from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship and Congregational and Ministry Studies at Calvin College

Posts Tagged ‘Psalms’

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Spirit at Work: Illuminator

Monday, July 18th, 2011

The event is as clear today in my mind’s treasure of memories as when it happened almost forty years ago.  Our first-born—and yes, remarkably precocious!—daughter Karen toddled toward the full-length mirror hanging on our closet door. Standing before it, she stared intently at the image of the little girl looking back at her. Then, with a look of excitement and satisfied joy only a child’s face can display, she pointed her finger and exclaimed: “That’s Karen!”

In order for God’s Word to achieve its Divinely intended purpose and effect, such an “Aha! That’s me!” response must happen within the hearts of those who read and hear it.  Without that response, one has not heard God speaking. Scripture’s testimony will be flat and unimportant; its string of words and sentences will matter very little to one’s own life and destiny. “Those who are without the Spirit do not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God. Such things are foolishness to them; they cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14).

But when that “Aha!” happens—when the brilliant and penetrating light of Jesus’ resurrection Spirit floods in upon one’s spirit and illumines it—then amazing things begin to occur. The eyes of one’s heart become focused and trained to see in Scripture deep and eternal truths springing directly from God’s own mind and heart.  One’s spiritual ears become cupped and attuned to hear the Lord’s voice. One becomes eager to trust the Lord’s promises and to obey his commands. Only then can a person become fully human and fully alive spiritually, and receive that fresh and daily supply of strength which is vital to living as God intends.

Given how necessary God’s Spirit is to one’s ability to hear and read Scripture aright, the psalmist pleads, “Open my eyes that I may behold wonderful things in your law,”  (Ps. 119:18). That prayer underscores two important, incontrovertible facts:

1.  God’s Word—God’s declared will, God’s “law”—does contain promises and commands that are glorious to behold. Its power to change human lives is profound. It can guide one along the path toward becoming Christ-like. Heeding Scripture’s words, God’s children can enrich themselves, can bless others, and can bring delight to their Lord. Hence the psalmist has deep awe and respect for God’s Word. He calls it “wonderful.”

2.  Not one of us is able, on our own and without Divine help, to mine Scripture’s vast riches or to enjoy its beauties. Our vision is too dim and blurred. Hence, the psalmist’s plea: “Open my eyes ….”

Given these two hard-as-nails facts—how wonderful the truths contained in God’s Word, and how weak our ability on our own to learn them—God’s people must pray regularly for the Spirit to help them read and hear God’s Word for all that it’s worth. During those times of solitude and quietness that they dedicate to meditate upon God’s Word, they must “seek God’s face” (cf Ps. 27:4). They must begin their time of personal devotions by declaring dependence upon God’s Spirit—with something like the words used by the psalmist to rouse his mind and heart to attentiveness: “My soul, wait in silence for God only, for my expectation is upon him” (Ps. 62:1).

Christians (must) also declare that dependence when they’re congregated as Christ’s Body and gathered on Sunday morning to read God’s Word and hear it proclaimed. Christ’s Body, the Church, needs Christ’s Spirit to become alive—to be able to respond. His Spirit must flood her communal life with light so that she can read that Word aright. The Spirit must clean out her ears to hear what he longs to say to her. Thus, in a worship service, before the Bible is read, before the preacher proclaims, and before the congregation turns its ear to listen, collectively the entire Body of Christ directs to God a “Prayer for the Spirit’s Illumination.”

One too few times—always one too few—have we pleaded for God’s Holy Spirit to be present as we take up the Word. Whether we’re studying and meditating upon that Word personally, or whether we’re congregated on Sunday morning to listen to the Word together, the presence of God’s Breath is vital to our hearing that Word.

And also to obeying it.

He Sits at God’s Right Hand

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

Two little girls, paging through a picture book of the kings and queens of England, came upon a portrait of Queen Victoria. There sat the unsmiling monarch upon her throne, erect, regally attired, and thoroughly proper in every way.  Said the one little girl to the other: “That’s the Queen. But what’s she doing?” The other replied, with a hint of knowing scorn: “Doing? She ain’t doing anything. She’s just reigning!”

