ps. 62 reflection…
ps. 62
my soul finds rest in God alone…
what does it mean/ what does it look like to have “my soul… at rest”?
that is a genuine question. my soul, my person, my heart, my being, what i think of as “me”. i live in a place where i think my soul (and many others’) spend very little time “at rest”. that feeling of being at rest, of being content and happy in the lord.
our world systems aren’t real conducive to helping us find “rest” even the rest, they prescribe and help us to pursue, oftentimes, is more of a commodity for us to purchase so that they can make money, than it is a genuine offer at help and a desire to bless with real rest.
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ps. 60 reflection…
Give us aid against the enemy, for the help of man is worthless. v. 11
that’s so true, i think how this or that will make me better, but how much junk that is. circumstances can’t correct my heart, they may be able to temporarily sway my emotions, but Lord you must change my heart, you must aid my person, for the help of capitulating man is worthless, the feel good nature of things going my way only serves to feed my expectation that life should be as i envision it in a faithless reality. Lord i need real aid, real aid to help my heart, my beliefs, my lack of faith.
Lord give me real aid against the enemy, for the help of man and a positive circumstance is fleeting and ultimately worthless. Transform my heart.
barth…
“[The Church] exists… to set up in the world a new sign which is radically dissimilar to [the world's] own manner and which contradicts it in a way which is full of promise.”
Church Dogmatics, 4.3.2
ps. 58,59 reflection…
so psalms 58 and 59, somewhat similar in nature. curses on the enemy. a request for the righteous judge to judge the wicked, to smite them, to make them as stillborn children, and to cause them great pain, that the righteous would be justified and God glorified.
so how does this practically apply to me? kind of funny question after you read the passion and the detail that is included in these psalms. but i do think that, once again, the overriding thing that i can take away from these psalms is the absolute dependance on God for resolution and protection and justification.
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more resident aliens…
excerpt:
“In a world like ours, it is tempting to seek commmunity, any community, as a good in itself. Liberal society has a way of making us strangers to one another as we go about detaching ourselves from long-term commitments, protecting our rights, thinking alone. Our society is a vast supermarket of desire in which each of us is encouraged to stand alone and go out and get what the world owes us.” p.77
comment:
A vast “supermarket of desire” where we’re promised happiness in a million different things that play on our deepest needs, wants, hurts, etc., but where the end result is simply lonliness, selfishness, fear, and a detached sense of ourselves. what we thought we wanted actually was the thing we needed least of and the things that the world told us we could certainly do without or handle on our own we actually needed the most.
Continue reading ‘more resident aliens…’
psalm 57…
the ability to praise God right there in the midst of the crap of life is really quite an interesting thing. quite a rare thing. yet the encouragement that it holds and the security that it reveals is so powerful. david here is either in the thick of his fleeing from Saul or at least remembering that chase, yet he again and again returns to the Lord, cries out for his help, and proclaims that the Lord is his help, that the Lord provides rescue, that the Lord is to be praised, that the Lord’s love saves, and that God is faithful.
how different is this from our experience of “being pursued and troubled”?
God help me to see you, call to you, and thank you.
the silence of adam…
so has anyone ever read this book?
good book. not the easiest read in the world, but good, insightful and refreshing.
the subtitle is becoming men of courage in a world of chaos, and a lot of it is focused on authentic manhood and was really good. one aspect that struck me in particular however was the fresh perspective affirming the non-formulatic [i probably made that word up] nature of faith and chrisitianity. i’m often frustrated by what modern and especially american christianity has amounted to, being essentially a set of doctrines and belief formula in the theological realm and a group of practical steps to fix your life in the “livology” realm.
Continue reading ‘the silence of adam…’
resident aliens excerpts…
rereading resident aliens, such a good book, tons of good bits and well developed thoughts.
some noted ones:
Having no use for such bourgeois virtues as tolerance, open-mindedness, and inclusiveness (which the revolutionary knows are usually cover ups that allow the powerful to maintain social equilibrium rather than to be confronted and then to change), revolutionaries value honesty and confrontation- painful thought they may be.
p. 63
To be saved is to be on the road again. Too often, we depict salvation as that which provides us with a meaningful existence when we achieve a new self-understanding. Here, with our emphasis on the narrative nature of the Christian life, we are saying that salvation is baptism into a community that has so truthful a story that we forget ourselves and our anxieties long enough to become part of that story, a story God has told in Scripture and continues to tell in Israel and the church.
p. 59
Engagement with Jesus, as the misconceptions of his first disciples show, is necessary to understand Jesus. In a sense, we follow Jesus before we know Jesus. Furthermore, we know Jesus before we know ourselves. For how can we know the truth of ourselves as sinful and misunderstanding, but redeemed and empowered without our first being shown, as it was shown to his first disciples?
p. 55
We would like a church that again asserts that God, not nations, rules the world, that the boundaries of God’s kingdom transcend those of Caesar, and that the main political task of the church is the formation of people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price.
p. 48
Yoder also notes that the confessing church will be a church of the cross. As Jesus demonstrated, the world, for all its beauty, is hostile to the truth. Witness without compromise leads to worldly hostility. The cross is not a sign of the church’s quiet, suffering submission to the powers-thhat-be, but rather the church’s revolutionary participation in the victory of Christ over those powers. The cross is not a symbol for general human suffering and oppression. Rather, the cross is a sign of what happens when one takes God’s account of reality more seriously than Caesar’s. The cross stands as God’s (and ours) eternal no the powers of death, as well as God’s eternal yes to humanity, God’s remarkable determination not to leave us to our own devices.
The overriding political task of the church is to be the community of the cross.
p 47
The confessing church is not a synthesis of the other tow approaches, a helpful middle ground. Rather, it is a radical alternative. Rejecting both the individualism of the conversionists and the secularism of the activists and their common equation of what works with what is faithful, the confessing church finds its main political task to like, not in the personal transformation of individual hearts or the modification of society, but rather in the congregation’s determination to worship Christ in all things.
p. 45
SmoothSlideshow…
found this cool little slideshow / gallery script on digg this am (SmoothSlideshow).
looks pretty sharp, we’ll see how it works…..
ps. 56 reflection…
When I am afraid, I will trust in you.
In God, whose word I praise, in God I trust; I will not be afraid. What can mortal man do to me?
v. 3,4
fear and trust are interesting animals aren’t they?
most of us naturally know fear, it’s common to the human condition. we all fear different things, but it’s rare to run into someone who is genuinely fearless. some brave or confident people mask their fears with a tough facade, but underneath the same fears reside, they’re just packaged a little differently.
trust it seems to my simple mind, once most of us make it out of childhood, is a much scarier thing, a much more unnatural thing for us. i mean we certainly all trust, and must trust certain realities in our world to survive, but there are areas where we can find it quite difficult. not too many of us are really willing or over-eager to entrust our fragile concepts of ourselves to thsoe around us. we fear peoples opinions of us, we want to be liked or appreciated or respected (at least by those we like, appreciate, and respect). Very few of us like to be out there vulnerable and opened up to the unknown.
and trusting God is a hard thing too. for those that call themselves Christ followers sometimes we act like it’s easy or should be easy, but in reality it’s not. we’re most comfortable when we’re calling the shots, when we’re in control, when we’re our own boss. and that makes sense because that is the way the world is oriented and has trained us to be. for us the challenge is learning. learning to entrust ourselves to one greater and much more capable than ourselves. logically it makes perfect easy sense. in living that out however our real beliefs are challenged and our fears and insecurities revealed.
may God be our help as we learn to trust in him despite all our fears and inclinations and training to the contrary
