Psalm 22: HELP (Part 2)

We introduced the issue of pain yesterday. What do we do? Cry out for HELP! This is the ongoing theme of this message. David cries out for help. He cries out early and often.

O my God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, and am not silent. – Psalm 22.2

By day and by night. And no answer. I don’t get the impression that this is one day and one night. It seems like it is a constant pursuit of God and His rescue and His presence. Jesus commends praying like this in the NT. In Luke 18 he tells a parable of a widow seeking justice from a judge that doesn’t care about justice. He finally gives her what she wants because he’s tired of her constant requests. Jesus is teaching us to be persistent in prayer through this. That lesson applies to crying out for HELP!

God doesn’t expect you to bear the weight of your pain on your own. You may think that proves something to God – or others. But that isn’t what He wants from you. He wants you to cast your cares upon Him. He wants you to ask for help. That’s what David is doing. He’s in pain. God isn’t answering, but he doesn’t quit crying out. Why?

God helps His people. David keeps crying out day and night because God has a track record. He takes care of His people. Always has.

Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One; you are the praise of Israel. In you our fathers put their trust; they trusted and you delivered them. They cried to you and were saved; in you they trusted and were not disappointed. – Psalm 22.3-5

There’s an important aside here. The idea (see ESV = enthroned on the praises of Israel) is that this pain that David is enduring isn’t the result of Israel’s sinning. They did that plenty, but right now they’re in line with who God has called them to be. This isn’t discipline.

Many of you know this, but others may not. Your current crisis is not necessarily a result of your sin. It isn’t because you did something wrong. You might be doing everything right and bad stuff can still happen. I hope that lifts a burden for some of you. The faithful can (and do) suffer.

Now it’s also true that your issue may be due to foolish or sinful choices you’ve made, but it’s also possible that you’ve done everything right and you’re still suffering. We live in a broken world.

The overall point of this section, however, is that God has always taken care of His people. David looks back as a man who knows his history. God has created Israel and has taken care of her – even when she rejects God and sets herself up for ruin.

We can see how God has worked in the history of the church to move the church forward in great ways through historical turning points like world missions and revivals. We see in our congregation how God repeatedly delivers (including Dan Woolley) and is generally changing lives.

We hear how God takes care of those around us – healing them (naturally or supernaturally), restoring marriages, and helping people get back on their feet.

Here’s an exercise for you. Take some time and think about how you’ve seen the work of God in the lives of others. How does that encourage you in your pain?

Psalm 22: HELP (Introduction)

On Sunday I taught on Psalm 22. Our church is in the middle of a series called ‘simply prayer.’ Go here to listen – be sure to click on Media. It looks like the sermons are about a month behind so I’m not sure when the message will be up. But it seemed like it was helpful so I thought I’d break down the message into several blog posts. Since the psalm is fairly seamless, this will no doubt lose some effect, but I hope it will prove helpful along the way.

This is a serious psalm and, while I like to inject humor into my messages, this one didn’t have much room for humor. So this will be pretty steady stream (interspersed with Missional Renaissance posts) of posts that are serious and grapple with the idea of how we cry out to God – even when we’re not sure he’s there. So here we go …

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? – Psalm 22.1

Have you ever been there? I know many from Haiti are there right now. You don’t say this with small things. This isn’t a bad day at work; this is losing your job … and your home. You don’t think this after a flare up of frustration with your spouse; this is the ending of a marriage – either a long, slow deterioration or an instant flare up or betrayal. This isn’t a cold; this is getting the test results back and they’re devastating – even to the point of death. This is an earthquake that kills tens of thousands.

There is a deep, dark place where, in addition to the pain we’re drowning in, we feel betrayed by God. We don’t like to talk about that place, but we can be thankful that Scripture goes here. It gives us permission to be real in our pain, knowing God is real about it.

