him. It says Jesus was led by the spirit into the wilderness after his baptism, but Jesus came out of the wilderness in the power of the spirit. What happened? Worship happened. The submitting, obeying, God and God alone, worship.

In Matthew 7:21-23, Jesus says that only those who do God’s will, those who worship, enter into the kingdom of heaven. He gives a similar message in Matthew 12:46-50. There’s also the conversation that Jesus has with the rich man in Matthew 19:16-24 which is also fundamentally about worship.

Notice how the rich man is seeking eternal life and Jesus answer is to keep the commandments. The rich man asks which ones - I would have thought answer was pretty obviously all of them. Jesus initially focuses on the last 6 that we talked about earlier, before going to the first 4 commandments about worshipping God.

Notice how Jesus doesn’t address the first 4 commandments directly, he simply goes to the man’s core for the answer. Jesus command to the rich man to sell everything, was simply a question about whether the rich man worshipped God. Unfortunately, the rich man’s heart was somewhere else.

And then there is the most amazing scene of submission in the bible in Matthew 26:36-44. Here in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prays to God and basically says “Father, is there any way out of this? I’d really like there to be, but if there isn’t, I will do what you ask of me”. Not once, not twice but three times.

God gets it. Jesus gets it. Truly worshipping God is really hard. It’s OK to wish that we didn’t have to fast, or give up our time, or give that money, or sell our house and go to Africa. True worship costs us, and we feel it. I think that’s why it’s called a sacrifice.

Which bring us to the most famous verses on worship in John 4:1-24. Here Jesus is discussing worship with a Samaritan woman and he says in v23-24 that true worshippers worship God in spirit and truth. Amazingly in v20, the woman basically starts having a conversation with Jesus about worship in the church service! What Jesus does is take her to a completely different place in her thinking, where he says in v21-24 to forget about the details and focus at the very core of what worship is about.

Worshipping in spirit and truth. The heart of worship. It’s about submitting to God and what he is calling you to do. Even when we just don’t get it. Especially when we just don’t get it. Can we trust God as much as Abraham did? As much as Jesus did?

Worshipping God is a lifestyle. In Romans 12:1-2, Paul tells us to offer our lives, that’s everything in it, as an offering to God, and that this is our worship. And that in the transforming of our minds we can be in the perfect will of God. Why? Because we are trained up for it, we trust God, we submit to him, we worship him, and when the going gets tough we don’t stop worshipping him.

But what about the songs …? We’ll get to those next time, now that we’ve laid the foundations.

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Fasting: Building Power In Your Spirit

11/10/2014

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Last Sunday, we took a look at fasting together - it turned out to be one of my favourite discussions we've had so far! Here's a summary of the key points we came up with as a record - both for those who weren't there and those who were. Enjoy :)

The Purposes of Fasting
Fasting serves three main purposes in scripture: repentence, rememberance, & seeking direction.
The first record of fasting is in Exodus 34:28 when Moses spends 40 days in God's presence, carving out the second set of stone tablets to record the Ten Commandments.
This is after Israel traded in God's favour for a month of orgies and bowing down to golden cows.
God was furious with them and Moses pleads with him not to take his presence away.

Repentence
Joel 2:12 records God's pursuit of Israel, urging them to repent and return to him with all their heart, "with fasting and weeping and mourning." Fasting was one of the ways Israel responded when they realised their sin and were convicted with the realisation they had grieved God. So fasting has a strong association with repentence...if you fast for a reasonable period you'll notice it has a cleansing effect on your body. It does the same with your spirit.

Ezra 8:21 records fasting as a practice of humbling ourselves to petition God. Jesus and Paul tell us to come boldly before God, but we are also to keep an honest reckoning of ourselves. By denying our desires, fasting has a humbling effect on us. When we fast we are declaring to our body and our spirit that catering to our own wants is not the main driver in our life. That's really important.
You'll find similar passages in Nehemiah 9:1, Daniel 9:3 and Esther 4:3.

Rememberance
The passage in Esther is an interesting one as it's more about mourning than repentence. The Israelites are facing extermination, so they collectively humble themselves and fast in pleading with God to spare them. If you know the rest of the story, you'll recall how God divinely positions Esther (a jew) to find favour with the King and turn the tables on the evil Haman.
At the end of the book, the fast that the Jews undertook to preserve their lives is turned into an ongoing fast - known as the days of Purim - but this time in remembrance of what had happened and how they were saved (Esther 9:31). (Fun trivia fact: Incidentally, Esther is the only book in the Bible that doesn't mention God at all - he is implied, but never mentioned directly).

Inquiring of God's will - seeking direction
The third primary purpose of fasting we see in the Bible is as a way of inquiring God's will and seeking his direction about something. We see this in Acts 13:2, as the disciples were waiting for the fulfilment of Jesus promise that the Holy Spirit would come and again in Acts 14:23 when Paul and Barnabas were appointing elders for each of the churches.

