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

Posts Tagged ‘time’

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Spirit at Work: The Transformer’s Instruments

Wednesday, October 5th, 2011

The previous two articles addressed the Holy Spirit’s crucial work of “writing us into the story of salvation,” as Eugene Peterson puts it, and shaping us into fully mature saints—persons who aspire to live in, with, like, and for Jesus Christ. In this article we shall focus on the means the Spirit employs to achieve that goal.

God’s Word teaches that the Spirit employs four principal means for shaping Christians: Scripture, the sacraments, a person’s life experiences, and time. Furthermore, the Spirit puts these four to their optimal intent and use within the fellowship of Christ’s church—his worshiping, witnessing, and serving body.

A brief word about each of these instruments of the Spirit.

Growth in spiritual maturity begins with God’s Word. For healthy growth to occur, the Bible must be read properly, of course. Simply to read it in a rote, mechanical manner does the reader little spiritual good. Scripture must be read in line with its God-intended purpose—namely, to announce the Triune God’s earnest campaign to restore sinful, rebellious human beings to their place within God’s family. “The written Word,” says John Stott, “points to the Living Word and says to us, ‘Go to Jesus.’” Failing to recognize that would be to misunderstand the entire purpose for reading the Bible. But when a person dwells in God’s Word—reads it, memorizes it, studies it, and meditates upon it with an eye eager to see God at work rescuing his children from Satan’s angry jaws—he grows in God’s way.

Sacraments, too—baptism and the Lord’s Supper—are God’s gifts to help Christians grow. The Spirit uses common elements—water, bread, wine—to accomplish what is breathtakingly uncommon: through them believers are bound more closely to Jesus, and the gospel is impressed more deeply and permanently into their hearts.

A person’s life circumstances also serve the Holy Spirit’s high purposes. For it is precisely there—amid the sometimes messy and often mysterious events of one’s life—that the Lord intends the gospel’s promises and commands to be heard and obeyed. God pledges to superintend and guide all of those events in such a way that they can work toward growing a person into Christlikeness (cf. Romans 8:28-39; 2 Cor. 2:14). Thus, a person’s joys in life, her seasons of sorrow and sadness, even her times of wandering and wrongdoing, can serve as soft clay in which the Spirit’s hands can sculpt features of holiness, can etch deeper and clearer lines of saintliness.

Time, too, is the Spirit’s tool. Growth is a lifelong process. John Calvin was correct: Only at death does a person “graduate” from the school of Jesus Christ.

And we must say what has become a mantra these last few articles: these instruments of the Spirit work best together within the fellowship of Christian pilgrims who are enroute together. The Spirit uses the church to unite believers more fully as family, and to encourage them to support one another toward their common goal of becoming like Jesus.

To illustrate what I mean, let’s put these elements into something of an equation. What follows is my attempt to present visually the thoughts I heard from Howard Hendricks at a Dallas Seminary conference years ago. Granted, the formula is much too simple to account for all that goes into the complex divine/human process of moving people toward maturity in Christ. But perhaps it might prompt us to think about the means the Spirit uses in our lives to encourage our growth in godliness.

To explain:

  • God’s Word and sacraments together serve as fuel to live obediently amid life’s events.
  • Obedience, practiced over time, will yield holiness.
  • The church functions as catalyst for this process to happen. (Worshiping and fellowshipping together, Christians are encouraged to “make every effort to add to [their] faith” (2 Pet. 1:5), and to mature in Christ.)
  • The entire process depends upon the Holy Spirit, without whose energy nothing happens.

Some Jewish children once asked their rabbi: “Where did Enoch go?”
Rabbi: “He went to be with God.”
Children: “How do you know?”
Rabbi: “Because the last time people saw him, he was walking that way.”

A journey of lifelong obedience begins by taking the first step.

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

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