This is desperation that erases our distractions. Today we’re talking about the crises that focus our minds like lasers – whether we want them to or not. These are the events that, when they come upon us, dominate our hearts and minds. It seems like everything is coming undone. What do we do? Let’s look to the psalm.

Before we do, I want to be clear how we’re going through this. Much like ourselves when we’re processing pain and betrayal, we don’t walk through a systematic outline. This is poetry and it is the poetry of pain. Verse 1 sets the tone for where we’re going. It’s almost a title that the rest of the psalm explains. I want to walk through this psalm of David’s pain with you and let it speak to our pain as it has for so many for thousands of years.

Where do we start? It’s our prayer series, so let’s start with prayer. But before that, we need to recognize the assumption that is behind the psalm. Something terrible has happened … or is happening. Now we’re left wondering what we’re to do. We’ll hit that next post.

Missional Renaissance: Missional Manifesto, Part 3

Now McNeal lays out some basic plot markers for the way ahead. He states, “The missional church’s story sees the human drama and God’s saga intertwined, one incomprehensible without the other” (p. 34). Here are some things to keep in mind as we look at the Missional Renaissance and changing the scorecard of the church.

People are created in the image of God.
People matter to God and are deserving of blessing simply because they are image bearers, not just so we can witness to them.

God is on a mission.
He is pursuing relationship ever since sin disrupted the intimacy we had with Him. Jesus’ Incarnation is the high point in this pursuit.

God’s mission is redemptive.
God wants to restore relationships, but He also desires to restore the benefits of that relationship. McNeal: “He declared that he had come to give life, life to the full. This means that missional Jesus followers are engaged in all aspects of human experience – political, social, economic, cultural, physical, psychological, and spiritual – to work for those things that enhance life and to oppose those things that steal life” (p. 35).

God’s mission is always being prosecuted in the world.
God is at work all over the world and His rule is far beyond just the church.

God doesn’t postpone His mission, waiting for the church to ‘get it.’
The church is often playing catch-up to the Holy Spirit. It was that way in Acts. Some things never change.

God is up to something new.
This missional movement is gaining steam. People are saying the same thing even though they’ve never met. McNeal says they have the same ‘Source’!

The people of God play an important role in the mission of God.
If we’re the people of God, we need to participate in His mission. God’s people in Scripture are often rebuked when they become more concerned about themselves than the ones God desires to minister to through them.

The kingdom is a future that provokes a crisis.
We have to choose to engage and move beyond a church-age worldview. McNeal: “Kingdom agents have no other option than being subversive, attempting to introduce kingdom realities to every domain of life and culture, even the church” (p. 37).

The missional expression of church will require new metrics to measure its vitality.
We need a new scorecard that educates people on new possibilities for living out kingdom responsibilities.

Missional expression can grow out of the current church, but it is not limited to the current church.
This can be done by Jesus followers in any situation. Some are doing it in their current roles in a nonmissional church. Others are starting smaller monastic communities or house churches.

Missional Renaissance: Missional Manifesto, Part 2

Missional isn’t some new trend. Well, maybe it is; but it shouldn’t be. God is a missionary God and the Bible is testimony to His mission. In this next section of Chapter 2, Missional Manifesto, McNeal looks at the Bible through missional lenses. Here’s what he sees…

First the purpose of the Bible changes. In the church-centric world, the Bible is God’s gift to show us who He is and how we should live as His people. That’s good, but that’s not everything, according to McNeal. The Bible also communicates God’s story so we can understand His world and our part in it. It is a guide for us on how to live while on mission. He states, “By forcing us to see the disparities between the kingdoms of this earth and the kingdom of God, it becomes far more disruptive than informational” (p. 27).

He then hits just a few of the highlights (by his own admission). He starts with the Abrahamic Covenant (Gen. 12.1-3). God has created a people, through Abraham, for the purpose of blessing the nations. Then he hits some key characters that show God is comfortable working outside Abraham’s line: Melchizizedek (a mysterious priestly figure of Yahweh in Abraham’s story); Jethro (Moses’ wise father-in-law); Jonah (who was called to preach to the Assyrians); and even Jesus (whose genealogy, birth, and early childhood were filled with Gentile interaction and influence).