We also see it in a really intense passage in 2 Samuel 12:16-23. David finds himself unable to sleep one evening and, walking around his roof tops, he oversees a gorgeous woman bathing. Men - if this happens to you, the wise thing to do is go straight back to bed! Alas, he finds himself smitten with Bathsheba and then orchestrates to have her husband killed so he can take her as his own wife. He succeeds in this and she becomes pregnant to him. God sends Nathan to confront David in a really clever way (have a read 2 Sam 12:1-10).
Nathan tells David that because of his sin, the child he has conceived with Bathsheba will die. In mourning and repentence, a distraut David goes into a fast, as he petitions God to change his mind.
God does not and the child dies. David mourns with Bathsheba and then rises, dresses and feasts. His servants are completely baffled and ask him to explain himself. He replies:
"While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept. I thought, 'Who knows? The Lord may be gracious to me and let the child live.' But now that he is dead, why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I will go to him, but he will not return to me." David then comforted his wife Bathsheba..." (2 Sam 12:22-24).

We are to use fasting to petition God and to repent and to remember. But once the moment is passed, whether our prayers are answered or not, we are to let it go and avoid bitterness or discouragement by becoming trapped in the past. This is easier said than done. A powerful challenge!

Types of Fasting
The most common type of fasting is skipping food, but in other parts of scripture God calls people to other fasts: Leviticus 16:29-31, Leviticus 23:28-32 and Numbers 29:7 are all instances where God calls people to fast from their work!
Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are all called to fast from certain types of food (Daniel 1).

Also, although the epic fast of 40 days has become famous (Jesus and Moses both tackled this one), the Bible actually records all sorts of lengths of fasts. Here are the ones we found:

Part of a day (2 Samuel 1:12)
1 day (1 Samuel 7:6)
7 days (1 Samuel 31:13)
Twice a week (Luke 18:12)

Can you find any others? If so add a comment and let us know!

The Authority of Prayer & Fasting
In Mark 9:29, Jesus is confronted by a frustrated man who son has been plagued with a demon for years. The demon inflicts fits on the child and tries to throw him into fire to burn him or water to drown him.
As if that isn't frustration enough, the man brings his son to Jesus disciples and they can't set him free!
He raises his complaint to Jesus and after a short dialogue, the man presents his son to Christ and the demon immediately throws the boy into a fit. But just as the boy's thrashing begins to be noticed by the crowds around them, Jesus shuts the demon up and kicks it out of the child, barring it from ever afflicting him again (Mark 9:25).
His disciples ask what went wrong and Jesus simply replies, "This kind can come out only by prayer and fasting" (Mark 9:29 - note the NIV translation omits 'fasting' except for in a text note).

The key question here is when did Jesus fast? He didn't tell the man to come back in a week's time while he fasted long enough to gain power over the spirit. He already had power over the spirit because he'd built a whole lifestyle of prayer and fasting!
We need to do the same.
I don't ever want to meet anyone who is being afflicted by the kingdom of darkness and not be able to set them free because I haven't built enough character or authority in my spirit! We need to make a lifestyle of cultivating our stature in spirit - like Jesus we can prepare in advance.
You see Jesus doing this very thing after his baptism when the Spirit takes him into the wilderness. Matt 4:2 reads "After fasting for forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him..."
Jesus prepares for his encounter with Satan in the wilderness how? Prayer and fasting.

As he prepares for his coming journey to the cross, Jesus tells his disciples, "...the prince of this world is coming. He has no hold on me, but the world must learn that I love the Father and that I do exactly what my Father has commanded me" (John 14:30).

The Bible is extremely clear that Jesus loved his food and his alcohol. He feasted freely and loved spending time with his friends that way - he participated in life fully and freely. Yet, he also built a regular pattern into his life of prayer and fasting, of denying his own desires and cravings to instead humble himself and seek the Father's will. That build enormous authority in his spirit as it meant he was ruled by nothing - no craving, desire, lust, hunger, or personal ambition had any hold over him. That's why he could say that Satan also has no hold over him.
If we can't say the same yet, then fasting is one of the ways to start this journey.
Remember, the world doesn't need more religious do-gooders.
It needs real men and women of faith, who are filled with the power and presence of God and led by his will, rather than their own desires. These are the people who make history and shake the foundations of the world. These are those who have the power to set others free.

If We Don't Practice Fasting...

One of the sports I am trying to learn is a Chinese kung-fu style named Wing-Chun. It's famous for it's short, lightning fast hand techniques and there is a famous set of drills you use to build up that skill (they're known as Chi-Sao, or 'sticky-hand' drills). Among those who know this style, if you claim to learn Wing-Chun, then they will ask you how your Chi-Sao is. If you told them you don't practice Chi-Sao, then they would tell you that you don't practice Wing-Chun.

Fasting is one of the core practices of a disciple.
If we don't practice fasting, then the truth is we aren't practicing the way of the disciple.
Jesus never gave us instructions for "if" we fast, he gave us instructions for "when" we fast - Matt 6:16.
How you fast - for how long, and what you fast from - is completely up to you and the Holy Spirit.
There's no rules or formula...but it should be part of our life if we are to become people of real stature in spirit.

A Community Expression
Finally (are these blogs getting longer each time? Sorry!!), fasting in the Bible is something the community of disciples did together - in common. For the most part, we've lost that today and if we practice fasting at all, it's become another individualised religious practice.
For the Israelites it was part of their collective faith as a community.
We're trying to pick that up a little as The Local too and are encouraging those who want to journey with us to fast each Monday (again how much and what you fast is up to you). But let's be in prayer together for the community around us and seek God to pour his power and presence through us into those he'd had us bring love and light to - begining with the Building Awesome Whanau course that kicks off this week.

Up for the challenge? Bless you heaps team!

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