Forty days after he rose in victory over death, Jesus ascended and returned to heaven, and there took his seat of honor. In the words of the Apostles’ Creed, he is now “seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty.” And he’s doing something! From that throne of honor and authority he’s ruling over all of heaven and earth.

That Jesus is now enthroned became a central and glad part of the earliest Christian testimony, and it formed the basis for their heady and unshakable confidence in life and death. No fewer than 33 times throughout the New Testament—in the Gospels (Matt. 22:44; Mark 14:62), in the early sermons in Acts (2:33-35; 7:55-56), in Paul’s epistles (Rom. 8:34; 1 Cor. 15:25; Eph. 1:20-22), in the book of Hebrews (1:3; 13; 8:1; 10:12-13), and in the book of Revelation (chap. 4-5), to cite but a few—these early believers affirmed their Lord’s now exalted status.

With Jesus’ victorious enthronement an accomplished reality, his enemies now have an altered position and status. They are vanquished and “underneath his feet.” Jesus’ ascension and session at the Father’s right hand have put them in their rightful place: the Lord now uses them as his “footstool” (Ps. 110:1;  Acts 2:33-35).

In biblical times, the land over which a victorious conqueror trod—the territory over which he strode triumphantly—by rights came to belong to him. It was under his sovereign sway and authority (cf. Josh. 10:24). In similar fashion, his enemies once and for all subdued, Jesus has taken his seat of honor “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age, but also in the one to come” (Eph. 1:20-21). From that exalted position he is already bringing the benefits of his saving conquest to his people.

The biblical metaphor of “under the feet” also connotes the act of humiliating the enemy. To hold the enemy under foot—to tromp on him—was to shame him (cf. Ps. 47:3). In the New Testament context, Jesus, the ascended and triumphant Lord, has now dethroned the principalities and powers. Holding them under his feet, he shames and mocks them.

How different the status and the mood of those who, as Jesus’ friends, gladly yield to him as ruling Sovereign. Yes, as their seated Lord, he is over them; and yes, as his subjects, they are under him. But there they feel safe—and free, too. No need for them to feel defeated or distressed, shamed or anxious. No need to go at life with grim seriousness or fearful concern. For saints know that, from his exalted throne, Jesus, their Sovereign Savior, is directing the course of history to its appointed end.

The earliest Christians worshiped Jesus for his triumphal enthronement. Fittingly, they bowed low and fell at his feet. How could they do otherwise? After all, the entire company of heaven’s angels and saints—even the Heavenly Father himself—had saluted Jesus as he made his grand entrance and seated himself at God’s right hand. How then could saints on earth fail to join their hearts and voices, and give their Lord his due acclaim and honor?

Heaven’s everlasting choirs and earth’s saints keep calling us to join them in acclaiming our now-enthroned Savior.

A Heart-Stoppingly Grand Invitation

Monday, August 30th, 2010

Many folks nowadays suppose they’re doing God quite a favor by paying him some attention every now and then. When they show up for worship on Sunday morning and, for good measure, toss a dollar or two into the offering plate, they rather expect that God, marionette-like, ought to come through with his smiling approval and hearty applause. After all, it is they, so they think, who have taken the first steps to initiate the rendezvous. It is they who have graciously carved out time for him and invited him into their presence for an hour of human-Divine encounter.

But the Bible declares otherwise. In his Word God declares that it is he, the Almighty Maker of heaven and earth, who welcomes his creatures into his presence and invites them to worship him. Given who God is and who humans are by comparison, the invitation he extends is heart-stoppingly grand.

Imagine that your morning’s mail contained an elegant envelope with the return address “The White House.” You opened it—very carefully—and discovered an invitation:

President Barack Obama

is pleased to invite you to be one of his conversation guests

on

September 1, 2010, at 2:30 p.m. in the Oval Office.