McNeal next tracks several passages that indicate God is concerned with blessing people globally, not just in the “church” or “people of God.” Some of the verses? 1 Peter 2.9; John 3.16; Matthew 27.37-40 (love your neighbor no matter who they are); Ephesians 4.13 (we need to do a better job loving as Evangelicals and Mainliners need to do a better job of speaking the truth of Jesus); 1 Peter 3:15b (we need to live in such a way that people ask why we’re different); Matthew 5:13-15 (salt & light are not neutral presences, they influence).

In John’s gospel, the church is ‘sent people.’ We like to be considered ‘called out,’ which is shorthand for being called out of the world into the church. McNeal says, “Missional believers of Jesus understand they’re being called out all right – called outside” (p. 34).

Blind Spots

I was reading my Bible this morning and it covered Genesis 38 – the Judah and Tamar episode. Grab your Bible or go online and read it. It’s bizarre. Most bizarre is that, upon hearing that Tamar is pregnant, he wants her dead. Yet, just a few verses earlier he’s flippant about figuring out how to pay a prostitute (Tamar). He relents in finding her because he doesn’t want to look crazy. He seems more concerned with looking silly than he is concerned about a corrupted soul. His corruption is most pronounced when he seeks to condemn Tamar to death for, not a similar crime, the exact same crime. She was no more immoral than he was. Actually less, as we learn from the context.

Judah was, until he was caught and called on it, oblivious to his sin. As I was journaling, I was wondering how often ‘we’ do this. We easily see and are eager to point out (even if in our own minds) the sins of others while remaining blind to our own. But I had to scratch some stuff out. I put an ‘X’ over the ‘we’ and started writing ‘I.’ That generalization is part of the problem. I need to spend more time in self-examination. And much more time in self-examination than in examining others and pointing out their sins – whatever the reason.

Not sure what else to do with this. The hypocrisy of Judah has always been clear, but I’ve never been so confronted with my own in this passage.

Missional Renaissance: Missional Manifesto, Part 1

In this chapter, McNeal sets out to describe what missional means. Specifically, that the church is a ‘who,’ not a ‘what.’ Wherever the church has been central in the society, it has come to be defined by what it does – sometimes it is what happens in a certain place, or as a ‘vendor of religious goods and services’ or a body of people on a mission (whether it happens to be God’s mission or not).

McNeal (and other theologians like Guder, Bosch, and Newbigin) argue that God is on a mission and we are to join Him in that mission. We are not intended to “do” church; we’re to “be” the church. The church is to be the local expression of the people of God for the good of those around them and be on mission to reach ever farther. It is a community-based ‘body’ that incarnates God’s presence wherever it happens to exist.

I love this concept. I love what we do at church, but I fear we consider what we do at church the most important, most spiritual things and minimize the importance what happens the rest of the week. If we’re to glorify God in all that we do, isn’t there something inherently ‘spiritual’ about how we work? How we use our free time? Might that be not just how we glorify God, but the means by which we fulfill the mission God has given us? Instead of focusing exclusively on people coming to church, what about the idea that, where God’s people are, there the church is? That’s a thought McNeal communicates and it is both exciting and challenging … and puzzling.

The next Missional Renaissance (should be two days from now) post will survey the Bible through missional eyes.

Missional Renaissance: Introduction

Wow! It’s been too long. I started blogging Missional Renaissance right before I hopped into the “Unnamed Luke Advent Thingee” and haven’t returned. Here’s the link to the Intro I already put up: http://whirledviews.blogspot.com/2009/11/missional-renaissance-introduction.html

I'm going to try to be a little more consistent on the blogging. Hopefully covering this book every other day or so with some thougthts on prayer sprinkled in here and there as I prepare for Sunday's sermon on Psalm 22.