A formal dinner will follow in the White House Dining Room.

How would receiving such an auspicious invitation make you feel? If you’re like me, you’d be delirious with excitement. Everything routine would become utterly unimportant. And when—at long last—you made your way to the White House and military sentries escorted you through its labyrinth of corridors and into the presence of the President of the United States of America, your tongue would be three inches thick and your knees would be like water.

Such an imaginary meeting is but a faint—extremely faint—shadow of what actually happens in church on Sunday morning. There the Sovereign Lord deigns to welcome his people and bids them bring their worship.

How can human beings ever enter God’s presence except “By Invitation Only”? And how can they properly tune their hearts to sing his praise, except that they first have heard his eager, beckoning welcome: “Enter his gates with thanksgiving”? Then—only then—can worthy and right worship be offered to him.

Which is why I, for one, appreciate a worship service that begins with more than a polite “Good morning” from the lips of the worship leader. How good to hear her say to me, speaking on God’s behalf: “O come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord our Maker, for he is our God.” Such words put me in my place again. They remind me that though I’m small and undeserving, my Maker and Redeemer really wants me there.

O, the immense favor God shows us by showing up for church before we do.

And by welcoming us when we arrive to worship him together.

Prayer

This is the day the Lord hath made; He calls the hours his own.
Let heav'n rejoice, let earth be glad, and praise surround the throne.
Hosanna in the highest strains the Church on earth can raise;
The highest heav'ns, in which He reigns, shall give him nobler praise.

Isaac Watts

Jesus Yes—Church Yes!

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

For there is no other way to enter into life unless this mother [the Church] conceive us in her womb, give us birth, nourish us at her breast, and lastly, unless she keep us under her care and guidance until, putting off mortal flesh, we become like the angels. Our weakness does not allow us to be dismissed from her school until we have been pupils all our lives.John CalvinInstitutes of the Christian Religion16th century

‘Jesus Yes—Church No!” That placard, held high by a lone student at a demonstration some years ago, expresses the thoughts and feelings of multitudes today about organized (Christian) religion. For them it’s “Spiritual Yes—Religion No.” And, “Yes to Jesus, but No—an emphatic No!—to everything connected with Church” (doctrine, ecclesiastical machinery, hierarchy, organization, etc).

In the Western hemisphere, especially in Europe and considerable sections of North America, vigorous contempt toward and sleepy disregard of the Christian church are widespread and increasing at an ever-accelerating rate. So widespread and rapid is the decline of organized Christianity in the West that the July-August, 2010, issue of The Atlantic magazine cites “The Demise of the Roman Catholic Church” as one of the fifteen leading trends in contemporary society.

For the last 2,000+ years of Christian history—ever since Jesus was born, crucified, and resurrected—his followers, in a kind of regular systolic-diastolic rhythm of the heart, have faithfully been gathering together on Sunday (to worship God and fellowship with one another), and then dispersing (to live and work in the world). Why this regular practice, by now centuries old? And why keep doing it today? In other words, why “Jesus Yes—Church Yes!”?

Well, because it”s a fact, declared in Scripture and verified in centuries of human experience, that no follower of Jesus ever grows optimally alone or in isolation from a society of fellow followers. We need to come together—to congregate, if you will. At history”s beginning God declared: “It is not good that man should be alone” (Gen. 2:18). Thus God intended humans to come together, to be in community with one another.

Thus, though the Christian faith is a personal religion, it is certainly not an individual religion. Yes, the Lord calls his children, one by one, to follow him; and they, in turn, respond one by one, to his call amid the specific, unique, and fine-print details of their lives. But never ought they then to remain as isolated individuals, separated from others who have heard and responded to God’s call. Rather, God intends followers of Jesus, his called-out people, the Church, to live out all of his “one another” commands—all 32 of them: “Pray for, encourage, speak truth to, love, be kind to, forgive, [and so on] one another.” All 32 imply the formation and existence of a community.

What a challenge this invitation presents to live counter-culturally! For our age is shot through with individualism, by what sociologist Robert Putnam calls a “Bowling Alone” mentality and practice.

The rhythm of coming together/dispersing/coming together/dispersing is the pattern God set for followers of his Son, Jesus Christ. Which is why

  • • Scripture commands: “Do not neglect to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encourage one another” (Heb. 10:25).
  • • Cyprian, a third-century Christian leader, declared: “Extra ecclesiam nulla salus” (“Outside the Church No Salvation”).
  • • John Calvin called the church the very “society of Christ” into whose fellowship God has deposited the rich treasure of the gospel.
  • • Christians, both worldwide and throughout history, gather to confess, “I believe in the holy catholic church, the communion of saints”—and then to sing, “I Love Your Church, O Lord.”

Lone-Rangerism is “out” when it comes to living as Christ intends. Faithful Christians raise the banner: “Jesus Yes—Church Yes!”

Prayer

Jesus, with your church abide; be our Savior, Lord, and Guide, while on earth our faith is tried: Lord, our Savior, hear us.

Thomas Benson Pollock1871

Simply Fellow Strugglers

Monday, August 16th, 2010

My years as chaplain among college students have convinced me that many young people suffer from what I call the “immortality virus”: “Death—accidents, illness, and weakness, too—can, and sometimes do, happen to others. But it won’t (read: cannot) happen to me.”

Or so they foolishly imagine.

Sad to say, the virus often endures well beyond adolescence. Plenty of adults, too, show symptoms of believing that they’re invincible, unsusceptible to life’s common weaknesses and difficulties. Blithely they assume that the winds of life—of their life—will always be pleasantly gentle and at their backs; that circumstances are well within their power to manage; and that a generous portion of prosperity and cheery happiness is theirs by some sort of entitlement.

God, however, declares quite otherwise. Time and again God keeps reminding humans how small they are, and how very fragile and weak. Soon after creating the first human pair,the Maker reminded the woman and the man of their creaturely limits: “Dust you are, and to dust you shall return” (Gen. 3:19). And to every subsequent generation of human beings—to modern folks, too, whose confidence in themselves knows few bounds—God keeps reissuing a “Declaration of Human Limits,” so to speak:

[Your] years pass quickly, and [then you] shall fly away.” (Ps. 90:10)

When he took on humanity’s nature, Jesus too became weak—as tired, weak, and vulnerable as any one of us. Hebrews 4:15 says that Jesus was able to “sympathize with our weaknesses,” an acknowledgment of his solidarity with us. He had scars to show for the troubles he bore and the weakness he felt.

Nor did Jesus promise his would-be followers a smooth and easy time of it through life. Never did he lure them toward discipleship by presenting it as something of a good bargain, a ticket to a life free from weariness, distress, and agony. Never—simply never—did he hide his scars to get them to come on board. Rather, without apology or double-speak, he forthrightly announced, “In this world you shall have trouble” (John 16:33).

Barbara Brown Taylor claims that getting in touch with human weakness—with our own weakness—is the proper starting point to trying to figure out who we are: “The practice of wearing skin is so obvious that almost not one engages it as spiritual practice, yet here is the place to begin: with tears, aches, moans, gooseflesh, heat.” She adds: “You and I are simply fellow strugglers. None of us has our life or our pain under control, although sometimes we pretend that we do. . . . Deep suffering makes theologians of us all. The questions people ask about God in Sunday school rarely compare with the questions we ask while we are in the hospital.”

Hospitals may be good places to get rid of the immortality virus. So too are churches. In fact, wherever and whenever God calls his people together for worship, there and then—at that place and time—he intends it to become something of hospital itself. A worship service is something of “God’s common hospital,” so to speak, a place to become healthy and whole—and fully human—again. Corporate worship ought to be a place and time where we learn to sing and declare about ourselves and about our Lord, “Jesus loves me, this I know. . . . [We] are weak, but he is strong.”

Prayer

Lord, let me know my end, and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting my life is. . . . My lifetime is as nothing in your sight. Surely everyone stands as a mere breath.based on Psalm 39: 4-6

God Everlasting!

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

Jewish rabbis were fond of telling about a man so scatter-brained that he kept misplacing things, even his basic articles of clothing. He’d drop his socks, shoes, shirt and pants in such unlikely places before bedtime that he couldn’t for the life of him find them back the next morning. So he bought a notebook, and made a list of what he had placed where. In the morning he fetched the notebook from his bedstand, checked the list, and located every single piece of his wardrobe.

But then he found himself in a far worse predicament. Checking his appearance in a full-length mirror, he couldn’t locate himself. He kept asking: “But I—where am I?”

Learning what it means to be human involves learning to locate one’s place in the grander scheme of things—to figure out where one “fits.” And the place to begin that inquiry, says the Bible, is with God. The psalmist exclaims:

God, it seems you’ve been our home forever;

Long before the mountains were born,

Long before you brought earth itself to birth,

From ‘Once upon a time’ to ‘kingdom come’—you are God.

(Psalm 90:1-2, The Message)

So if you want to know yourself, reckon seriously with the fact that God does exist. Though the Divine One is well beyond human senses—invisible to the human eye, inaudible to the human ear, and beyond the reach of human touch and grasp—this Divine One, the great “I AM,” is God above all. God is, well . . . God—and God alone. Thus, every human being lives out the span of our years before God’s face. God sees and knows—and cares deeply about—our every act of working and playing, of eating and sleeping, of crying and rejoicing.

Though God’s deepest nature may be beyond human knowing (God is enveloped within mystery as if within a cloud), nevertheless God has left indubitable traces of his reality and presence. Said English Puritan pastor Thomas Manton (1620-1677):

We know God but as men born blind know the fire: they know that there is such a thing as fire, for they feel it warm them, but what it is they know not. So, that there is a God we know, but what He is we know little, and indeed we can never search Him out to perfection. A finite creature can never fully comprehend that which is infinite.

How easy to slip into living as though the Invisible One does not even exist. Some people, like pitiable Demas (cf. 2 Tim. 4:10), fall so head-over-heels in love with this world’s things that they become near-sighted, perversely unaware of what lies beyond. Fools, the Bible calls them, for they raise what they can see to such an exalted level that they expect miracles from it—they worship and adore it. Their lives become a jewelry store where price tags are all mixed up: trinkets command high prices, while things of real value go for pennies.

Other people try to sit where God sits. They act as though they’re in charge, as though the welfare of the entire universe—their own lives, too—depends on how well they do. (A preacher friend reported how he was running himself ragged as he tended to every detail and duty while serving his first congregation. His mentor intervened with wise counsel: “[Jim,] you must ruthlessly preserve the distinction between yourself and God!”)

However and wherever it happens that we drift away from God and thus dislocate ourselves, one thing is clear: There’s no better place to see God clearly again and to rediscover our proper place than among the assembly of God’s people gathered for Sunday worship. For it is there that God calls to his people with words of warm greeting, “Grace to you, and peace from God.” It is there that God reminds us of our dependence upon him: “Our help is in the name of the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.” It is from there that we depart with a blessing which can give shape to our lives and define our days: “May the Lord bless you and keep you . . . and give you peace.”

Together—in worship—people come face to face with the God who tells us again that he exists. Together—in worship—we practice recalling who God is and what he has done for us. And in our act of communal remembering, God relocates us again, helps us rediscover who we are and where we belong. We fit sub specie aeternitatis: “under the aspect of eternity.” Relearning that thunderously important truth, we then come to expand the range of what the eyes of our hearts can take in. We come again to see that God is God, and that human beings are human beings.

And that those who keep the distinction between the two are wise.

Prayer

O God, who lovest us, set our own loves in order.

    • Prayer: “O God, who lovest us, set our own loves in order.”
            • (Thomas Aquinas, 1225-1274)
Thomas Aquinas13th century
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